Punk and Revolution: Seven More Interpretations of Peruvian Reality 9780822373544

Citation preview

punk and revolution

shane greene punk and ion t u l o rev 7 mor interp e retatio ns of per reality uvian

Duke University Press Durham and London 2016

© 2016 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ♾ Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Greene, Shane, [date] author. Title: Punk and revolution : seven more interpretations of Peruvian reality / Shane Greene. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016024764 (print) lccn 2016025627 (ebook) isbn 9780822362593 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822362746 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 9780822373544 (e-­book) Subjects: lcsh: Punk culture—Political aspects—Peru. | Peru— Politics and government—1980– | Political violence—Peru— History—20th century. | Sendero Luminoso (Guerrilla group) Classification: lcc f3448.5.g74 2016 (print) | lcc f3448.5 (ebook) | ddc 985.06/4—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024764 Cover art: Shane Greene (design); Shad Gross (photography). Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the University of Indiana, College of Arts and Sciences, and Department of Anthropology, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

The very word revolution, in this America of small revolutions, lends itself to a lot of error. José Carlos Mariátegui

Hay que destruir para volver a construir. Narcosis

dedica

ted to

x

contents



ix Thanks Go To . . .



1 Warning!

7 interpretation #1 On the Risks of Underground Rock Production 45 interpretation #2 El Problema de la Sub-­Tierra 52 interpretation #3 El Problema del Pituco 83 re: interpretation #4 The Tongue Is a Fire, an Agent, a Traitor 112 interpretation #5 The Worth of Art in Three Stages of Underproduction 151 interpretation #6 A Series of Situations Resulting in X 188 interpretation #7 Hot Revolution with Punk Pancakes (a drunken dialogue)

205 PS!



211 Notes



219 References



225 Index

thanks go to . . .

The ghost of Mariátegui for putting up with me. Aaron and Marshall Bachelder for turning me into a punk sometime around 1983. Shad Gross for rad techniques made in Ohio. Leigh Bush for mastering the web. Motown for tongues, tears, and trumpets tied together with dog collars. Two “anonymous” readers for reading knowingly. Gisela Fosado for saying yes Duke can, Lydia-­Rose for making stuff happen. Las Perras de Bogotá por morderme sin intención de matar. Marisol de la Cadena for the alienation effect. Sandro Dogma for the MRR hook-­up. MRR for bringing the punks (but not the decision to cleanse GG’s original title). Newton Mori por darme una idea sin querer. The people at Tepo who laughed when they were supposed to. Alfredo Márquez porque al fondo siempre hay sitio. Julio Durán por traducir semejante huevada. Roos, Sonia, Olga, and Eric for helping Julio traducir semejante huevada.

Leo Escoria por no molestarse (tanto) cuando robo su mostrito. Richi Lakra por ser un poeta que asalta. Olga Rodríguez Ulloa for the Thai food in NY and the seafood in Seattle. Dalia Davoudi for thusly striking at my fine indeediness. Fabiola Bazo for all the intercambios. Richard Nossar Gastañeta por invitarme sus sutilezas. Manolo Garfías por el contacto con el gaucho rocker. El gaucho rocker, Christian Van Lacke, por producir el gringo que no tenía plata. Jesse Shipley and Marina Peterson for synchronizing their JPMS. Pedro Tóxico por no ser tóxico. Iván Santos Paredes por haberme ayudado llegar al fondo del tema T-­ta. Matt Van Hoose for the sax solo and the eight-­letter word. María Elena and Tony for the occasional grunge nostalgia. Jennifer Boles for driving all the way from Chicago. Claudia Alva, alias Blue, por ayudarme fastidiar. Chiki y Chovi por insultarme y abrazarme y insultarme de nuevo. Sydney Silverstein and Leigh Campoamor for the chismes about Lima. Rodrigo Quijano for always being on Facebook. Miguel Angel del Castillo and Raschid Rabi por varios diálogos subterráneos. Támira Bassallo por ser simplemente amable. x Thanks Go To . . .

