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Mapping ‘El Condor Pasa’: Sonic translocations in theGlobal EraKirstie A. DorrPublished online: 13 Mar 2007.

To cite this article: Kirstie A. Dorr (2007) Mapping ‘El Condor Pasa’: Sonic translocations in the Global Era, Journal of LatinAmerican Cultural Studies: Travesia, 16:1, 11-25

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Kirstie A. Dorr

MAPPING ‘EL CONDOR PASA’: SONIC

TRANSLOCATIONS IN THE GLOBAL ERA

If we rethink culture and its science, anthropology, in terms of travel, then theorganic, naturalizing bias of the term ‘culture’ – seen as a rooted body that grows,lives, and so on – is questioned. Constructed and disputed historicities, sites ofdisplacement, interference, and interaction, come more sharply into view.1

I begin with the above argument from James Clifford because of its useful elucidation,in concise form, of important new directions in the study of globalized popular culture.Clifford advocates a theoretical framework that views popular cultural texts both asobjects that beg interpretive analysis and as theoretical arguments that evade easyinterpretation. He then introduces the concept of ‘travel’ as a means through which toaddress the messy and complex sociospatial relations engendered by contemporaryglobalization and migration processes. This recent emphasis in cultural studies on thefungibility of ‘travelling cultures’ offers an apt point of departure for the discussion thatfollows, which explores the sociospatial politics of Andean musical production andpractice in its circuitous travel from the Global Southern regions of the Andeanhighlands to dispersed locales in Global Northern metropoles.

Relations of global economic restructuring in the late 1980s coincided with theunprecedented globalization of Pan-Andean musical traditions through internationalnetworks, both commercial and cultural. Yet, among the many highland ballads thathave become popularized in the last two decades, El Condor Pasa2 has emerged as the‘musical crossover’ par excellence, receiving far more airtime, recording attention andpopular renown than any other Andean text within the musical genre. From thebackyard performances of Hungarian wedding bands to the New Age playlistsmarketed on iTunese to the world beat compilations sold in Wal-Mart’s popularmedia aisles, El Condor Pasa has become a familiar, geo-historical icon of theinternationalization of ‘musica andina’.

What follows is a travelogue of sorts, indexing the circuitous journey of thisubiquitous musical text. Following Clifford’s call for attention to the interplay of traveland translocation, I argue that El Condor Pasa is an exemplary case of how cultural formsare dispersed and rearticulated throughout space and over time, in the service of often-divergent geopolitical projects. Both an archive and artefact of Peruvian nationalfolklore, it has ‘travelled’ for nearly a century, crossing multiple geographic, aestheticand linguistic borders. Exploring the convergences of three historically andgeographically distinct ‘worldings’ of El Condor Pasa,3 I examine how this musical texthas been mobilized in distinct popular cultural spheres to articulate the shiftingrelationship between racial and (inter)national formation. I ask how attention tomultiple articulations of a single song – and its unique ability to signify both nostalgicfamiliarity and authentic difference – may reveal important connections between

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 March 2007, pp. 11-25

ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13569320601156720

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interpretive sonic languages and the construction of memory and place. Whilefollowing this historical path of El Condor Pasa, I hope to also elaborate some fertileareas of further exploration in the fields of Transamerican and Latina/o CulturalStudies.

El Condor Pasa, Track One

‘El Condor’, a festive, sentimental, or intimate song, of such a noteworthy author. . . depicts the ‘tragedy’ – not psychic, but concrete – of the self that laughs,jumps, creates, screams, intuits, and makes history.4

In 1913 Peruvian composer, musician and folklorist Daniel Alomıa Robles arranged amusical score entitled El Condor Pasa. A unique musical fusion of rhythmic andinstrumentational traditions from Peru’s coastal and highland regions, the ballad wascomposed to accompany Julio de la Paz’s5 libretto from which it takes its name.Condemning the exploitation of Andean miners by US-owned corporations such asCerro de Pasco, the dramatic production sought to cultivate anti-imperialist fervouramong Lima’s liberal intelligentsia via an empathetic appeal to their ostensibly sharedalbeit ‘distant’ indigenous heritage. Nine decades later, Paz’s revolutionary dramacontinues to be nationally recognized as a critical contribution to the burgeoning urbanIndigenista movement of early twentieth-century Lima. However, its sensation andcirculation have been utterly eclipsed by Alomıa Robles’s renowned musical score,which domestic and international listeners alike continue to celebrate as a hallmark ofPeru’s national cultural production.

