LAT
Yma Sumac, 'Peruvian songbird' with multi-octave range, dies at 86
The singer with a persona matching her exotic voice became an international sensation in the 1950s.
By Dennis McLellan
November 3, 2008
Yma Sumac, the Peruvian-born singer whose spectacular multi-octave vocal range and exotic persona made her an international sensation in the 1950s, has died. She was 86.
Sumac, who was diagnosed with colon cancer in February, died Saturday in an assisted-living facility in Silver Lake, said Damon Devine, her personal assistant and close friend.
Bursting onto the U.S. music scene after signing with Capitol Records in 1950, the raven-haired Sumac was known as the "Nightingale of the Andes," the "Peruvian Songbird" and a "singing marvel" with a 4 1/2 -octave (she said five-octave) voice.
"She is five singers in one," boasted her then-husband Moises Vivanco, a composer-arranger, in a 1951 interview with the Associated Press. "Never in 2,000 years has there been another voice like hers."
After Sumac performed at the Shrine Auditorium with a company of dancers, drummers and musicians in 1955, a Los Angeles Times writer observed:
"She warbles like a bird in the uppermost regions, hoots like an owl in the lowest registers, produces bell-like coloratura passages one minute, and exotic, dusky contralto tones the next."
Sumac's first album for Capitol, "Voice of the Xtabay," soared to the top of the record charts. A handful of other albums followed during the 1950s.
With her exotic beauty, elaborate costumes and singing voice that could imitate the cries of birds and wild animals, the woman who claimed to be a descendant of an ancient Incan emperor offered Eisenhower-era audiences something unique.
During her 1950s heyday, Sumac sang at the Hollywood Bowl, Carnegie Hall and Royal Albert Hall. She reportedly made $25,000 a week in Las Vegas.
She was featured in the 1951 Broadway musical "Flahooley" and appeared in the films "Secret of the Incas" in 1954 and "Omar Khayyam" in 1957.
Although details of her birth date and early life vary widely, Devine said Sumac was born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo in Cajamarca, Peru, on Sept. 13, 1922.
Sumac said she began singing when she was about 9.
After joining Vivanco's large group of native singers, dancers and musicians, she made her radio debut in 1942; she and Vivanco were married the same year.
In Argentina in 1943, Sumac and Vivanco's group recorded a series of Peruvian folk songs. By then, she was known professionally as Imma Sumack. (Capitol Records later changed the spelling.)
In 1946, she and her husband moved to New York City, where they performed as the Inca Taky Trio, with Vivanco on guitar, Sumac singing soprano and her cousin Cholita Rivero singing contralto and dancing.
After making her name as a solo artist, Sumac toured around the world for several years in the '60s, but her popularity in the U.S. had waned by then.
In 1971, she recorded a psychedelic rock album, "Miracles," that was not widely released, and semi-retired to Peru later in the decade -- at least that's what she always said.
"That's the legend that she stuck with all through these decades," Devine, who runs the Sumac website www.yma-sumac.com, told The Times in June. "She didn't want people to know she was here and not working. The story was good for her. She's a very eccentric woman. . . . Her whole career and life is based on her mystery, and so the facts and fiction is a fine line with her."
Sumac, however, did return to performing in 1984 at the Vine Street Bar & Grill and the Cinegrill in Hollywood. In the early 1990s, she toured in Europe and continued to perform until 1997.
"The younger generation loves the music, loves Yma," Sumac told the Tampa Tribune in 1996. "The new generation told me many times: 'Miss Yma, we love you. Your music is something. It's out of this world.' "
Sumac, who was divorced from and remarried to Vivanco in the late '50s and divorced from him again in 1965, is survived by their son, Charles, who lives in Europe, and three sisters, who live in Peru.
Services will be private.
McLellan is a Times staff writer.
Showing posts with label Andes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andes. Show all posts
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Friday, October 03, 2008
Bolivian Aymara Rap
NPR
[soundfiles on NPR]
Bolivia's Rap: Protest Songs And Windpipes
By Juan Forero
Day to Day, October 1, 2008 - Visitors to the harsh, cold, windswept Andes of South America are familiar with the traditional music there — it's almost all windpipes, with the occasional haunting lyric. It's been that way for centuries in the remote country of Bolivia, but there are many more kinds of music there, from folkloric to protest to even baroque. The latest trend, generated by indigenous youths, is rap, and it's catching on in Latin America's largest indigenous city.
Bolivian music also comes from the far eastern lowlands — guitar-laden cruceno, music made for dancing. In the south, there's Enriqueta Ulloa and her folkloric songs. Now, a new kind of music has spread across the gritty cinderblock city of El Alto, which is 14,000 feet up in the highlands, home to hundreds of thousands of Aymara Indians.
The music is rap, and it's hard and fast, railing against consumerism and money, and promising to "break the chains of oppression" and spark revolution. The music is, in some cases, sung in Aymara, the predominant tongue among highland Indians in this region of Bolivia.
Newfound Power
The lyrics stem from Bolivia's tradition of protest music — condemning the Yankees, while celebrating the newfound power and influence that have buoyed indigenous people here ever since Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, won the presidency in 2005.