Álex Ángeles por las lentejas. Miguel Det por no estar dead yet. Analucia Riveros por las consultas Quechistas (y todos los besos mandados a Samik). Emma McDonell for the beer bottle. All the subtes that submitted to, or refused, an interview, or gave me stuff, or did not. Ian McKaye and Martín Crudo for picking up the phone. Everyone that spilt ink for Interpretation #6 (Project X). Everyone that got upset and rejected prior versions of Interpretation #4. Eduardo Restrepo por ser más anarco-­editor que es@s pinches gring@s. The Newhouse Humanities Center for the freedom to begin writing. The Bishop for selling cheap alcohol at the corner of Walnut and 4th St. My guitars for always sassing back. Samik for sassing back (but only sometimes). P.J. por compartir un pedazo de su revolución caliente (y su jugo) conmigo (anoche soñé contigo, hoy también).

xi Thanks Go To . . .

warning!

My work has developed as Nietzsche would have wished, for he did not love authors who strained after the intentional, deliberate production of a book, but rather those whose thoughts formed a book spontaneously and without premeditation. Many projects for books occur to me as I lie awake, but I know beforehand that I shall carry out only those to which I am summoned by an imperious force. José Carlos Mariátegui

I bring together in this book seven Interpretations concerning some essential aspects of punk and revolution within what José Carlos Mariátegui once called Peruvian reality. Anyone dumb enough to think he meant it to refer to the nation-­state as a “unit of analysis,” or to attach the adjective “national” to his peculiar brand of Marxist thought, has completely missed his point. I say this irrespective of—although admittedly in slight annoyance with—all the global speak and transnational turns that have so many US-­based academics eager to fashion themselves beyond the nation. A universalist thinker deeply concerned with the particularities of context, Mariátegui meant it as a gesture of conviction. His main commitment was to ground any theoretical account within specific social structures and historical conditions. Inevitably, this requires leaps of interpretation since such realities shift according to moment and circumstance. Peru of the 1980s and early 1990s is the historical context for these seven Interpretations. The focus is largely on how Lima punks lived and died amid “the people’s war” that the Communist Party of Peru, popularly known as the Shining Path, declared in 1980 in Ayacucho and that soon engulfed the entire country. The atmosphere of hard-­line Marxist militancy, daily political violence, and state terror that resulted, and proved to be the bloodiest period since independence from Spain, was inevitably enmeshed in broader

processes. These other phenomena are not at the core of the analysis but necessarily appear as contextualizing factors: the Andeanization of Lima, as a decades-­long process of migration from highland provinces to urban slums intensified amid uncontrollable violence and economic collapse; the resulting invention of a chicha culture full of Andean, creole, and Caribbean musical fusions, tabloid newspapers, and informal street markets; radical left journalism and Marxist organizing in many public universities; new social movements trying to defend communities from violence and hardship, such as the women-­led communal kitchens in Lima slums or the peasant community patrols in the countryside. Most of those involved in the eighties punk scene are from families with deep Lima roots. If their families hail from the provinces it is typically from provincial cities (Arequipa, Piura, etc.) rather than rural areas. The vast majority fall somewhere on the continuum of upper- to middle- to lower-­middle class and reside in Lima’s core urban districts. Few, if any, grew up in the precarious shantytowns that now surround the core of the city after undergoing vast expansion during the eighties, populated overwhelmingly by Andean migrants, or cholos in Peruvian speak. In fact, after dozens of interviews, incursion into many homes to access personal collections, and attendance at lots of shows, I have yet to meet a single punk from the eighties generation that was exposed to Quechua in any significant way. Their surnames suggest complex permutations of Spanish, Basque, Italian, German, Japanese, and Lebanese descent much more often than Andean ancestry in a country with a sizeable indigenous, or indigenous-­descended, population. Despite this similarity in certain sociological terms, and the smallness of a scene that probably numbered only a few hundred at the time, Lima’s punks generated an extraordinary diversity of responses to the chaos of Peruvian reality during a war over the future. This included everything from rock-­n-­roll apathy toward “realpolitik” to radically ambiguous aesthetic provocation to anarchist militancy with liberatory aims. In these varied responses I locate distinct kinds of revolutionary hope and document different experiences of historical nightmare. Parts of the book have been published in, or rejected from, proper academic venues. Others came out in punk ’zines, all in a mix of Spanish and English. Some parts were released as piy (Publish-­It-­Yourself ) arte/facts, aesthetic announcements of my ongoing actions of Interpretation. They circulated as digital files instantaneously via the Internet, more slowly via the postal service with cut-­up cardboard protectors, or with fewer mediators thanks to hand-­to-­hand exchanges. These anticipatory tidbits were also sold, copied, 2 Warning!