In both popular and academic circles, various myths surround the origins of AlomıaRobles’s musical score. A passionate musicologist, Alomıa Robles’s commitment to thecompilation and ‘preservation’ of national folklore inspired him to spend over 15 yearstouring remote regions of Peru’s highlands, recording and transcribing over 600popular songs.6 Some claim that Alomıa Robles merely found the inspiration for thescore El Condor Pasa in the traditional Andean and coastal ballads he encountered in histravels; others, however, maintain that Alomıa Robles wilfully appropriated existingpopular songs composed by musicians whose raced and classed disenfranchisementprevented them from legally copyrighting their creative property.7

While the origins of El Condor Pasa remain uncertain, Alomıa Robles’s arrangementhas undeniably become the most widely popularized and dispersed melody to beclaimed by the Peruvian state. In the past century since it was first introduced to thebohemian stages of Lima’s public theatre, the musical score has remained in consistentcirculation. The ballad’s diverse sonic commercial venues have ranged from radioprogramming in the remote Andean highlands, to Paul Simon’s renowned vinyl releasein the late 1960s, to Latin American television programming in the early 1970s, andfinally, to US world music circuits in the early 1990s. As an icon of globalized culturalproduction, then, how does this sonic text – imbued with geo-historical vestiges andtransient ideological significations – narrate a story of shifting relations between andwithin different places? And, after nearly a century of worldwide circulation, why doesEl Condor Pasa continue to hold such national and international appeal?

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Sounding nationalism

The conception of El Condor Pasa occurred on the centennial eve of Peru’s postcolonialsovereignty. This was a significant moment of national reflection for Alomıa Roblesand his contemporaries. Despite a near-century of independence from the Spanishcrown, the combined effects of political and economic instability, civil andinterregional war, and rapid urbanization produced an ongoing crisis throughoutemergent Latin American nations.8 Indeed, as Peruvian sociologist Anıbal Quijanoretrospectively observed, decolonization was (and continues to be) an ongoing processwithout guarantees:9 a shift in leadership from the colonial elite to a nationalbourgeoisie offered little promise of political and economic transformation for themasses. Rather, the postcolonial crisis of early twentieth-century Peru found familiaralbeit dubious resolution in the implementation of neocolonial economicarrangements: the nation’s vertical assimilation into the world market as a producerof raw materials.10

The introduction of foreign-funded development projects geared towardsresource extraction did result in meagre economic growth; however, it likewise ledto ideological struggles over the future direction and management of nationaldevelopment. While many criollo conservatives embraced the boom in trade andcommerce, Lima’s burgeoning liberal intelligentsia resented excessive US andEuropean interventionism, favouring instead a closed market expansion of thecountry’s industry and infrastructure. Moreover, with the capital’s unprecedentedurban population explosion – and the concomitant ‘Andeanization’ of its peripheralneighbourhoods and labour markets11 – the ‘Indian Problem’ became an issue ofparamount concern for liberal and conservative elites alike, who feared that thecultural and linguistic practices of highland peasants were antithetical to politicaland economic growth. Finally, frontier wars with Bolivia and then Chile hadpersisted for decades; this effort to secure the nation’s material territorial bordersserved to underscore the need for symbolic national unification. From thesemounting schisms emerged popular debates that called into question not only futurestrategies for national development, but also the very boundaries and meaning ofnation itself.

In this context of prolonged and uneven decolonization, the relationship betweennational development and the construction of an autonomous national identity becamea central preoccupation for the Peruvian artist and intellectual of the early twentiethcentury.12 For these self-designated architects of postcolonial nationalism, the task ofgenerating coherent popular symbols that could be rendered legible across Peru’sextreme ethnic, linguistic and geographic divides posed a formidable challenge.Of particular difficulty was the prospect of creating cultural texts that could at oncepromote the modernist ideologies of the intellectual and economic bourgeoisie whileappealing to the ‘traditional’ aesthetic sensibilities of Peru’s popular classes. The effortto resolve these contradictions led nationalist artists to embrace a cultural phenomenonthat was sweeping Latin America’s emergent postcolonial nations: folklore.13

As cultural theorists William Rowe and Vivian Schilling have argued, ‘folklore was‘discovered’ in Latin American in the early twentieth century, when modernizingstates were seeking ways to achieve a partial integration of those rural populations

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which a weak capitalist economy ‘could not fully incorporate’, and was thereuponadopted by the postcolonial state ‘in order to bring about national identity’.14

Considering the cultural, ethnic and regional heterogeneity of the postcolonial LatinAmerican nation-state, it is easy to imagine how folklore was adapted as a tentativesolution to what Anne McClintock has aptly described as the temporal paradox ofnationalism: the necessity of simultaneously ‘gazing back into the primordial mists ofthe past’ while maintaining an eye toward ‘an infinite future’.15 Indeed, folkloreprovided a temporal framework for the imagining of national unification: those textsand practices deemed antithetical to national development could be rearticulated asnational folklore – fragments of a shared cultural past that would be institutionallyhonoured as such – while the project of modernity, namely ‘cultural’ and economicdevelopment, could be counterposed as the nation’s inevitable future. It is notsurprising, then, that for the Latin American intellectual of ‘modern’ America, folkloreregistered as a prevalent topic of concern and debate. At the 1939 XXVII CongresoInternacional de Americanistas, Peruvian intellectual Frederico Schwab delivered animpassioned speech that placed folklore at the centre of the (Latin) Americanistpolitical agenda:

