Middletown (Connecticut), USA - In the recently published book Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific, author Heidi Feldman explores the people and events that shaped the resurgence of black Peruvian culture. There are chapters on white criollo folklorist Joes Durand, black theater and dance director Victoria Santa Cruz, poet Nicomedes Santa Cruz, Perú Negro—Peru’s leading black folklore company, and Afro-Peruvian singer Susana Baca.

In the early 20th century Peru’s black population and its culture had seemingly “disappeared, ” largely due to changes in how Peruvians of African descent defined themselves. But in the 1950s there was a revival of diasporic consciousness through a social movement to re-create the forgotten music, dance, and poetry of black Peru. In the 1950s and ‘60s, a number of world events helped to shape this movement. There were the African independence movements and other international black rights movements, performances in Lima by African and African American dance troupes, the appropriation of black culture by white criollos, the Peruvian military revolution and its support of local folklore, and the emergence of important charismatic black leaders both within and outside of the Afro-Peruvian community. Suddenly, Peru’s black culture was gaining attention and respect.

In Black Rhythms of Peru, Feldman reveals how Afro-Peruvian artists remapped blackness from the perspective of the black Pacific, which she describes as a marginalized group of African diasporic communities along Latin America’s Pacific coast. Feldman’s book celebrates a cultural tradition that was nearly lost, and shows how such a vanishing tradition was rescued from the brink of extinction.

Heidi Carolyn Feldman is a lecturer in the department of communication at the University of California at San Diego.

Buy the book Black Rhythms of Peru.

More information: Afro-Peruvian artists