given, and probably thrown away in those informal markets in Lima that specialize in underground paraphernalia (comics, ’zines, T-­shirts, bad horror movies, pirated rock music). The “PS!” at the end provides more details on why they were done and points to a companion website (punkandrevolution .com) where these and still other interpretations can be found, soundtrack included. The majority of the book remained unpublished until I convinced editors of a press to lend me a space where I might inhabit these voices, try to say something about how interpretative explorations of punk and revolution allow us to rethink the sordid political history of Peru and the world. The resulting whole, if it can be called that, turned out less how I originally intended it and more just how things shook out. So it should be with a book in direct dialogue with Mariátegui. In compiling his famous Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality he declared himself in conversation with Nietzsche and “warned” readers not to expect recognizable formulas, to engage instead with his idiosyncratic divergences from Marxist dogma and academic convention. At the end of a multiyear process, one witness to spurts and bursts of writing, booms and busts of revising, and fits and starts of aesthetic intervention, a process that also entailed more than one personal crisis and lots of laughter with the frustration I feel amid academe’s overly enlightened ways, and many passionately false promises that I was “80 percent done,” I finally became aware of what I was doing. More or less. I was appropriating Mariátegui’s form, and some of his content, for a reason. I wanted to imagine one of Latin America’s most creative Marxist thinkers—the one exiled to Europe in 1920 only to return to Peru further radicalized three years later; the one that founded Peru’s first Communist Party the same year he published his famous Seven Essays; the very same one whose traumatically injured body bound him to the materiality of a wheelchair for most of a very short life—as possessing the spirit of a punk contrarian. It was some Lima punks I know that inspired the thought. They gave me floors to sleep on and argued with me vigorously over beer. They were the ones to visualize something distinctly punkish in Mariátegui’s peculiar way of viewing the world, along with Peru’s particular and universal place in it. I also started thinking in terms of intertextual, subtextual, and countertextual dialogues between Mariátegui and a horde of other intellectual misfits: this problematic graduate student with the thesis that pissed off the Soviet intellectual establishment (Bakhtin); that most dangerous of dangerous women in the history of the United States (Goldman); a suicidal German Jew never entirely on board with the whole Frankfurt thing (Benjamin); a 3 Warning!