One young rapper is Abraham Bojorquez. Bojorquez explains that one of his songs, "We're Going to Rise Up," tells the story of Bolivia's native people — children of the great warrior Tupacatari — and the Aymara's long struggle. He says that his music tries to speak for the people, to denounce injustice and to honor indigenous communities for what he calls "the recuperation of indigenous identity."
'The Abyss Of Racism'
Alvaro Montenegro, who teaches at the National Conservatory of Music, also produces rap music at his home studio. One song he has worked on, "The Abyss of Racism" by Bojorquez, says that racism is here, there and everywhere — when will it stop? Montenegro says it's a theme familiar to many Bolivians, and that it ranks among the hard social themes that spawned and continue to inspire Bolivian rap.
"The youth of El Alto was looking for a particular personal expression in order to find a vehicle to put forward their own ideas, their own ways of thinking, their own ways of challenging society," Montenegro says.
Montenegro says that young Altenos, as they're called, began rapping in 2003, when Bolivian troops shot several dozen demonstrators. That event helped propel Morales to power.
As Bolivia's first indigenous president, Morales has promised to overturn the old social order. That gave rappers even more to sing about. Many of them fine-tune their work in a radio station in El Alto: Wayna Tambo. Under bare light bulbs, squeezed into a small room, Bojorquez and his two fellow musicians practice. The next day, they're off for a concert in Ecuador.
Freddy Limanchi runs the tracks — the heavy beat at the base of rap music. He says there's clearly American hip-hop in the music, but there's also a fusion with trumpets, bongos and windpipes. That gives it a Bolivian twist.
[soundfiles on NPR]
Bolivia's Rap: Protest Songs And Windpipes
By Juan Forero
Day to Day, October 1, 2008 - Visitors to the harsh, cold, windswept Andes of South America are familiar with the traditional music there — it's almost all windpipes, with the occasional haunting lyric. It's been that way for centuries in the remote country of Bolivia, but there are many more kinds of music there, from folkloric to protest to even baroque. The latest trend, generated by indigenous youths, is rap, and it's catching on in Latin America's largest indigenous city.
Bolivian music also comes from the far eastern lowlands — guitar-laden cruceno, music made for dancing. In the south, there's Enriqueta Ulloa and her folkloric songs. Now, a new kind of music has spread across the gritty cinderblock city of El Alto, which is 14,000 feet up in the highlands, home to hundreds of thousands of Aymara Indians.
The music is rap, and it's hard and fast, railing against consumerism and money, and promising to "break the chains of oppression" and spark revolution. The music is, in some cases, sung in Aymara, the predominant tongue among highland Indians in this region of Bolivia.
Newfound Power
The lyrics stem from Bolivia's tradition of protest music — condemning the Yankees, while celebrating the newfound power and influence that have buoyed indigenous people here ever since Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, won the presidency in 2005.
One young rapper is Abraham Bojorquez. Bojorquez explains that one of his songs, "We're Going to Rise Up," tells the story of Bolivia's native people — children of the great warrior Tupacatari — and the Aymara's long struggle. He says that his music tries to speak for the people, to denounce injustice and to honor indigenous communities for what he calls "the recuperation of indigenous identity."
'The Abyss Of Racism'
Alvaro Montenegro, who teaches at the National Conservatory of Music, also produces rap music at his home studio. One song he has worked on, "The Abyss of Racism" by Bojorquez, says that racism is here, there and everywhere — when will it stop? Montenegro says it's a theme familiar to many Bolivians, and that it ranks among the hard social themes that spawned and continue to inspire Bolivian rap.
"The youth of El Alto was looking for a particular personal expression in order to find a vehicle to put forward their own ideas, their own ways of thinking, their own ways of challenging society," Montenegro says.
Montenegro says that young Altenos, as they're called, began rapping in 2003, when Bolivian troops shot several dozen demonstrators. That event helped propel Morales to power.
As Bolivia's first indigenous president, Morales has promised to overturn the old social order. That gave rappers even more to sing about. Many of them fine-tune their work in a radio station in El Alto: Wayna Tambo. Under bare light bulbs, squeezed into a small room, Bojorquez and his two fellow musicians practice. The next day, they're off for a concert in Ecuador.
Freddy Limanchi runs the tracks — the heavy beat at the base of rap music. He says there's clearly American hip-hop in the music, but there's also a fusion with trumpets, bongos and windpipes. That gives it a Bolivian twist.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Peruvian Chicha in NY: Chicha Libre and the Brooklyn-Peru Connection
Village Voice
Chicha Libre and the Brooklyn-Peru Connection
Bringing Lima's trippy underground sound to Park Slope
by Richard Gehr
March 25th, 2008 12:00 AM
The Peruvian music sensation known as chicha wasn't on Olivier Conan's cultural itinerary when the Brooklyn musician and club owner flew into Lima in 2005. The Paris-born expat was a bigger fan of guitarist Oscar Aviles, singer Arturo "Zambo" Cavero, and other emotionally supercharged criollos. So he was delighted to hear buskers performing his favorite song, Zambo's "Cada Domingo à las Doce Despues de la Misa" ("Every Sunday at Noon After Mass"), not long after stepping off his plane. (He'd even recorded the tune in New York with his own group, Las Rubias del Norte.) A fervent record collector, Conan soon stumbled upon Lima's flourishing army of street vendors, specifically some mom-and-pop record shops that he says exhibited "almost curatorial tendencies." One such savvy proprietor introduced him to vintage tracks by chicha pioneers Los Mirlos—"the old Amazonian stuff"—and Conan was hooked: "I must have bought 600 songs while I was down there."