It is not a coincidence that, among all of the International Congresses ofAmericanists, the present XXVII is the first to consider, among other signalledtopics, folklore. Today one can observe, throughout South American countries, agrowing interest in this field of study . . . . This interest in folklore demonstrates. . . that South American and Central American countries are consolidatingthemselves ethnically and socially . . . in them a national consciousness isawakening . . . a new concept of nationality that allows them to understand theculture of its people.16

The clear link that Schwab establishes between the production of popular folklore andthe project of national unification was echoed throughout early twentieth-century Peruas nationalist artists adopted folklore as the discursive field through which thedevelopment of a popular cultural imaginary would be elaborated. In texts rangingfrom Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones Peruanas to Julio de la Paz’s El Condor Pasa, nationalfolklore was proposed as the tenuous historical and cultural link between Peru’sdiverse citizenry. Tellingly, a new class of artist-intellectuals, including AlomıaRobles, emerged as the self-elected curators of all cultural texts and practices that fellwithin the nation’s territorial purview. Sponsored by a newly formed Ministry ofEducation, they were enlisted to cull, assess and preserve those remnants of thenation’s ostensibly dignified yet remote indigenous past in order to generate acollective historical testament to the violence of Western colonialism andinterventionism. By the same token, however, these cultural texts and practiceswere understood within a masculinist, linear trajectory of cultural evolution thatclearly began with precolonial indigenous communities in the highlands and endedwith entrepreneurial mestizo classes in the coastal capital. Through this directedinvention of a national folklore, uneven relations of race, gender and capital, as well ascompeting and contradictory localisms, found shady resolution in folklore’sevolutionary logic and ethnographic gaze. It was in this context that Alomıa Robles’sEl Condor Pasa found its earliest conception.

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Hybridity and the language of sound

The listener unfamiliar with the immeasurable variance in Andean sonic and rhythmicconfigurations might not capture the aesthetic innovation that was clearly legible toAlomıa Robles’s Peruvian compatriots. To explain, in Peru’s Andean and coastalregions, rhythm functions as a complex organizational structure for musicalproduction. Rhythm connotes both temporal and geographic specificity: the former,through the commemoration of historical moments such as the ‘pre-conquest’; and thelatter by territorializing ethnic and linguistic groups into regional geographies. What isunique about Alomıa Robles’s El Condor Pasa is that it both deploys and explodes thislogic of sonic particularism by fusing three distinct rhythmic traditions into a singleballad. The result is a musical score that re-orders temporal fragments and geographiclocalisms into a cultural text representative of a broader geographic scale: the nation.

The three distinct rhythms that are fused in El Condor Pasa are yaravı, pasacalle andhuayno, respectively. Interestingly, each of these musical traditions connotes a distinctcultural and geographic milieu. For example, the cadence of the ballad begins with themeasured and melodic yaravı. A mestizo rhythm derived from the highland mourningpractice of harahui, yaravı was a musical mainstay for the society balls of Lima’seighteenth-century criollo elite.17 The score then transitions into pasacalle, an upbeatmarch associated with the peninsular and later criollo communities of the northernPeruvian and Ecuadorian coasts. Finally, El Condor Pasa culminates with a seamlessmetrical shift into huayno, the most ubiquitous rhythm of Peru’s Andean region.

The logic of socio-sonic hybridity in Alomıa Robles’s arrangement is furtherreinforced by the instrumentation of the score, which also mirrors this triadicstructure. String instruments of European origin, such as guitar and mandolin, areblended with those of the colonial era, charango and hualaycho,18 to form the cadencedrasgeo (rhythmic strum) of the score. Precolonial wind instruments such as the bambookena and siku19 provide the text with its melodic contours and transitions. ThroughAlomıa Robles’s fusion of these three distinct rhythmic traditions, El Condor Pasaemerged as a nationalist text proffering an idyllic, simulated transculturation of Spanish,mestizo and indigenous cultural practices. By employing this rhythmic andinstrumentational prose, Alomıa Robles appealed to a national constituency acrossthe messy and politicized geographies of language and culture. In this way, El CondorPasa produced a seamless – if perfunctory – fusion of Peru’s distinct cultural traditionsimagined at the national scale.

