Got a nice note a couple days back from Mitch Teplitsky, the director-producer of Soy Andina, which film I mentioned in my post a few months back on huayno music, the Andean tradition that has maintained its integrity from Inca days to the present. Mitch was kind enough to say a few nice things about that post on Soy Andina’s blog, and let me know that the film’s premiere is looming:
Ok, so it took 6 years, 5 trips to Peru, 140 hours of tape, 4 credit cards, 150 donors, and who knows how many guinea pigs killed during the making of the film…
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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 7:00 pm
Proshansky Auditorium | CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Ave., between 34th and 35th streets
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BUY TICKETS NOW! (show likely to sell out)$15 ($10 w/valid CUNY ID). Proceeds to help pay for music rights, film festival fees, community outreach. 10% to be donated to non-profit health clinic in Peru.
* Phone: (212) 817-8215 / Mon-Fri, 9-5 (with credit card)
* In-person: CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 8204, Mon-Fri, 9-5
(credit cards, checks and cash accepted)
Despite Mitch’s kind words about my huayno post, I clearly have something to learn from him. Only one guinea pig has been killed in the making of this blog, and we completely wasted the meat. Ah, well. Anyway, if you missed it last time I mentioned it, you can see the trailer and some clips here. You NYC CRN readers should consider checking it out. CRN readers in Perú should check the website frequently for showings in your neighborhood. Mitch promises to bring the film out to the US West Coast at some point.
It’s my birthday, and I have a long-standing tradition of listening to huayno on my birthday, so let’s watch some videos. (Actually, I have a long-standing tradition of going to Down Home Records in El Cerrito on my birthday and buying new huayno recordings, if I can find them. But let’s not quibble.) I’ve been listening to Dina Paucar lately, as have a lot of people about 4,500 miles southeast of me. Her style is interesting. The only instrumentation she works with is harp, drums and beat box. (At least, that’s all she works with in the stuff I’ve heard.) As you’ll hear in the song featured below, she often relies on a note-bending singing technique that can sound a little odd to Western-music ears until you get used to it. To me, it sounds centuries old.
That song may sound a little familiar to people who paid close attention to my previous huayno post. You got it: put in a cumbia rock-steady beat and an accordion backup, and you have the not-really-safe-for-work technocumbia song and dance routine from Son Caliente’s appearance on daytime TV. For those of you who don’t speak Spanish, the caption that comes up about a minute in reads “My husband is crazy about a technocumbia star!” En la proxima Montel.
Huayno and its underdressed niece technocumbia carry a fair amount of social text around with them. For non-Indians to listen to huayno in Peru is to make a bit of a statement about native rights and respect for other cultures, the way white folks’ listening to R&B in the 1950s generally indicated a more liberal point of view on civil rights for African Americans. This is less the case than it once was, as the music gains in popularity and as native people regain some measure of political authority, as witness the presidency from 2001-2006 of Alejandro Toledo, born at about 10,000 feet up in the mountains in the Ancash region. In fact, Dina Paucar has taken on winning greater acceptance for huayno as a bit of a life’s goal. From a 2005 AP story on Paucar by Rick Vecchio:
Known throughout Peru’s race-conscious society as the “Beautiful Goddess of Love,” Dina Paucar, a stout, dark-skinned 36-year-old singer, is one of the nation’s biggest stars. Her songs are from a tradition called huayno, pronounced WHY-no, folk music from the Andes that mixes in European instruments and rhythms.
Social scientists, human rights activists and marketing experts agree that her stardom is emblematic of deep social change in Peru, where the Indian and mixed-race majority are being recognized as a political and economic force.
“Now, I am far away, missing the village where I was born,” Paucar sings in “I Will Return,” one of her most popular hits. “Oh, my children, I know I will return. Do not judge me. I did not abandon you. I just wish to build the things I always dreamed of.”
Paucar’s life story is similar to hundreds of thousands of other provincial migrants who came to forge new lives in a capital city where for centuries culture and class were measured against a racial yardstick of Spanish lineage.
She left home in the central Andean department of Huanuco when she was 11 to work as a street vendor and live-in maid.
Paucar says her mission is to elevate huayno “to a higher level so that no one is ashamed to dance to it.”
“Dina is one of us. She is an example for all people who come from the provinces. Most everyone loves her,” Jorge Luis Gutierrez, a 28-year-old clothing salesman, said at one of Paucar’s concerts. Gutierrez said he emigrated to Lima 15 years ago, also from Huanuco.
Paucar’s success is intrinsically linked to that of her fans - the third generation of Indian and mixed-race highlanders who founded shantytowns and slums in the coastal desert and Andean foothills surrounding Lima.
Today, two-thirds of Lima’s 8 million residents live in those sprawling neighborhoods, where a class of prosperous Indian entrepreneurs has emerged from a burgeoning underground economy, said Rolando Arellano, president of the Arellano Marketing Investigation firm.
“Racism and exclusion are very related to economic power,” Arellano said. “The people from these zones, who are basically Andean, are starting to have money to spend, and there is nothing more equalizing.
“For this third generation, being called ‘serrano’ (from the sierra) is no longer an insult,” Arellano said. “That’s a very important social change and the case of Dina Paucar is clear. It is a vindication of the sierra tradition.”
As evidence of the ground being gained by Paucar and other Huayno artsts, consider this little shift: The Peruvian TV network Frecuencia Latina commissioned a miniseries in 2004 based on Paucar’s life, and concurrently dropped its odious and regrettably popular series la Paisana Jacinta, which was a sort of Peruvian equivalent of Amos and Andy blackface drag version of the Beverly Hillbillies, only with the misogyny turned up to 11. A taste of that little bit of historical dustbin fodder follows. Notice the use of a huayno-San Juanito mix right up front to signify embarrassing class status, in much the same way that Earl Scruggs signified the Clampetts’ low birth:
The world is well rid of that crap, if you ask me.
Let’s cleanse our palates, shall we? I do wish the sound quality was better on this next piece, but it’s pretty damn good: the incomparable Raúl García Zárate plays an old huayno standard: Adios Pueblo de Ayacucho.
As masterful as that is, it’s a bit clean, a bit precise. Let’s close with a piece that captures some of the roots of the genre. Huayno is, after all, a peasant and proletarian music at its heart, the music of farmers and factory workers and miners, and this video by Yolanda de Carhuamayo captures that as well as any I’ve seen. Well, there was another one involving a flock of sheep, but I can’t find that now.
As I mentioned, that’s nice integration of writing and multi-media.
Happy birthday! How old are you? Can you drink legally yet? If so, don’t be hitting the clubs looking for teenage girls to ogle.
I’m gonna hit the clubs to meet teenage girls and ask if their grandmothers are seeing anyone.
Since you and I are roughly the same age, that’s quite an insult.
Or it would be, if you weren’t way too young for me.
Did the unfortunate guinea pigs suffer the same fate as certain frogs?
Hey Chris, thanks again for the plug. Man, finally to meet a gringo more obsessed with huayno than me…