AFRO-PERUVIANS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (1895-1940)
The paths of integration and exclusion
Cumanana
E - Newsletter of Peruvian Culture for Africa
MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Intercultural education for the construction of identity in young African descents
Recipe: Githeri (Kenyan corn and bean stew)
Article 1:
AFRO-PERUVIANS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (1895-1940)
The paths of integration and exclusion
Maribel Arrelucea / Jesus Cosamalón
The introduction of Afro-Peruvian cultural elements into the national culture had a divergent effect. On the one hand, it allowed their incorporation into the nation, broadening its definition, but, on the other hand, it carried the danger of stereotyping Afro-Peruvians in these cultural practices as their only possibilities for development and integration. In this work we would like to emphasize a couple of historical aspects of these paths: music and sport.
It has been said ad nauseam that the Afro-Peruvian population, like other similar populations, has a natural tendency for musical interpretation, again racializing people's abilities. In fact, the frequent presence of the Afro-Peruvian population in these activities is more a reflection of the inequity of life opportunities, a product of low educational access and adequate jobs.
Instead, music has a more democratic character, open to people without academic musical training and who, thanks to the skill gotten in several ways, can open a door to participate in discriminatory societies. Such a characteristic is noticeable in the type of instruments and skills typical of Afro-Peruvians, especially in the early twentieth century: voices, dance, and percussion. The importance of this last element is revealing. Especially in music of Afro-descendant origin, percussion usually has a transcendental place and even its performers are usually ahead of other instruments, positively positioning those who in other spaces would not be in first place.
Porfirio Vásquez (1902-1971)
Among the historical figures of Afro-Peruvian music is, without a doubt, Porfirio Vásquez (1902-1971). Born in Aucallama, he moved to Lima in the 1920s and worked as a janitor at the Kennel Park racetrack. When he lost his job due to the closure of the park, he was hired as a teacher of Peruvian black dances at Lima's first folklore academy created by the government in 1940. From that moment on, Don Porfirio became a reference of Afro-Peruvian culture, serving as a key informant for later historical recreations, such as the "Pancho Fierro" “peña” [a place where people come to eat, drink, and be merry while listening to Peruvian folk music], created by José Durand. His skill with the guitar, the cajón, the singing and the “décimas” contributed enormously to the creation of the Afro-Peruvian cultural heritage.
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Sports arrived then to discipline the popular sectors and achieve civilization, but they were quickly reinterpreted from below, according to popular interests. Quickly one of the clubs founded in 1901 by teenagers of different ethnic origins, Alianza Lima, became one of the symbols of the Afro-Peruvian presence in the sports field. The reasons why the club was identified with this origin were the strong links between athletes and fans with laborers and workers, as well as the club's move from Cotabambas Street to La Victoria, a space with a large Afro-Peruvian presence.
presence.
From 1920 to 1930, this relationship with Afro-descendants would become more intense, especially from the appearance of its great historical figure: Alejandro "Manguera" Villanueva (1908-1944). Soccer, like music, allowed many Afro-Peruvians to mobilize socially: it was not necessary to have education or training, it was enough to have the necessary skill to be part of the soccer teams. Villanueva was born in the Rimac, then moved to Barrios Altos and joined Alianza Lima, standing out from 1927 to 1943. He was part of the team that competed in the Berlin Olympics (1936) and the famous "black roller", one of the best historical teams of Alianza Lima that was undefeated for more than three years and won six national titles (1927-1934). His disorderly life caused him profoundly serious health problems, he retired in 1943 and died a year later victim of tuberculosis.
A couple of sports examples can help to understand the relationship between exclusion and success in sports. For example, one of the first figures of the national box was José "Bom Bom" Coronado (1921-1952).
He was born on January 5, 1921, in the town of Chincha (Ica, Peru), an area of great Afro-descendant presence. In 1931, his family decided to move to the workers' neighborhood of La Victoria (Lima), one of the urban spaces that housed the new masses of workers, many of them immigrants, who worked in the capital. Boxing had arrived in the early twentieth century in the Peruvian capital, and the love for the new sport quickly spread among workers and popular sectors. Precisely in La Victoria, near the Manco Capac
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de la tuberculosis.