Named after a popular fermented Andean beverage usually made of maize, chicha blends the traditional Peruvian sounds of the Amazon, Andes, and coastal regions with the dance music of Colombia and Venezuela. Cumbia Amazónica, as it is also known, developed in the oil-boom towns of Iquitos, Moyobamba, and Pucallpa during the 1960s, when certain bandleaders took a notion to modernize their sound by replacing cumbia accordions with Farfisa organs and adding garage-psych electric guitar to the tropical rhythms. Los Mirlos attached the term Poder Verde—"Green Power"—to this new sound, while Juaneco y Su Combo proudly flaunted their Shipibo Indian garb onstage. As migrants from the mountains and rain forest moved into Lima's gray environs, the Andean strain came to predominate in songs reflecting ghetto struggles and the migrant's plight. Chicha's main add-on in Lima was the folkie huaynos pipes sound of the Andes, though "El Condor Pasa" this ain't.
Upon returning to Brooklyn, where he'd moved in 1984 at the age of 22, Conan assembled a new group he called Chicha Libre. Cumbia not being native to Peru, Conan had no qualms about adding his own Anglo-Gallic spin to the style once the group got into the groove. "Peruvian cumbia is to Colombian cumbia what British r&b was to American r&b," he says: "They play it wrong, and that's why it's so good." Since September, Chicha Libre has played nearly every week at Barbès, the smartly curated Park Slope club that Conan owns with surf-rocking guitarist Vincent Douglas. This month, Chicha Libre releases its first album—¡Sonido Amazonico!—on Barbès Records.
Conan synergized the sextet's residency with the September release of 2007's best international reissue, The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias From Peru, which joins releases from Slavic Soul Party!, One Ring Zero, and Las Rubias del Norte on Barbès. Like Chicha Libre's debut, this enormously satisfying compilation kicks off with Los Mirlos' irresistibly sinuous chicha national anthem, "Sonido Amazonico." Chicha's golden-age Amazon and Andes variations are well-represented on 17 tracks, recorded between 1968 and '78, that groove along as smoothly as fine vintage reggae. Juaneco y Su Combo, to whom Conan plans to devote a greatest-hits release, cook up a strange brew indeed in tracks like "Vacilando Con Ayahuasca" ("Floating With Ayahuasca"), in which the potent jungle psychedelic delivers an orgasmic kick. (The rest of the album is psychedelic only in the sonic sense.) Chicha's first star, guitar hero Enrique Delgado, deploys a mean wah-wah pedal on "Para Elisa," Los Destellos' snazzy take on Beethoven's "Für Elise." Los Hijos del Sol bandleader Ángel Anibal Rosado contributed what might be chicha's most singularly groovy tune, "Cariñito." And Los Diablos Rojos bring it all back home—or at least to Cuba—with standout dance raves like "El Guapo" and "Sacalo Sacalo."
As cool rulers of Peru's underclass, ignored by critics and the upper crust alike, it's unlikely that these fine artists ever expected chicha to thrive outside Peru, especially insofar as many of its innovators are already dead. Half of Juaneco's group, including songwriting guitarist Noé Fachin, perished in a 1976 plane crash. Enrique Delgado died in 1996. And Ángel Rosado isn't doing so well, either. "When we first called Ángel, he cried on the phone," Conan says. "He was so excited that he started playing us all the songs over the phone, from beginning to end. I felt like a complete impostor. I'm not Sony Music; I'm just some guy from Brooklyn. I'm not going to make him rich." As he pursued the tracks he wanted to use, Conan had to decide whether to use master tracks that the original artists no longer owned, or substitute remakes. "I feel really bad, because I want to help out the musicians," Conan empathizes. "But I'm not going to put out a bad CD to do it." The good news, at least for Conan, was that Infopesa, chicha's predominant label, conveniently still owned most of the masters.
One of the hardest-working signifiers in Peruvian culture, chicha also applies to both architecture (combining handmade tiles with cheap aluminum siding, for example) and the prensa chicha, the inexpensive and bloody Lima tabloids once co-opted by the country's corrupt president, Alberto Fujimori. As the title of the recent film Chicha tu Madre suggests, Peru's emerging chicha culture is garish, tacky, sexual, and slangy. With its myriad racial and class signals, it's thus the subject of much scholarly and political discourse, with the Shining Path's responsibility for driving millions of Andeans into Lima just one harsh historical factor among many.
On Sunday afternoons, Lima's chicha massive has traditionally assembled by the tens of thousands in parks and empty parking lots known as chichodromos. The generation of pioneers heard on Roots of Chicha gave way to more mainstream bands like Los Shapis, the dapper counterparts to chicha's biggest '80s group, Chacalon y la Nueva Crema. Los Mirlos continue to perform in chicha's standard configuration of male musicians flanked by a pair of G-string-clad, booty-shaking dancers typically photographed from the ground up in many an entertaining YouTube clip. Chicha's third and most recent incarnation is tecnocumbia, whose (thus far) cheesy electronics broke in the Amazon before spreading rapidly through the country.
