Mediating Sentiment and Shaping Publics: Recording Practice and the Articulation of Social Change in Andean Lima

Abstract

This article, based on several years of fieldwork in Peru, describes the emergence and circulation of an Andean popular style called música ayacuchana, arguing that it was instrumental in defining Lima's emergent Andean bourgeoisie. While the music's cosmopolitan blend of local traditions, Andean “world” music, and international pop is noteworthy, I argue that its success must be understood in relation to the media circuits by which it reached its public. I focus in particular on the way that one record studio, Dolby JR, directed the style's development and articulated it to particular images and audience segments.

Acknowledgments

This article is based on research conducted between 2000 and 2005 in Lima and Ayacucho, Peru. This work was funded, at various times, by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the University of Michigan's Rackham School of Graduate Studies, and the University of Michigan Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, which support is hereby gratefully acknowledged. I would also like to thank an anonymous reviewer for providing insightful comments on an earlier draft of the article.

Notes

^[1] During the period of research, there was little agreement about whether or not the style of Los Gaitán and their peers was different enough from other Andean musics to deserve a new name. Many commentators simply use the term “música ayacuchana,” which means “music from Ayacucho,” with the implicit recognition that it is both a stylistic variant of huayno music, and one recognizably distinct from other variants in sound and social trajectory.

^[2] The status of “tradition” and “modernity” as concepts, and the processes by which they become reified and then interpenetrated, has been a strong theme in literature on Latin American music (for example, Galinsky; Guilbault; Turino, “Somos”), and Latin America more generally (see especially the essays in del Sarto, Ríos and Trigo; García Canclini Hybrid; Rowe and Schelling). While space does not permit an adequate exploration of these issues in relation to música ayacuchana here, it should be noted that the discourses adopted by the mediators described herein were crucial both in defining the boundary between “traditional” and “modern” elements in música ayacuchana and in suturing that somewhat artificial gap for the style's audience. Further discussion of this matter can be found in Tucker.

^[3] The label's name is usually, in conversation, abbreviated to “Dolby,” a practice that I will follow here.

^[4] Exceptions include the works of Lloréns Amico and Romero: these, scholars, however, though they have treated mass mediated styles, have not explicitly theorized the fact of mediation itself.

^[5] Criollo society has strongly integrated cultural elements derived from Peru's marginalized Afro-descendent population as well. Until the recent emergence of Afro-Peruvian cultural revitalization movements, however, these elements were largely viewed as racially non-specific, and the overall distinction between criollo legitimacy and minority inferiority remained largely unchallenged by such hybridity.

^[6] This meant that the label took all of the profits from recording, a source of much justifiable rancor.