50 Years of Afro-Peruvian
Dance & Culture

(Asociación Iberoamericana de Artes y Letras & Studia Hispanica Editors, Lima-Perú, 2021) offers urgent strategies to define and problematize a choreography of blackness by an important company with huge influence in Peru and beyond. Between anecdotal ethnographic entries, Luis explores significant theoretical concerns around the formation of identity and the commodification of culture, the wages of racism, and neoliberal interventions into daily life. He analyzes the scraps of extant evidence to produce compelling arguments surrounding habitus, relationship to the state, willingness to auto-exoticize, constructions of sexuality, and, of course, race in connection to the long history of Perú Negro.

“Perú Negro:
Bailando Muchas Memorias”

Published April 28, 2021

“Perú Negro is the third root of Peruvian identity, another version of mestizaje. Based on their musical production, they managed to insert a past that was invisible, marginalized, and oppressed. They used the body as an agent of their own freedom and choreography to nationalize the idea of ​​blackness. ” 

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- Luis F. Paredes, in Article by El Comercio