Alejandro “Manguera” Villanueva (1908-1944)
José “Bom Bom” Coronado (1921-1952).
square, a tent was installed since the 1920s that offered boxing matches, a sport that José admired since he was a child and began to practice from the age of 14. He was trained by Guillermo Peñaloza, one of the most important trainers in the history of Peruvian boxing. While still a teenager he achieved significant triumphs in Santiago de Chile (1935) and was champion of the selective tournament for the Berlin Olympics (1936). Unfortunately, due to his youthful age he could not attend the competition, resurfacing his fame by achieving the title of undefeated Latin American featherweight champion in 1938, with only 17 years of age, defeating without mitigating the Argentine Emilio Trotta in the city of Lima (Peru). With these successes he became the first Afro-descendant idol of boxing fans.
Soon he ventured into professional boxing, with an official record of 31 fights: 16 wins (1 by K.O.), 9 losses (3 by K.O.) and 6 draws. Considered a technical boxer, with fast movements and having a remarkably effective left jab, he won the national title in the lightweight category on June 19, 1939. He then continued his career in the south of the continent, fighting against prominent boxers such as the Argentine Tito Soria, whom he defeated on points on February 2, 1941, at Luna Park in Buenos Aires, and against the Chilean Humberto "Peloduro" Buccione in Santiago de Chile, with whom he drew in a 10-round fight. In Argentina he married Elba Sotelo, but his disorderly and bohemian life resulted in a serious deterioration of his health. Even so, he tried to continue his career in Lima and abroad. He culminated his career facing Armando Yáñez (Kid Colombia) in Nicaragua and Colombia in 1948. Back in Peru, illnesses overwhelmed him. Without further quarrels and with his resources squandered, he quickly fell into oblivion and misery. He died on May 7, 1952, with scarce 31 years old, after a painful agony, victim of failures in the liver, kidneys, and heart. His humble burial went unnoticed by most Peruvians,
but soon the composer Pedro Espinel dedicated a song in polka rhythm, "Bom Bom Coronado", which perennialized the memory of this remarkable boxer.
Another important figure was Antonio Frontado (1924), Peruvian boxer born in the Chiclín hacienda on the outskirts of the city of Trujillo (La Libertad) on October 28, 1924. He began practicing football in his childhood, but after a street fight, he was summoned with other young people to the boxing classes taught by Armando Foglia, an Italian immigrant hired by the Larco family, owner of the estate, to teach boxing on the farm, a sport that soon got great popularity among workers and popular sectors. Since colonial times, the northern part of Peru had specialized in this activity, employing slave labor first and then hired Chinese workers. The practice of sport was one of the strategies that the family developed with the aim of attracting labor to produce sugar, and in the early twentieth century the salary and living conditions offered by the hacienda were the best attractions to fix this labor force on the hacienda.
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Antonio Frontado (1924)
lightweight category in 1943 (Lima, Peru) and in the middleweight category in 1945 (Montevideo, Uruguay). Considered as a technical boxer before one of great punch, he was one of the first great idols of Peruvian sport in general, and specially in boxing. In 1946, he began his career as a professional boxer, in which however he did not have as many successes as in the amateur. He took part in 29 fights, of which he won 22 (7 by K.O.), lost four (three by K.O.) and drew the remaining two. He was the protagonist of one of the most remembered incidents when the Dominican boxer Carlos Pérez, known as the "Zurdo del Higuamo", knocked him down with a terrible blow to the liver in the Plaza de Acho (Lima) on June 4, 1949, in the third round of the ten agreed. Frontado's boxing career seemed over, but Max Aguirre, Frontado's promoter, arranged a rematch in which he was victorious on points in the same square on August 28, 1949. After that triumph, he faced several figures of international boxing, such as the Uruguayan
Pilar Bastidas, the Argentine Francisco Antonio Lucero, (“Kid slapped”) and, especially, the American middleweight James Tufts (Artie Towne), to whom he lost on November 11, 1950 (nine years later, Tufts would be defeated by Peruvian boxing great Mauro Mina). Frontado tried to be professional South American champion but lost in the city of Buenos Aires at the Luna Park coliseum to one of the best Argentine boxers, Eduardo Lausse, on May 6, 1953. Finally, he retired after a victory against the Peruvian Fridolino Vilca in the city of Trujillo on January 1, 1956. As a tribute to his career, the boxing ring of the Mansiche Stadium in Trujillo bears the name of "Antuco Frontado".