French vandal without much of a father figure (Debord); even that exiled German philosopher mooching off his friend Friedrich’s British capital to create Capital (Marx). Clearly, the implications of the book extend well beyond the precise geopolitical confines and specific history of the nation-­state called Peru. Or, rather, the point is that the particularities of Peruvian reality provide us the chance to rethink more universal dilemmas. It was only toward the end that I realized I wasn’t producing something that could be called “Seven Essays,” since only the first five really correspond to that genre. Numbers 2 and 3 make direct allusion to those Mariátegui writings that represent the core of his creative reinterpretation of historical materialist thought. Number 4 has three prior lives, all of which I claim but only one of which appears here. Number 6 is a series of twenty-­four situations that reflect the most sensitive topic in the book. Half “posters” I designed and half “field notes” I took, there’s an entire multitude behind their construction. Together, they would be better appreciated if displayed on an appropriately sized wall. Number 7 started out as Number 1 and went through a mass metamorphosis. The result is a dialogue between two thinkers with much in common, upstairs and down, since both used the imaginative power of their intellectual superstructures to challenge the distinct fragility of their material bases. Even then, amid these seven distinct Interpretations, there were still other stories and less elaborated notes on Peru’s rock subterráneo (“underground rock”) movement of the 1980s and early 1990s. These fragments simply appear here and there to add countertextual testimony. Nonconformity with the singularly distant, arrogantly all-­knowing, and overly calculated voice of the scholar was as much the product of idiosyncrasy as it was intention. I am of course depedent on this very same institution—the professor’s paycheck and assorted privileges. But I often feel “far removed from the academic techniques of the university,” as Mariátegui (1971, xxxiv) once put it. Dissonance, some chaos, rough juxtapositions, a bit of repetition of the same chord, some melodramatic irruptions: Aren’t these things one might want in a book about punk rock? Inevitably, punk suffers plenty from its own internal contradictions. It has an authenticity complex. It has a highly contradictory politics of race, class, space, and gender even while pointing toward a horizon of anarchic all-­inclusiveness and primal aesthetic freedom: a living beyond the limits while still being forced to live within them. Punk also has its metadiscourse about dying and being reborn, an implicit theory of history and revolution as dialogic becoming rather than the rapture of 4 Warning!

rupture. But you’ll hopefully find only a mandated minimum of academic correctness and no fucking promises of truth or reconciliation. I did want to delocate punk and then relocate it somewhere else. I aimed to remove it from its overly familiar place in the history of Anglo popular music forms and the Euro-­American avant-­garde. I thought it was high time we get past other context-­specific dilemmas—a decaying New York, a nihilist London, a superficial LA—so often assumed to explain why punk held global resonance in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Underground rock, the phrase initially used to describe Lima’s punk-­inspired music and art scene, emerged in the 1980s just as Peru converted into a battlefield, a war of wills to state power and a bloody fight between Marxist militants (principally the Maoist-­inspired Shining Path, and to a lesser degree the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru, mrta) and a faux democratic apparatus quick to reveal its authoritarian dark side. The unique roles—sometimes militant, other times oppositional or even apathetic, often times ambiguous and anarchist—played by those in Lima’s underground music and art scene represent a largely invisible chapter in Peru’s war. I try to tell it here in these seven different ways to demonstrate a couple of basic points. First, punk’s political possibilities, like its creative drive to irrupt, are greater than many have thought. The emergence of an urban subculture in the context of revolutionary proposals and radical political instability make this clear. Second, Peru’s war is not nearly as two-­ dimensional as most postconflict narratives construct it—Marxist subversives versus the state and a civilian population “caught in between.” Factoring punk anarchists into the mix results in telling the war otherwise and incites the interpretative imagination with the possibility of a political praxis that defines the revolutionary differently—and history with it. “This is all that I feel honestly bound to tell the reader before he begins my book” (Mariátegui 1971, xxxiv). Yeah, that about covers it. Lima 2014 shane mariátegreene