With DJs chopping/screwing the latest crop of Colombian cumbias, the chicha revival can't help but smack of nostalgia, although back in Brooklyn, Barbès is far from an Andean-Amazonica Social Club. So far, only a few dozen chicha fans can comfortably enjoy York's own chichodromo action at this divine hole in the wall, situated below a tanning salon and beside a decent patisserie (create your own metaphor) on an otherwise unremarkable Park Slope corner. There you'll find Chicha Libre—which consists of Conan (on the four-stringed Venezuelan cuatro), Vincent Douglas, One Ring Zero keyboardist Josh Camp (playing a mind-bending faux accordion called an Electrovox), former Combustible Edison bassist Nick Cudahy, and veteran percussionists Greg Burrows and Timothy Quigley—playing their franco-norteamericano chicha each Monday night. They cover chicha classics like Juaneco's "El Borrachito" ("The Drunk"), lay down class-struggle koans in originals like "The Hungry Song" ("I have no mother, I have no father/But I have coca, and I have cola"), and chicha-fy Satie, Ravel, and the Clash with equal syncretic fervor. Apart from some slightly goofy cowboy hats, the kitsch ends as soon as these honkies start to kick it some 3,600 miles north of Lima's bleak cityscape, with hardly less of an intoxicating effect than their jungle-boogie-ing predecessors.
Chicha Libre and Los Rubias del Norte play the ¡Sonido Amazonico! release party April 4 at Drom, dromnyc.com.
Chicha Libre and the Brooklyn-Peru Connection
Bringing Lima's trippy underground sound to Park Slope
by Richard Gehr
March 25th, 2008 12:00 AM
The Peruvian music sensation known as chicha wasn't on Olivier Conan's cultural itinerary when the Brooklyn musician and club owner flew into Lima in 2005. The Paris-born expat was a bigger fan of guitarist Oscar Aviles, singer Arturo "Zambo" Cavero, and other emotionally supercharged criollos. So he was delighted to hear buskers performing his favorite song, Zambo's "Cada Domingo à las Doce Despues de la Misa" ("Every Sunday at Noon After Mass"), not long after stepping off his plane. (He'd even recorded the tune in New York with his own group, Las Rubias del Norte.) A fervent record collector, Conan soon stumbled upon Lima's flourishing army of street vendors, specifically some mom-and-pop record shops that he says exhibited "almost curatorial tendencies." One such savvy proprietor introduced him to vintage tracks by chicha pioneers Los Mirlos—"the old Amazonian stuff"—and Conan was hooked: "I must have bought 600 songs while I was down there."
Named after a popular fermented Andean beverage usually made of maize, chicha blends the traditional Peruvian sounds of the Amazon, Andes, and coastal regions with the dance music of Colombia and Venezuela. Cumbia Amazónica, as it is also known, developed in the oil-boom towns of Iquitos, Moyobamba, and Pucallpa during the 1960s, when certain bandleaders took a notion to modernize their sound by replacing cumbia accordions with Farfisa organs and adding garage-psych electric guitar to the tropical rhythms. Los Mirlos attached the term Poder Verde—"Green Power"—to this new sound, while Juaneco y Su Combo proudly flaunted their Shipibo Indian garb onstage. As migrants from the mountains and rain forest moved into Lima's gray environs, the Andean strain came to predominate in songs reflecting ghetto struggles and the migrant's plight. Chicha's main add-on in Lima was the folkie huaynos pipes sound of the Andes, though "El Condor Pasa" this ain't.
Upon returning to Brooklyn, where he'd moved in 1984 at the age of 22, Conan assembled a new group he called Chicha Libre. Cumbia not being native to Peru, Conan had no qualms about adding his own Anglo-Gallic spin to the style once the group got into the groove. "Peruvian cumbia is to Colombian cumbia what British r&b was to American r&b," he says: "They play it wrong, and that's why it's so good." Since September, Chicha Libre has played nearly every week at Barbès, the smartly curated Park Slope club that Conan owns with surf-rocking guitarist Vincent Douglas. This month, Chicha Libre releases its first album—¡Sonido Amazonico!—on Barbès Records.
Conan synergized the sextet's residency with the September release of 2007's best international reissue, The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias From Peru, which joins releases from Slavic Soul Party!, One Ring Zero, and Las Rubias del Norte on Barbès. Like Chicha Libre's debut, this enormously satisfying compilation kicks off with Los Mirlos' irresistibly sinuous chicha national anthem, "Sonido Amazonico." Chicha's golden-age Amazon and Andes variations are well-represented on 17 tracks, recorded between 1968 and '78, that groove along as smoothly as fine vintage reggae. Juaneco y Su Combo, to whom Conan plans to devote a greatest-hits release, cook up a strange brew indeed in tracks like "Vacilando Con Ayahuasca" ("Floating With Ayahuasca"), in which the potent jungle psychedelic delivers an orgasmic kick. (The rest of the album is psychedelic only in the sonic sense.) Chicha's first star, guitar hero Enrique Delgado, deploys a mean wah-wah pedal on "Para Elisa," Los Destellos' snazzy take on Beethoven's "Für Elise." Los Hijos del Sol bandleader Ángel Anibal Rosado contributed what might be chicha's most singularly groovy tune, "Cariñito." And Los Diablos Rojos bring it all back home—or at least to Cuba—with standout dance raves like "El Guapo" and "Sacalo Sacalo."