In describing Alomıa Robles’s musical arrangement as a simulated ‘transcultura-tion’, I reference both the import of Fernando Ortiz’s neologism as well as thepotential limitations of its application. Coined by Ortiz in his seminal 1940 study,Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y azucar, ‘transculturation’ challenged the colonialunderpinnings of the concept of ‘acculturation’ by offering a distinct model of culturalevolution that linked the independent Cuban nation-state to its colonial past. Againstthe notion that the colonial encounter resulted in the subsumption of ‘inferior’ culturesby an ascendant one, transculturation emphasized the dynamic relationship ofcontradiction and synthesis that emerges from cultural interaction. Ortiz’s work posedan important critique of the tendency of Latin American academic scholarship to echomodernist nationalist discourses in their disavowal of the cultural presence of the

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indigenous and Black peasantry.20 However, the subsequent adaptation oftransculturation as a nationalist discourse has tended to conveniently privilege theacknowledgement of ‘hybridity’ or aesthetic difference to the exclusion of addressingmaterial differentiation. As John Beverley has argued, the deployment oftransculturation as a nationalist discourse is betrayed by a ‘hidden agenda of raceand class anxiety’ that stems from the possibility that ‘racial and class violence frombelow will overturn the structure of privilege inhabited by upper class liberalintellectuals’.21

It was precisely this dissimulative deployment of transculturation which Beverleydescribes that characterized the institutionalization of folklore by Peru’s earlytwentieth-century intellectual bourgeoisie. Moreover, it was toward this end thatAlomıa Robles’s creative musical arrangement was quickly appropriated by Lima’scriollo nationalists and cultural apologists. Indeed, while the popular press wasattentive to La Paz’s theatrical exposition, media coverage of Alomıa Robles’s uniqueballad was both sycophantic and extensive. Pre-eminent newspapers ranging from LaCronica to El Comercio lauded the score as an unprecedented national musicalachievement:

The public – which, in matters concerning national texts is the best judge – hasdemonstrated through their interminable ovations that this music is theirs . . . andfrom our [Peruvian] musical soul master Robles has created a sensation of sagaciousharmonization.22

Such glowing reviews in the popular news media were mirrored in Lima’s academicand intellectual circles, as El Condor Pasa was mobilized as a potent ideological tool formanaging the race and class anxiety that Beverly describes. The ‘sagaciousharmonization’ of El Condor Pasa lauded in the popular press was indeed anopportunistic nationalist interpretation of Alomıa Robles’s musical project. It was inthis way that the score came to function as a nationalist folkloric text par excellence,precisely because it introduced a literal sonic harmony that could stand in for thecacophony and contradiction of Peru’s many localisms: grievances over regionaldevelopment and distribution of resources, racial divides and ethnic parochialisms, etc.Accordingly, Alomıa Robles was celebrated in Lima’s local press as ‘the author ofPeruvian folklore’ and named director of the Fine Arts Branch of the Ministry ofEducation in Lima,23 while El Condor Pasa was memorialized in national newspaperRevista de La Opinion Nacional as ‘a text crafted with a love of all things national . . . richin the material of Incan music, but harmonized with great art’. 24

Of course, the exclusionary narrative proposed through this sonicrepresentation of nation in no way remained uncontested. As Carol Andreas,Steve Stein and Mark Thurner have all argued,25 throughout the twentieth century,the urbanized indigenous peasantry – particularly its women – has protestedagainst foreign interventionism and bourgeoisie developmentalism through streetdemonstrations, in popular radio programming and via dissident expressive culturalpractice. As I will soon detail, critique of the manifestly raced and genderedconsolidation efforts of the Peruvian state-in-crisis has remained lively amongPeruvian nationals as well as among Peruvian immigrant and diasporic communitiesin the US.

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Track Two, International Worldings: ‘entitled by my birth tothe treasures of the earth’26

Alomıa Robles’s El Condor Pasa was first introduced to audiences abroad in the 1930sduring a 14-year stint that the artist spent living and travelling in the United States.However, the composition did not reach the apex of its international acclaim until itsappropriation and reproduction by a US musician 30 years later. During a 1965European tour performance at the Theatre de L’Est Parisien in Paris, renownedsinger/songwriter Paul Simon had a chance backstage encounter with performers fromthe Peruvian folkloric group Los Inkas. Intrigued by their instrumental interpretation ofEl Condor Pasa, Simon paid the South American performers a nominal fee to produceand record a musical arrangement of the ballad. With Simon’s English lyrics overlaid,El Condor Pasa was released to US and European audiences in 1969 to become acelebrated hit – one for which Alomıa Robles was never credited, despite his 1933copyright filed with the US Library of Congress. Over the past three decades sinceSimon’s release, El Condor Pasa has been re-recorded by artists ranging from romanticballadist Perry Como27 to new age icon Zamfir,28 and has recently been made availableas a polyphonic ring tone;29 according to Alomıa Robles’s son Armando Robles Godoy,there are currently over 4500 versions of the song in popular circulation.30