5 Warning!

interpretation #1 of on the risks duction o r p k c o r d undergroun Where in the world does punk come from? Typical answers point to particular moments in US and British rock history: the proto period of sixties US garage rock followed by punk “proper” when the term became linked to New York’s midseventies underground club scene and was then exported to London where it exploded into public scandal thanks to the Sex Pistols’ infamous “filth and fury” (McNeil and McCain 2006; Savage 2002). More than a collection of musical sounds, punk is a conglomeration of bands and shows, fanzines and fliers, social relations and political statements held together loosely by desires to subvert mainstream cultural production with a gritty aesthetic and a do-­it-­yourself ethic. Like any form of resistance it is difficult both to sustain and to predict its future lives. Ultimately, this speaks less to the reports that “punk is dead” (so said Crass in 1978 shortly after its official birth in 1977) or rejoinders that “punk’s not dead” (so screamed The Exploited in 1980 two years after its death) than to a clarification. In significant part what punk means is relative to time and context. In this essay, I ask: What in the world is the importance of punk as it emerged in Lima, Peru in the 1980s? It is the radical difference in context that permits us to entertain other theoretical possibilities about punk’s place in the world. Let’s get this straight. I’m not talking about what punk is in essence. Rather, I have an interest in thinking about what punk intends to be, punk as a peculiar way of directing one’s attention. Similarly, the issue is less about defining who punks essentially are—and punks really do hate it when you tell them who they are. It’s really more about who I think punks aim to be, even if inevitably intentions never perfectly match outcomes. Dick Hebdige’s (1979) now classic semiotic analysis of punk as a subversive “style” appeared shortly after the UK punk explosion of the late seventies, influenced by the poststructuralist turn and cultural studies debates about youth subcultures as ritualized expressions of systemic discontent, constituting symbolic transgression but not a potential for “real” revolutionary change (Hall and Jefferson 2006; cf. Interpretation #2). Contemporary

perspectives suggest different readings of punk, from those fueled by gender critique and the transnational approach to the Americas to those searching for a theory of the global city (Nyong’o 2005, 2008; Muñoz 2013; Habell-­ Pallan 2004; LeBlanc 1999; Nikpour 2012; Nguyen, 2012; Brown 2011). Collectively, they theorize punk as constituted by more diverse voices and multiple global contexts than what the dominant “whitestraightboy punk” (Nikpour’s [2012] shorthand) narrative often suggests. What happens when we encounter punk in one of the rock universe’s global elsewheres? Certainly Lima is such a place despite a history of rock that stretches back to the sixties. The condition of geomusical marginality is one of which Peruvian punks are deeply aware; they rock out in a world region most often associated with Latin rhythms, Afro-­Peruvian beats, and Andean folklore. I deal then in rock from a peripheral vantage point but one that also reveals something crucial about punk’s global intentions. There is the curious case of Los Saicos, a midsixties garage rock band from Lima that only began making headlines in the 2000s for having anticipated punk’s primitive sound and boundary-­pushing lyrics. A band named Anarkia began playing punk cover songs in Lima clubs in the late seventies—singing the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and Dead Boys tunes in their “bad” English. Yet Peru’s punk-­inspired music did not come into its own until the mideighties, when it took on the much more particular identity of rock subterráneo (“underground rock”). In fact, it is in this translated idea of “underground rock” that we can identify something about the global importance of rock’s subterranean circuits and punk intentionality writ large—the things punk wants to do everywhere even when punks try, succeed, and fail to do them in very particular ways from within specific historical contexts.

On the Risk of Underproduction and Undercutting The act of naming Lima’s punk movement “underground rock” was largely the result of a 1984 flier announcing a show called “Rock Subterráneo Ataca Lima” (Underground Rock Attacks Lima) in which several foundational punk bands played: Leusemia, Narcosis, Guerrilla Urbana, and Autopsia (see figure 1.1). This movement from “underground,” an English term with connotations of subversive intent since at least the era of the Underground Railroad, to subterráneo, a Spanish term typically used literally rather than with the connotations of terms such as subversivo (“subversive”), 8 Interpretation #1

Figure 1.1 “Rock Subterráneo Ataca Lima” show flier, 1984. Courtesy of Leopoldo la Rosa.