As cool rulers of Peru's underclass, ignored by critics and the upper crust alike, it's unlikely that these fine artists ever expected chicha to thrive outside Peru, especially insofar as many of its innovators are already dead. Half of Juaneco's group, including songwriting guitarist Noé Fachin, perished in a 1976 plane crash. Enrique Delgado died in 1996. And Ángel Rosado isn't doing so well, either. "When we first called Ángel, he cried on the phone," Conan says. "He was so excited that he started playing us all the songs over the phone, from beginning to end. I felt like a complete impostor. I'm not Sony Music; I'm just some guy from Brooklyn. I'm not going to make him rich." As he pursued the tracks he wanted to use, Conan had to decide whether to use master tracks that the original artists no longer owned, or substitute remakes. "I feel really bad, because I want to help out the musicians," Conan empathizes. "But I'm not going to put out a bad CD to do it." The good news, at least for Conan, was that Infopesa, chicha's predominant label, conveniently still owned most of the masters.
One of the hardest-working signifiers in Peruvian culture, chicha also applies to both architecture (combining handmade tiles with cheap aluminum siding, for example) and the prensa chicha, the inexpensive and bloody Lima tabloids once co-opted by the country's corrupt president, Alberto Fujimori. As the title of the recent film Chicha tu Madre suggests, Peru's emerging chicha culture is garish, tacky, sexual, and slangy. With its myriad racial and class signals, it's thus the subject of much scholarly and political discourse, with the Shining Path's responsibility for driving millions of Andeans into Lima just one harsh historical factor among many.
On Sunday afternoons, Lima's chicha massive has traditionally assembled by the tens of thousands in parks and empty parking lots known as chichodromos. The generation of pioneers heard on Roots of Chicha gave way to more mainstream bands like Los Shapis, the dapper counterparts to chicha's biggest '80s group, Chacalon y la Nueva Crema. Los Mirlos continue to perform in chicha's standard configuration of male musicians flanked by a pair of G-string-clad, booty-shaking dancers typically photographed from the ground up in many an entertaining YouTube clip. Chicha's third and most recent incarnation is tecnocumbia, whose (thus far) cheesy electronics broke in the Amazon before spreading rapidly through the country.
With DJs chopping/screwing the latest crop of Colombian cumbias, the chicha revival can't help but smack of nostalgia, although back in Brooklyn, Barbès is far from an Andean-Amazonica Social Club. So far, only a few dozen chicha fans can comfortably enjoy York's own chichodromo action at this divine hole in the wall, situated below a tanning salon and beside a decent patisserie (create your own metaphor) on an otherwise unremarkable Park Slope corner. There you'll find Chicha Libre—which consists of Conan (on the four-stringed Venezuelan cuatro), Vincent Douglas, One Ring Zero keyboardist Josh Camp (playing a mind-bending faux accordion called an Electrovox), former Combustible Edison bassist Nick Cudahy, and veteran percussionists Greg Burrows and Timothy Quigley—playing their franco-norteamericano chicha each Monday night. They cover chicha classics like Juaneco's "El Borrachito" ("The Drunk"), lay down class-struggle koans in originals like "The Hungry Song" ("I have no mother, I have no father/But I have coca, and I have cola"), and chicha-fy Satie, Ravel, and the Clash with equal syncretic fervor. Apart from some slightly goofy cowboy hats, the kitsch ends as soon as these honkies start to kick it some 3,600 miles north of Lima's bleak cityscape, with hardly less of an intoxicating effect than their jungle-boogie-ing predecessors.
Chicha Libre and Los Rubias del Norte play the ¡Sonido Amazonico! release party April 4 at Drom, dromnyc.com.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Bolivian fighting ritual draws crowds
photos AP - Juan Karita
By DAN KEANE, Associated Press Writer - Thu May 17, 3:13 AM ET
The locals come down from the mountains drunk, dancing and ready to fight. The police come to make sure no one dies. And the tourists, reporters, and documentary filmmakers come for the blood.
The outside world has discovered Tinku, an ancient ritual in which indigenous Quechua communities gather each year in a remote corner of the Bolivian Andes to dance, sing and settle old scores in staggering and bloody street fights.
The largest Tinku takes place early each May in Macha, about 210 miles southeast of La Paz, where this year's festival provided a stunning and sometimes uneasy combination of culture, spectacle and violence.
Relatively unknown outside the Andes for centuries, Tinku remains on the fringe of Bolivia's growing tourism industry. But its heavily asterisked listing in the guidebooks (Lonely Planet calls it "a violent and often grisly spectacle") is beginning to draw both backpackers and media curious to witness the peculiar event firsthand.