Arguably, Simon’s dubious appropriation of ‘El Condor Pasa’ exemplifies thecategory of transnational musical ‘collaborations’ that have been continually celebratedin the international media as an ideal variety of global community formation madepossible by globalization’s rapid technological innovations and territorial integration.From recording labels such as Putumayo and Luaka Bop to national icons like the PublicBroadcasting Service, US culture brokers have popularized a discourse of internationalmulticulturalism that celebrates artists such as Simon for ‘rescuing’ Global Southernmusical traditions from relative obscurity by popularizing them in the Global North.However, as critics of such multiculturalist narratives have noted, the ‘fatal couplingsof power and difference’31 that such projects represent – most notably neo-imperialism and imperialist nostalgia,32 racist love and racial violence – are effaced byand for Western audiences whose enthusiastic consumption of world music madeSimon’s El Condor Pasa a top hit in the US and Germany.

In the case of El Condor Pasa, this critique of world music has been articulatedby contemporary Peruvian cultural nationalists who have argued that, through itshyper-circulation in worldbeat markets, this musical score once envisaged as a criticalsymbol of Peruanidad has become emblematic of precisely that which it was designedto counter: the relentless protraction of US interventionism in Latin America.Consequently, in 2002 Peru’s Instituto Nacional de Cultura (National Institute of Culture,or INC) designated Alomıa Robles’s score a national patrimonio cultural.Concomitantly, the INC has launched a comprehensive research project that seeksto cull an archival collection memorializing the popular ballad and its ‘original’ musicalarranger. Entitled Proyecto Condor Pasa, the project’s stated goal is the education of anational and international public on matters related to the composition. These include:the pivotal role of El Condor Pasa in twentieth-century Peruvian national culturalformation; its fraught journey to the global stage; and, finally, its ‘authenticallyPeruvian’ musical roots.33

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While Proyecto Condor Pasa’s vehement condemnation of US and European audio-aesthetic appropriations occasions an important transnational dialogue regarding theasymmetrical relations of (re)presentation in materially differentiated geographies suchas Global North and South, the INC’s uncritical celebration of El Condor Pasa as theauthentic cultural object of an essential national subject fails to register thecomplexities and contradictions articulated by and through the text’s early twentieth-century regional and national circulations. In designating Alomıa Robles’s text apatrimonial icon of the Peruvian state, the INC revives the project of early twentieth-century bourgeoisie nationalists by once again deploying El Condor Pasa as a unifiedreferent of national ‘difference’, thus reinstating its role as a dissimulative alibi forenduring state technologies of ideological and material differentiation. Meanwhile, theprolonged regional tensions within the postcolonial Peruvian nation that foundexpression in Robles’s sonic amalgamation of previously unpublished vernaculartraditions continue to be effaced.

A closer look at the multiple con(texts) of El Condor Pasa’s international circulation,then, proposes an equally compelling set of questions: How might we address some ofthe contradictory and/or unintended consequences of the ballad’s multipletranslocations; and, in turn, what might attention to these geo-historical contingenciesreveal about the politics of contemporary cultural practice, mediation and travel?

Track Three, the Andean Music industry

Today, El Condor Pasa has been reintroduced to US and European audiences through itshyper-circulation in the performance and recording networks of what I call the‘Andean music industry’: an extensive US-based informal economy of Pan-Andeanmusical production that integrates (inter)national performance networks, aesthetictechnologies and labour migrations. In what follows, I examine how the contemporaryre-appropriation of El Condor Pasa by migrant musicians within this industry hasleveraged the practice of a ‘dissident folklore’ to confront the limitations andexclusions of both postcolonial nationalism and neo-imperial corporatism.

Established by immigrant musicians over three decades ago, the birth of theAndean music industry, or AMI, indexes a critical response to the contradictory effectsof global capitalist restructuring. On the one hand, the vertical integration ofinternational markets enabled an unprecedented consumption of ‘world music’ in theGlobal North, as signalled by the mass reproduction of El Condor Pasa. On the otherhand, the concomitant implementation of political and economic austerity measures inthe Global South dislocated many South American musicians from essential sites ofcultural (re)production – from the home, to labour markets, to the culturalbureaucracies of national and global media regimes. Consequently, in lieu of appealingto the ‘import’ recording projects of world music distribution, hundreds of Andeanmusicians chose immigration to Global Northern metropoles as an alternative optionfor their economic and aesthetic pursuits. Upon arriving in the US, rather thanpetitioning for access to the privatized stages of world music promotion, Andeanmigrant musicians strategically relocated the spatialized processes of culturalproduction, mediation and consumption to quotidian public venues in the urbancityscape: subway stations, street corners and shopping malls. By the early 1990s,

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industry circuits extended throughout the continental US, linking public spheres inPacific, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeastern coastal cities to those of metropolitan regionsin Southwest and college towns throughout Middle America.