As you can see, in the history of these athletes there are common features. They did not have great possibilities of ascending socially through education or better paid trades. His symbolic capital was the use of his body, his skill, and his physical strength, remarkable to achieve sporting successes. However, this success had a paradoxical impact: it also stereotyped Afro-Peruvians as carriers of certain innate abilities that racialized them and condemned them to certain social places they could not trespass.
AFRODESCENDIENTE EN
https://centroderecursos.cultura.pe/sites/default/files/rb/pdf/La-presencia-afrodescendiente.pdf
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Antonio Frontado vs. Antonio Fernández. (1948).
*Piece extracted from the article Los Afroperuanos en el Siglo XX (1895-1940), available in LA PRESENCIA
EL PERÚ: SIGLOS XVI-XX, Ministerio de Cultura, 2015. pp. 162-166.
Article
Angie Edell Campos Lazo / Jorge Rafael Ramírez
Afro-Peruvian population and intercultural education
To understand why the Afro-descendant population has been excluded from the intercultural educational approach in the country, we must go back to the historical process of slavery and the position that this population has been occupying in the process of construction of Peruvian society.
The slave trade in Peru brought many African citizens. They disembarked, initially, in some peripheral ports of the American Atlantic such as, for example, Cartagena, Veracruz and Portobelo, and then were transferred to Peruvian territory. In the process, they acquired the Spanish language and lost their own languages. This imposed transformation and acculturation, added to the genetic/biological explanation used at the time about "an inferior race", reinforced the position and invisibility of the enslaved African population of the time.
The enslaved African population in Peru and their descendants were at the bottom of the political and social ladder of the colonial era. They did not have the same recognition as the indigenous population, much less as the "white" society. They were stripped of all conception and idiosyncrasy of their countries, due to the strategies used by the Spaniards to disintegrate them and thus avoid revolutions.
On the other hand, there is the indigenous population, defined as originating in these lands, with its own economic, social, and political expressions. In this sense, later policies that would look to eradicate “social inequality”
Foto: Andina
in Peru would focus on the linguistic differences found in indigenous populations as the main axis. For this reason, again, they left the Afro-descendant population out of government plans, since all their descendants already spoke Spanish.
In this process, a historically invisible condition has been perpetuated in the Afro-descendant population. They lost the right to recover their memories, cultural and linguistic demonstrations.
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Intercultural education for the construction of identity in young African descents 2:
De La Cadena (2000) highlights that in Peruvian society a definition of race is perpetuated based on the historical subordination of phenotype and culture as a marker that would differentiate populations. In that sense, discriminatory practices in the social and institutional spheres would not be considered openly racist, protected by the hereditary differences of indigenous populations and Afro descendants. One of the obvious signs of the invisible position that the Afro-Peruvian population would have been that it has not been considered in the national census data either. The last official and national data until the elaboration of the present investigation was in the Census of 1940, in which various discussions have been triggered on the need to collect the data of ethnic origin, sheltering in the discourses of "egalitarianism" expressed in the famous Peruvian phrase "who does not have of inga, has of mandinga". This situation highlights the null existence of anyone purely indigenous or Afro
Reyna, 2006). Why is the intercultural educational approach necessary for the Afro-Peruvian population? Even though, in recent decades, there has been a renaissance and revaluation of the indigenous and the Afro-Peruvian, and the cultural contribution to our country has increased, discriminatory practices based on "race" continue to be carried out.
