Fotos de susana traverso actuales3/1/2023 “We’ve always been very colonised by Anglo-Saxon culture in Latin America – everything that comes out of the US and England,” he says. The eventual aim, adds Nuñez del Prado, is to get out records by at least three female artists from each country in Latin America. He is working on an album by Lucha Reyes, sometimes described as the Edith Piaf of Peru, while other reissued artists will include Olga Guillot from Cuba, Estelita del Llano from Venezuela, Mexico’s María Victoria Cervantes, and Las Tres Marías from Ecuador. McEvoy, who grew up listening to her parents’ Yma Sumac records in Peru, and wrote the sleeve notes for the reissue, attributes some of the singer’s enduring popularity to the fact that Sumac and Vivanco “remain a mirror for all those who are forging their identity across borders that are not just geographical but also cultural”.įor Nuñez del Prado – who has also worked to raise the profile of Peruvian Chicha music and is part of an agency dedicated to rescuing and restoring phonographic catalogues – the project is about redressing an ongoing cultural imbalance. Photograph: Tom Kelley Archive/Getty Images Yma Sumac with her husband, bandleader Moisés Vivanco in California, 1953. “While it’s true that they arrived in Hollywood at the height of the Exotica trend, both of them were bearers of an incredibly rich cultural capital that was acquired over the course of many decades and based on a re-reading and appreciation of Peruvian indigenous culture.” “The vision of Peru that Yma and Moisés brought to the world wasn’t, as many people think, one that was made in Hollywood,” says McEvoy. Twelve years before her death, one US paper described Sumac’s work as “a South American travelogue scripted by Disney, directed by Dalí”.Ĭarmen McEvoy, who teaches Latin American history at the University of the South-Sewanee and has spent the past few years writing a biography of Sumac and Vivanco, offers a slightly more nuanced appraisal.ī.A., University of the Sacred Heart M.L.A., Pontifical Catholic University of Peru M.A., Ph.D., University of California, San Diego She was a pioneer when it came to spreading Latin American culture around the world from the late 1940s – she laid the first stone.”Īfter divorcing Vivanco, making a rock album in 1971, becoming a favourite of San Francisco’s gay community and slipping into semi-retirement in the 1980s and 1990s, Sumac died of cancer in Los Angeles 2008. “Yma always had that little battle with Peru and she wasn’t honoured by the country until 2006 – even though she’d helped mythologise Peru. “A lot of those people came from very conservative folk schools and didn’t understand that you could create a hybrid that would transcend all that,” says Nuñez del Prado. However, as Nuñez del Prado points out, while Sumac and Vivanco found fame exporting their vision of Peru to the world, their work was not always well received in some intellectual circles back home, where it was considered a vulgar pastiche of Peru’s rich indigenous culture. She and Vivanco toured the world in the 1950s and 1960s, and Sumac appeared in the 1954 film Secret of the Incas, in which Charlton Heston plays a roguish treasure-seeker who wears a brown leather jacket and a fedora hat. They also gave rise to the urban myth that she was actually a woman from Brooklyn called Amy Camus who had simply reversed the letters of her name. Sumac’s extraordinary voice, striking looks and carefully packaged heritage – she claimed to be a descendant of Atahualpa, the Inca emperor garrotted by Pizarro and his conquistadores in 1533 – propelled her to international fame. Together with her husband, agent and composer, Moisés Vivanco, she became one of the biggest names in the gaudy, dramatic and lushly other genre known as Exotica, which blossomed in the 1950s. Born Zoila Emperatriz Chávarri Castillo in Peru in 1922, Sumac took her stage name from the Quechua words for “how beautiful”.
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