Within these networks, both the national history and the international renown ofEl Condor Pasa have been leveraged as critical tools for popularizing Andean music in theUS. On the global scale, Simon’s release of the ballad was historically among theearliest renditions of what has come to be known as world music, and thus played acrucial role in the cultivation of international consumer audiences. Within the US,Simon’s and other classical releases have provided a familiar sonic referent for GlobalNorthern listeners and thus a point of market leverage for AMI recording sales. AMIbands have strategically exerted this leverage by appealing to the neo-imperialistsentimentality of US listeners, exploiting their desire to obtain a seemingly more‘authentic’ rendition of the ballad. For example, since the AMI’s inception, the SanFrancisco Bay Area has been home to over 20 Andean bands. Bay Area groups such asMarkahuasi, Inkarrı, Karumanta and Kashwa represent both a remarkable variety ofregional and national affiliations (including Mexico, Central America and the Pacificcoast as well as the Andean region of South America) and aesthetic and rhythmicspecialties (from huayno and san juanito to chicha and musica tropical). Despite this,nearly all San Francisco Andean musical performances and album repertoires includeEl Condor Pasa, thus mirroring a national trend: while renditions vary, El Condor Pasaremains the most frequently played and recorded song within the AMI. Yet, whileperhaps a vulgar appeal to the predictable palates of US consumerism, the AMI’s re-appropriation of El Condor Pasa has enabled the creation of a diasporic migrant-musiciancommunity designed to circumvent the efforts of nationalist cultural bureaucracies andglobal culture industries to fix and manage the ‘proper’ sites and objects of culturalproduction.

Arguably, the performative strategies deployed through the Andean music industryepitomize the mobilization of what Jose David Saldıvar has referred to as ‘dissidentfolklores’: a set of adaptive cultural practices that disarticulate the Euclidean notions oftime and space that undergird the ‘nativist modernism’ of both the postcolonial andneo-imperial nation-state.34 The hybrid textualities of rhythm, melody andinstrumentation that constitute AMI aesthetics bear testament to the translocal‘contact zones’ through which contemporary Pan-Andean expressive culture has beenforged.35

Within AMI networks, the practice of dissident folklore follows two related butdistinct trajectories. First, by combining largely defunct instrumentation of the Andeanregion with new aesthetic technologies, Andean musicians in the diaspora havecontinued to redefine, by and through new (con)texts, what constitutes ‘folk’ music.For example, while the pre-Colombian siku and kena have been replaced in much of theAndean region by the accordion and clarinet, the use of electronic mixers andamplification has enabled their reincorporation into the instrumental arrangements ofAMI street performers. In turn, beat boxes, karaoke machines, claves and electricguitars have charted new aesthetic terrains within AMI practices, making possiblesounds previously unachievable without amplification or with limited numbers ofmusicians. In short, the instrumentational hybridity of contemporary AMI musicalproduction – produced through multiple and continual sonic translocations –effectively blurs the ostensible divisions between temporalities of present and past.

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Second, contemporary AMI musical arrangements are not limited to thereinterpretation of regional highland ballads or national anthems such as El Condor Pasa.Rather, numerous AMI recordings have come to include so-called fusion projects thatsimultaneously articulate and produce the place of the Andean diaspora within theUnited States. Examples of such rearticulations have ranged from Andean Nation’swind interpretation of Canon in D major to Quijerema’s ‘Andean Jazz’ to the myriad‘Andean Christmas’ albums that have saturated AMI markets. Through this body ofrecordings, migrant musicians have transformed their adaptation to market necessitiesinto opportunities to reinterpret Western cultural icons through new sonic languages.In so doing, they transgress the hegemonic demarcation of holiday carols or classicalmusic as the cultural property of Western nations while charting new terrains ofcultural and economic (re)production within the United States.

As I have argued previously, folklore has been used as a technology of nation-building for the postcolonial nation-state, a means of institutionalizing indigenousexpressive culture as merely a remnant of the historical past. Yet, as Rowe andSchelling have cogently argued, throughout Andean history ‘the cultures referred to asfolkloric have upheld their own ideas of nationhood capable of challenging the officialstate. In these circumstances, the idea of folklore breaks down, since the phenomena itrefers to challenge the legitimacy of the society voicing the idea itself.’36 While theauthors’ claim focuses on Andean cultural politics at the national scale, given thecultural and economic processes of late twentieth-century global capitalism, it hasbecome increasingly important to address the extent to which similar struggles forhistorical and political sovereignty have been enlisted at the intersection of local andglobal scales. In my view, this very strategy has most recently been employed on theglobal stage through the networks of the Andean music industry. If, as the case of ElCondor Pasa so vividly illustrates, Andean musical cultures have been appropriated forthe projects of nationalist modernity and international imperialism, then they havemost recently been reframed through the practice of fluid, dissident folklores that shiftand adapt to the material and aesthetic concerns of the transnational immigrant artist.