The attention has not gone unnoticed by the locals in Macha, a bitterly poor village of adobe houses and narrow dirt streets tucked between cold, dusty hills some 13,100 feet above sea level.
Tinku fighters generally resent the foreigners' gaze and now ask for money to have their picture taken. When drunk enough, a fighter may take an occasional swing at anyone in the street carrying a camera.
Tinku ("encounter" in Quechua) is a pre-Colombian tradition meant to solve conflicts and release tensions within the local community while honoring the Andean earth goddess Pachamama. Participants believe the spilled blood brings fertility to the rocky soil, and the death of a fighter forecasts an especially abundant harvest the following year.
The challenge for Macha city officials is to promote Tinku's authentic heritage while preventing the spotlight from turning its sacred rituals into meaningless blood sport.
"Before, Tinku before was something shared," said Abelardo Colque, who was selling press passes in Macha's one-room city hall. "They didn't just fight; they fought and ended up shaking hands. But now it's turning into just fighting without any point."
The festival includes several days of ceremonies blurred together by sleepless and spirited binges on grain alcohol and chicha, a tart homemade corn beer. There are prayers to a Christian crucifix, llama sacrifices at dawn, and an endless stomping, shuffling dance to the eerie strains of cane flutes and rhythmic, two-chord songs beat out on mandolin-like charangos.
On its climactic day, May 4 this year, fighters marched down the hill into town — still dancing, still singing — with their eyes peeled for particular rivals, intent on resolving everything from love triangles to land disputes.
While most fights are short-lived, death is not uncommon; one person was killed at a smaller Tinku in Macha in February. But with more foreigners turning up each year, local officials have brought in extra police to reduce the violence, and even broadcast radio announcements asking revelers not to attack street vendors.
The police immediately took control of this year's festival, forming an improvised ring in the town square and refereeing the fights. A sergeant selected combatants of equal size and age — women, too — and set a few ground rules ("No kicking!"). Fellow fighters cheered each pair on, while journalists and tourists crowded in, holding their cameras high to catch the bare-knuckle action.
The police ended each clash after only a minute or two, after drunken punches had bloodied one or both of the fighters' faces.
By late afternoon, the increasingly intoxicated crowd repeatedly overran the ring, hoping to revert to Tinku's traditional free-for-all. But the police drove them back each time, occasionally popping a tear gas grenade to clear the square.
Foreigners seemed both relieved and mildly disappointed to learn that Tinku had been toned down.
"Are they making it less violent so that people have a different image?" asked Portuguese backpacker Pedro Pimentel, 28. "It shouldn't have to be changed just by our presence."
Just what the world wants to make of Tinku — cultural celebration or a drunken brawl — remains to be seen, but increased exposure seems inevitable. "It's something that belongs to the world," Pimentel said.
In one Macha boarding house, a poster on the wall advertised an academic conference dedicated "to the rescue of the original Tinku of our collective memories" as a grainy video showed wince-inducing highlights of a previous year's street fight.
Out in the street, a tourist snapped the picture of a defeated fighter stumbling through the crowd, his face streaming with blood.
"Gimme a peso, you (expletive), if you want to take my photo!" the fighter bellowed.
Stiffening with fright, the backpacker quickly dug into his jeans for a coin.
Reviewing the picture later on his digital camera, the tourist was disappointed: The Tinku fighter held his head down to let his blood drip in the street, and his face was covered in shadow.
"I'm going back to take another picture," the backpacker told his buddy. "And this time I'm not going to ask."
Monday, February 12, 2007
Ritualized fighting in Bolivia's highlands
A young man took a swing at a man from a rival village, left, during the Tinku celebration in Sacaca, Bolivia, last week. The last remaining Tinku festivals are held in the Potosí region. Sacaca holds one in February, and Macha has a larger one in May.
Evan Abramson for The New York Times
Before the drinking and fighting began, villagers paraded through the main plaza carrying flags and playing traditional instruments.
New York Times
February 12, 2007
Sacaca Journal
Ritual Fades Into Blur of Drinking and Fighting
By SIMON ROMERO
SACACA, Bolivia — For hundreds of years, the Indians of Bolivia’s high plains have trekked to this town in early February. They dance, drink chicha, the fermented beverage made here from rye, and then fight one another until blood stains the dirt alleyways.
The ritual, called Tinku, a word that means “encounter” in both Aymara and Quechua, was once widespread throughout the Andean world, predating the arrival of the conquistadors. Anthropologists say it now tenuously exists just in this isolated pocket of Bolivia, seven hours southeast of La Paz by bus on a washboard dirt road.
To the chagrin of Roman Catholic priests who would like to see Tinku fade into the past, political officials here want it to survive.
“Tinku is a sublime, beautiful act,” said Wilson Araoz, the mayor of Sacaca and a leading official in the Popular Indigenous Movement, a party that is part of the coalition supporting Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president.
Emboldened by Mr. Morales’s efforts to strengthen Bolivia’s indigenous cultures, Mr. Araoz’s party is one of several political organizations pushing to preserve endangered traditions like Tinku.
“There’s a predisposition in all of us to do Tinku,” Mr. Araoz said in an interview. “I believe that denying that impulse is harmful.”