To show these events, it is enough to resort to the demographic and historical characteristics of Peruvian society. Peredo Beltrán (2001), in a synthesis carried out through research with Afro-Peruvian organizations and international institutions, summarizes that Peru has a population of more than 27 million inhabitants,
of which it is considered that, by descent, 40% are mestizos, 30% indigenous, 10% African, 10% European, 8% Asian, and 2% Israelites / Arabs and others. In addition, it is estimated that about 50 languages are used in the country; Among them, 44 indigenous languages, various dialects of Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, and other foreign languages, in addition to Castilian and Spanish. There are up to 85 languages spoken in Peru.
As mentioned above, the characteristic policy of the Peruvian State has looked to homogenize the entire population under a mestizo or Creole identity. In this way, it camouflages the social inequalities and signs of racism constantly denounced by indigenous and Afro-Peruvian populations. Given this constant, the intercultural approach, unlike what the Peruvian State looks for, would search to emphasize the value of cultural diversity as a source of national wealth, promotes tolerance, diversity, and cultural equality in national society.
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Photo: Andina Archivos
The greater the diversity, the greater the wealth. It is necessary that the State and society recognize and positively assume Peru as a multicultural country and that they choose to strengthen and spread the principles that allow peaceful coexistence, development with equal opportunities, respect, and positive assumption of cultural diversity (National Policy on Languages and Cultures in Education, 2002: 3).
The Afro-Peruvian and indigenous movements prove, through their organizations, the relevance of the intercultural educational approach for their populations. Therefore, in the Declaration of Pachacamac (2001), they constantly denounced the negligence of the State for not properly including the participation of both movements in the planning and implementation of educational measures. Likewise, they denounce the distorted way in which it is being carried out, since, instead of integrating the populations respecting their diversity, it looks to assimilate them and, again, homogenize the entire population.
The intercultural educational approach would also promote the rewriting of Peruvian history including the voices of the diversity of populations that constitute it. For Valdiviezo & Valdiviezo (2008), an intercultural history would stimulate the appreciation of cultural diversity and mutual recognition among all populations. In this way, historical images that perpetuate cultural oppression and discrimination are corrected, in addition to redefining the belief that citizens have about their present and future.
The Afro-Peruvian population needs to know its legacy, it needs to reinforce the feeling of social, cultural and historical pride forged by its ancestors such as, for example, the loyalty of Don Antonio Oblitas, the academic eminence of Don José Manuel Valdés, the patriotism of Don Alberto Medina Cecilia, the artistic exquisiteness of Don José Gil de Castro, the heroism of Doña Catalina Buendía de Pecho and the hidden identity of the martyr Micaela Bastidas (DIGEIBIR, 2012). The characters mentioned are a sample of participation beyond the slave stage of the country. However, Afro-Peruvian adolescents and children are unaware of them.
Since the colonial period, the Afro-Peruvian population has been eliminated from history in schools, their struggles and contributions have been displaced from the Peruvian collective memory and have not received help from any kind of reparation. In this sense, the intercultural education approach is a fundamental tool to mark the beginning of a multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, and multilingual Peru.
*Piece extracted from the article Intercultural Education for the construction of identity in young Afro-descendants, originally published in AFRO-PERUVIAN CULTURE: MEETING OF RESEARCHERS 2018, Ministry of Culture, 2019, Pp. 62-64.
https://centroderecursos.cultura.pe/sites/default/files/rb/pdf/Encuentro-de-investigadores-2018.pdf
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Photo: DAPA 2013
Githeri
(Kenyan corn and bean stew)
Ingredients
1 tablespoon oil or butter
1 medium onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 tablespoon curry powder
1 large bunch kale or other vegetables, chopped
4 cups diced tomatoes
2 cups corn
2 cups cooked beans of any kind, (canned and drained or cooked)
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 lemon
Preparation
In a medium skillet, heat the oil. Sauté the onion for 3 minutes, until transparent. Add the garlic and curry powder and cook for 1 minute.
Combine all ingredients except lemon juice. Stir. Bring everything to a boil, then cover at once, reduce cooking over low heat and cook for 20 minutes, until onions and vegetables are well cooked.
Season with more salt and pepper to taste. Cut the lemon in half. Serve in bowls with a splash of lemon juice.
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