Conclusion

What instruction does a study of these three tales of sonic migration have to offer toscholars of Latin American cultural studies? How can we read the multipleappropriations of El Condor Pasa so as to inform an analysis of the contradictions withinand contingencies of the circuitous travel of cultural forms? Arguably, attention to thereproduction of this mythical ballad across sonic and linguistic as well as temporal andgeographic boundaries offers important insights concerning the theoretical andmethodological frameworks through which globalized cultural production is mostoften addressed. Within cultural studies, the historical and contemporary globalizationof musical practice has most often been read through a discourse of coercive ‘travel’ –that is, of capitalist extraction and ideological reconfiguration, and its attendantreconstitution of the content and form of cultural practice. Such a critique is clearlyreiterated in the efforts of Peru’s Instituto Nacional de Cultura to reclaim El Condor Pasa asan authentic national icon of Peruanidad. Yet, as the Latin American Subaltern StudiesCollective has cued and as the multiple translocations of El Condor Pasa dramatically

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illustrate, the political struggles through which national icons and archives – be theylinguistic, sonic or performed – are constituted make impossible their singular,absolute or unbiased interpretation. To search for the ontological moment or authenticmeaning of a cultural text is to mask the moments of crisis and contradiction throughwhich history and language are produced. Those of us who seek to read and deploycultural texts as critical supplements to institutionalized knowledge, then, mustconcurrently interrogate critiques of cultural globalization that posit national culturalbureaucracies as the proper antidote to neo-imperial culture industries. For, in the lastinstance, the essentializing logic of a coherent, if not homogenous, national-popularenacts its own violent erasures – even when deployed as a means of marking theviolence of capitalist homogenization.

Alternatively, rather than gauging the extent to which a particular cultural formmaintains its aesthetic and political ‘integrity’ through processes of regional, nationaland global travel, might not it be more productive to consider what such processesreveal about the complex interplay of text and context, or object and argument? To putit differently, to read the consistent reproduction of El Condor Pasa as a contestedpractice of sonic rearticulation enables a move beyond categorical binaries such asauthentic/inauthentic, traditional/modern and political/aesthetic, attending instead tothe contradictions that are released, buried or unearthed through processes of trans-regional and transnational cultural production. In the case of musical production, sucha reading is enhanced by increased theoretical attention to the logic and languages ofsound – rhythm, melody and instrumentation – in addition to conventional lyricalanalyses.

Furthermore, a significant – if often underemphasized – aspect of culturalproduction is its constitutive role in the construction of place – that is, the spatialcategories that give meaning to a particular, articulating ensemble of socialrelations.37 As geographers Cindy Katz and Neil Smith have observed, criticalanalyses of cultural travel most often operate with the implicit assumption thatwhile cultural practices change over time, the geographic landscapes upon whichthey are staged remain constant or static.38 As I have argued above, such approachesfail to capture the extent to which travelling cultural practices in general, andmusical practices specifically, can reproduce, contest or alter the regional, nationaland transnational contexts in which they are situated. Alternatively, I want toemphasize the importance of addressing sonic translocations as not only transformedby processes of travel, exile and displacement but, in fact transformative of thematerial and discursive contours of space and time with which they come intocontact. Such a theoretical shift might allow for new ways of imagining the politicsof globalized cultural practice, as the (re)production of fluid and contingent textsthrough which the sociopolitical processes of ideological negotiation and mediation‘take place’.39

Within the fields of Latina/o and transamerican studies specifically, greaterattention to the overdetermined interplay of culture and place poses importantchallenges to the longstanding limitations of conventional area studies models. Over ageneration of scholarship on border thinking has defined the analytical forefront of suchengagements, encouraging us to rethink the subject produced at the limit of the US’smaterial and ideological Southern Border.40 As today’s post 9–11 political climatecontinues to demonstrate the facility with which the US state-in-crisis can

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instantaneously produce multiple delocalized border zones – both at home and abroad– we must continue to refine our hemispheric analyses of both spatialized anddeterritorialized political and economic ties. Such a move might well require increasedattention to the role of culture in both producing and making meaning of contemporarysociospatial formations, as well as interrogating the imposed geographies that eitherfacilitate or constrain the quotidian reproduction of bodies, communities and nations.Following a single ballad such as El Condor Pasa through its geographic, technologicaland ideological displacements provides one illustration of how spatialized thinkingmight usefully be applied to multiple locations and across scales. It suggests, perhaps,an alternative perspective on our own role as cultural critics and audience members –one in which we are not merely consumers, but also products of the music that wemake and to which we listen.