No one disputes that Tinku can be harmful, at least physically. The fighting, though ritualized through music and dance, is far from organized, less like boxing and more like street brawling.
Not everyone takes part. Men of roughly equal size and age square off against each other on the streets surrounding the plaza, though sometimes women also enter the fray. Some of the men wear leather helmets and gloves and carry woven coca-wallets. But the fighting can also be bare knuckle.
In one fight at a dirt intersection, two men in their 50s punched and kicked each other for about 10 minutes, their faces bloodied as a crowd cheered them on. By the time exhaustion overwhelmed them, both were still conscious, though in a trancelike state.
Bystanders sometimes step in to break up contests that become too lopsided. In addition to bruised faces and limbs, deaths sometimes occur.
No one died at this year’s Tinku here, but blood certainly flowed. Some of the fighting evolved into generalized rock-throwing brawls with screams of aggression in Quechua and Aymara.
Some of the Tinku fighters could be found passed out on the ground, though it was not clear whether concussions or chicha were to blame.
“It was a good year, but slower than before,” said José Acuña Gabriel, 22, a Quechua-speaking Indian who wore a colorful ceremonial vest over a secondhand Operation Desert Storm T-shirt.
Expressing concern with Tinku’s violence, priests in this region, North Potosí, have been trying to eliminate the ritual fighting. Some priests have told indigenous leaders that church aid and community religious services could be withheld if residents took part in Tinku.
“There are profound things within these people that I still don’t understand,” said Carlos Ortigosa, a Spanish priest who has lived in Sacaca for the last 10 years. “But basically Tinku is an event in which people kick each other when they’re down and die with some frequency. It’s not agreeable to see people treating each other so badly.”
Anthropologists say Tinku represents much more than fighting. But the fighting, often between members of different communities, can be a way to confirm or defend collective landholdings, or to bring good fortune at harvest time.
It is also a chance for young men to show off in front of women from other communities. Couples often meet at Tinkus and marriages are known to result.
Tristan Platt, director of the Center for Amerindian Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said Tinku’s origins were hard to pin down though indigenous communities might have practiced something similar as far back as 1100. The periodic channeling of communal violence may serve to reduce conflict during the rest of the year, he said.
Rare acts of cannibalism have occurred, Mr. Platt said, and are thought by participants to be legitimized by the Catholic eucharist, letting them believe they are eating the flesh of a divinized human being.
Ramiro Molina, an anthropologist and director of the Museum of Ethnography and Folklore in La Paz, said blood was required for Tinku’s participants to feel they had consummated a harvest fertility rite.
“The West isn’t used to seeing such violence out in the open, ritualized and organized in such a way,” Mr. Molina said. “So of course this seems shocking at first glance.”
Most of the several hundred people who attended were subsistence farmers who walked to Sacaca and bartered in the town plaza for corn, blankets, shoes, chicha and coca leaf before the dancing began. Those who took part said the fighting was as natural as farming potatoes.
“I do it because it’s fun,” said Esteban Lisidro Aguilario, 20, between turns playing the Tinku dance’s haunting rhythm on his pinquillo, a flute made for the occasion.
Sacaca, even with its isolation, feels the tug of the outside world in ways that are diluting the appeal of rituals like Tinku. Entel, the national phone company, opened a booth here five months ago with three Internet-connected computers. Many of the town’s children and teenagers seemed more entranced by the instant messaging and games on those machines than with the centuries-old ritual unfolding around them.
This year’s Tinku drew only about half the number that had come three years ago.
Bolivia’s largest Tinku is not in Sacaca but in Macha, another town in North Potosí, where thousands gather to fight each May. The police there sometimes disperse brawls with tear gas. Officials in Macha have started charging admission to foreign tourists.
Sacaca’s leaders hope their ritual may become an attraction as well, though for now outsiders are still oddities. The only lodging here is a room in a shopkeeper’s house on the plaza for $3 a night.
“Tinku is like a psychologist that helps us overcome our traumas,” said Osvaldo Echeverría, a Sacaca cultural official. “We have a lot to learn about the world, but the world also has a lot learn from us.”
Friday, June 23, 2006
Aymara time metaphors
Indians see past, future in reverse, study says
By Bruce Lieberman
San Diego UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
June 22, 2006
The future is in front of us, and the past is behind.
It's an idea so ingrained in human thinking that most people don't think twice about it. Scientists, too, have long believed that everyone perceives the passage of time this way.
But the reverse is true for the Aymara Indians in the mountains of northern Chile. For the first time, researchers have documented a culture that uses words and gestures to describe how the past stands before an individual and the future lies behind – unseen.
The discovery is described in the current issue of Cognitive Science. It suggests that the metaphors people use to describe abstractions – even everyday abstractions like time – are at least partly determined by culture, said University of California San Diego researcher Rafael Núñez, who co-authored the study with University of California Berkeley professor Eve Sweetser.
Aymara is spoken in the Andean highlands of western Bolivia, southeastern Peru and northern Chile.
Over an 18-month period, Núñez and Sweetser taped about 20 hours of conversations with 30 Aymara adults from northern Chile. A majority of the volunteers were bilingual speakers of Aymara and Spanish.
