This page is a temporary home for materials related to my recent article, "Permitted Indians and Popular Music in Contemporary Peru: The Politics and Poetics of Indigenous Performativity," which appeared in the journal Ethnomusicology (volume 55/3, pp. 387-413). Below you can find links to images and video clips related to that piece, featuring the artists involved. Any interested parties (especially bi- or tri- or multilingual parties) should scan the comments that accompany each of the videos, all of which are hosted on Youtube (a major site of promotion and distribution for contemporary Andean artists from Peru), because they are rife with comments that speak directly to the issues and processes outlined in the article.

Soon, all of this will be moved to a new location and folded into a series of links relating to my current, much broader research project on the international circulation of Andean and/or indigenous imageries. I will be updating that site as the project develops, so stay tuned.

Here and here, you can find two different videos for Alborada's version of the tune "Ananau." I think these two clips are a pretty fair indication of their general performative esthetic, but if you'd really like to see a live version, you can find one here.

Here is Uchpa, performing "Ananaw" live on Peruvian TV, and here they are performing their version of the song "Chachaschay": there is some prefatory conversation, after which Fredy Ortiz briefly performs part of the song with the kind of harp-and-violin duo that is very common throughout the Peruvian Andes, before segueing into the band's heavy metal version. Note Ortiz's prestation of the scissors dancer's hat, and the presence of the waqrapuku player Espinoza (poncho-clad, and holding...a waqrapuku), who typically appears with the band onstage even though he is rarely playing the instrument.

This clip is a pretty pointed response to Alborada's version of the song, which ridicules their pan-indigenous imagery, and which seems to me to be drawing upon the rhetorical style of Native American powwow emcees in its opening moments.