Notes

1 Clifford, Routes, 25.2 [Flight of the Condor]3 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.4 Vallarnos, El Condor Pasa.5 Julio de la Paz was the pseudonym under which author Julio Baudouin published El

Condor Pasa.6 Pinilla, La musica en el siglo XX, 139.7 For a detailed discussion of the national debate concerning the authorship of El Condor

Pasa, see Holtzman, ‘Catalogo De Las Obras De Daniel Alomıa Robles’, 25;Vallarnos, El Condor Pasa.

8 Burholder and Johnson, y ‘Crisis and collapse’9 See Quijano, Nationalism & Capitalism in Peru.

10 Skidmore and Smith, ‘The transformation of Modern Latin America, 1880s–1990s’.11 For a detailed discussion of the Andeanization of popular music in Lima, see Amico,

Musica popular en Lima.12 As Peruvian ethnomusicologist Aurelio Tello contends, this attention to the

development of national symbols was an aesthetic trend that spread throughout thenascent Latin American nations: ‘The preoccupation with creating an art bearing anoriginal stamp, that could find its roots in pre-Hispanic music, popular music,folklore, or in the reminiscences and reinventions of these, was a general trendextending from Mexico through the Southern Cone, or vice versa’. See Tello, AiresNacionales En La Musica De America Latina Como Respuesta a La Busqueda DeIdentidad. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

13 While the roots of the term folklore can be traced back to European romanticism andthe mourned loss of the popular practices of a pre-industrial peasantry, theheterogeneity of postcolonial Latin American societies has meant that the concept of‘folklore’ has been appropriated by both bourgeoisie cultural nationalists and anti-statist oppositional cultures. For an in-depth discussion of folklore in post-independent Latin America, see Rowe and Rowe, Memory and Modernity.

14 Rowe, Memory and Modernity.15 McClintock, ‘No longer in a future heaven’.

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16 Schwab, El Folklore, Nuevo Campo De Estudio En America Y La Necesidad De SuOrientacion Historica, 1.

17 Barrenechea, ‘Notas para una biografıa del Yaravı’, 62.18 A 10-stringed instrument traditionally fabricated from an armadillo shell dating back

to the early colonial period of the Peruvian viceroyalty.19 For a comprehensive discussion of Andean wind and precussion instruments, see

Aramayo, Instrumentos musicales de Bolivia, Romero, ‘La Musica Tradicional Y Popular’,Romero, Sonidos andinos.

20 See Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint.21 See Beverley, Subalternity and Representation, 45.22 Dorian, ‘La Nacion’.23 Vallarnos, El Condor Pasa.24 My translation of ‘el autor del folklore Peruano’. See Paz Soldan, ‘Apuntes Crıticos’,

xx.25 See Andreas, When Women Rebel, Stein, Populism in Peru, Thurner, From Two Republics to

One Divided.26 Excerpted from Simon and Garfunkel’s recent release ‘Citizen of the Planet’. Simon,

Citizen of the Planet.27 Como, It’s Impossible.28 Songs of Romance Volume One.29 Available from http://www.web2txt.co.uk/simon_and_garfunkel-el_condor_

pasa-polyphonic-ringtone-9119.html; INTERNET.30 Riofrio, y Daniel Alomıa Robles y.31 I draw the concept of ‘fatal couplings of power and difference’ from Ruth Wilson

Gilmore’s application of Stuart Hall’s term (Hall, Race, culture, and communications,17. See Gilmore, ‘Fatal couplings of power and difference’.

32 Rosaldo, y Culture and Truth y.33 On 14 April 2004, El Condor Pasa was finally declared a national cultural patrimony

by the INC. See Riofrio, y Daniel Alomıa Robles y.34 Saldıvar, Border Matters, 36. Saldıvar borrows this notion of ‘nativist modernism’ from

Walter Benn Michaels. See Michaels, Our America.35 Pratt, y ‘Arts of the contact zone’ y.36 Rowe, Memory and Modernity, 4.37 See Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Smith and Katz, ‘Grounding metaphor’; Neil

Smith, y ‘Contours of a spatialized politics’ y.38 Smith and Katz, ‘Grounding metaphor’.39 By place I mean a particular historico-geographic articulation that gives meaning to an

ensemble of social relations. See Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Smith, ‘Contours ofa spatialized politics’, Smith and Katz, ‘Grounding metaphor’.

40 See, for example, Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera; Mignolo, Local Histories; Pratt,Imperial Eyes; Saldıvar, Border Matters.

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Kirstie A. Dorr received her Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of

California, Berkeley. Her research interests include post- and anti-colonial nationalisms,

transborder bodily and cultural migrations, and the political geographies of American-

idad. She is currently a chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois

Urbana-Champaign.

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