Aymara speakers use the word nayra – which means “eye,” “front” or “sight” – to refer to the past. They use qhipa – which means “back” or “behind” – to refer to the future.
But Núñez and Sweetser did not draw any strong conclusions without looking at how those words were reinforced by gestures.
The Aymara subjects, particularly the elderly who didn't have mastery of Spanish, thumbed or waved over their shoulders when speaking about the future. And they swept their hands or arms in front of them while speaking of the past – closer to their bodies for events in the recent past and wider gestures for events in the distant past.
“It was quite striking when people were starting to point . . . in directions that seemed totally unnatural to us,” Núñez said. “We're talking about non-technical, everyday notions of chronology here.”
Researchers still need to study how the Aymara's view of time influences day-to-day life, as well as their concept of progress, prediction and organizing society for future generations, Núñez said.
He and Sweetser do know that the Aymara have a profound respect for their ancestors, tradition and history. These Indians also place great significance on whether an event has been witnessed by the speaker.
For example, the phrase “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” is incomplete in the Aymara language. The speaker must elaborate on how he or she knows that fact, either through attribution or other evidence.
This may explain why the Aymara metaphorically place the past before them because past events are knowable. And the future? Aymara elders see little point in speculating about events that haven't occurred.
David McNeill, a linguist who studies gestures as a component of language, described the Aymara study as a landmark.
“I consider the Núñez-Sweetser paper very important, because it forces us to consider the interaction of (physical gestures) and culture in the creation of basic beliefs about the world,” McNeill said.
The study shows that understanding the complexities and subtleties of language – and how gestures enrich and reveal meaning – is vital for people trying to relate to other cultures, he and other scientists said.
“It's really important to understand the conceptual systems of peoples around the world,” said George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley. “There's a dominant view in this culture that . . . everybody thinks in pretty much the same way, and that therefore you don't have to take into account different world views.”
Núñez said he planned to explore whether other South American groups used similar metaphors to describe the past and present.
“I have a gut feeling there may be other languages in the Amerindian family that also share the same thing in one way or another,” he said.
By Bruce Lieberman
San Diego UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
June 22, 2006
The future is in front of us, and the past is behind.
It's an idea so ingrained in human thinking that most people don't think twice about it. Scientists, too, have long believed that everyone perceives the passage of time this way.
But the reverse is true for the Aymara Indians in the mountains of northern Chile. For the first time, researchers have documented a culture that uses words and gestures to describe how the past stands before an individual and the future lies behind – unseen.
The discovery is described in the current issue of Cognitive Science. It suggests that the metaphors people use to describe abstractions – even everyday abstractions like time – are at least partly determined by culture, said University of California San Diego researcher Rafael Núñez, who co-authored the study with University of California Berkeley professor Eve Sweetser.
Aymara is spoken in the Andean highlands of western Bolivia, southeastern Peru and northern Chile.
Over an 18-month period, Núñez and Sweetser taped about 20 hours of conversations with 30 Aymara adults from northern Chile. A majority of the volunteers were bilingual speakers of Aymara and Spanish.
Aymara speakers use the word nayra – which means “eye,” “front” or “sight” – to refer to the past. They use qhipa – which means “back” or “behind” – to refer to the future.
But Núñez and Sweetser did not draw any strong conclusions without looking at how those words were reinforced by gestures.
The Aymara subjects, particularly the elderly who didn't have mastery of Spanish, thumbed or waved over their shoulders when speaking about the future. And they swept their hands or arms in front of them while speaking of the past – closer to their bodies for events in the recent past and wider gestures for events in the distant past.
“It was quite striking when people were starting to point . . . in directions that seemed totally unnatural to us,” Núñez said. “We're talking about non-technical, everyday notions of chronology here.”
Researchers still need to study how the Aymara's view of time influences day-to-day life, as well as their concept of progress, prediction and organizing society for future generations, Núñez said.
He and Sweetser do know that the Aymara have a profound respect for their ancestors, tradition and history. These Indians also place great significance on whether an event has been witnessed by the speaker.
For example, the phrase “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” is incomplete in the Aymara language. The speaker must elaborate on how he or she knows that fact, either through attribution or other evidence.
This may explain why the Aymara metaphorically place the past before them because past events are knowable. And the future? Aymara elders see little point in speculating about events that haven't occurred.
David McNeill, a linguist who studies gestures as a component of language, described the Aymara study as a landmark.
“I consider the Núñez-Sweetser paper very important, because it forces us to consider the interaction of (physical gestures) and culture in the creation of basic beliefs about the world,” McNeill said.
The study shows that understanding the complexities and subtleties of language – and how gestures enrich and reveal meaning – is vital for people trying to relate to other cultures, he and other scientists said.
“It's really important to understand the conceptual systems of peoples around the world,” said George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley. “There's a dominant view in this culture that . . . everybody thinks in pretty much the same way, and that therefore you don't have to take into account different world views.”
Núñez said he planned to explore whether other South American groups used similar metaphors to describe the past and present.
“I have a gut feeling there may be other languages in the Amerindian family that also share the same thing in one way or another,” he said.
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