is more than simply direct translation. Most notably, the term “subterráneo” gave rise to a very peculiar urban identity in eighties Lima known as the subte (“under”), a distinctly Peruvian way of talking about punk rockers. A subcultural moniker still used thirty years later, “subte” is rather unique compared to the more direct appropriations of the term “punk” as auto-­affirmation in most other global contexts. Fusing Fernando Ortiz (1995) with Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (2006), we might see this as an act of transubculturation—a gesture that transgresses global cultural boundaries (e.g., Spanish vs. Anglo, Latin vs. Euro-­American) while simultaneously subverting the hegemony of global cultural forms that circulate across borders in mainstream circuits (e.g., rock culture as mass commerce across geopolitical borders). This explains why I use this Lima phrase “rock subterráneo” as interchangeable with “punk rock.” The phrase presumes an exchange that takes place across and below the surface of the borders of language, nation, culture, and global commerce. The subte irrupts into the global dialogue about punk rock using a Peruvian voz (“voice”) that struggles to be heard since it is relegated to multiple margins: punk’s relative obscurity within popular culture generally, and rock subterráneo’s distinct invisibility within the global circuits of a rock culture completely dominated by Anglo expressions from the United States and England. Yet the subte’s voice demands to be heard, and in doing so it suggests something distinct about punk’s simultaneously universal intentions and contextual conditions. We might recall that punk is part of a longer genealogy of subversive aesthetics and critical political desires. In the wake of Dadaism and Situationism (G. Marcus 1989), or as the preferred soundtrack for today’s global direct-­ action movements (Graeber 2009), punk positions itself as critique of the mass culture generated by global capital. To capture at least a partial view of this quest to find and defend a rock underground, we can identify at least two basic intentions that result from punk’s fusion of material, political, and aesthetic strategies. I think of these as punk’s tendency to creatively underproduce while discursively undercutting public values. I offer these initial thoughts on punk intentions, inspired by the “under” in “underground” and the “subte” in “subterráneo,” as relative theoretical guidelines rather than absolute principles. The point is precisely not to suggest there is a means to measure punk’s underground status by a fixed material, stable aesthetic, or historically objective standard. Rather, the degree of how punk a particular aesthetic commodity, form of expression, or type of 10 Interpretation #1

action might be is subject to divergent interpretations at different moments. That relativity derives from the fact that the material dimensions and interpretative registers of aesthetic production exist across different contexts, forming multiple dialogues in which differently positioned voices offer alternative interpretations according to the moment. Following this more dialogical metaphor we might revisit Simon Frith’s history of rock-­n-­roll. If, as he suggests, punk asks of rock one critical question, “What is the risk of this music?” (1981, 84), I suggest the question was never as rhetorical, nor as limited to rock-­n-­roll, as he posed it. Instead, this reveals something about punk’s intentions in searching for an answer even as the conditions of risk necessarily change—both the riskiness that punk intends to represent to the world and the metarisk of no longer appearing very risky that punk frequently faces. One of punk’s core theoretical dilemmas then is deeply dialogical in nature: an ongoing conversation about how something that risks being “under” in one moment risks surfacing into the “over” in another or, for that matter, going back under in yet another. At one level, punk proposes a means of underproduction, a concerted attempt to intervene crudely but creatively into the problem of overproduction. I mean this in José Carlos Mariátegui’s “heroically creative” Marxist sense rather than any dogmatically technical one.1 Marx famously summarized capitalism as “a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite” (Marx 1977, 175). In essence, he means that the concentration of capital and the systemic barriers to making processes of production socially visible result in a fetishized view of productivity as a whole. They serve to suppress a more conscious realization, and more equitable organization, of the potential for human creativity that production entails. It is precisely this potential for creativity that is held captive in a system organized around a monopolization of the means of production. The entire system is ideologically governed by highly economistic logics that value “being productive” over “being creative” at virtually every level. When “successful” forms of creativity do emerge, they are quickly subsumed into the process of mass production; this assures the route toward homogenous commodification and that any material benefits accrue to the owners of private property that command “productive” labor. We might build further on this understanding of underproduction by calling attention to the specifically aesthetic connotations in the opposite terminology. Beyond the strict political-­economic frame, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, another familiar definition of “overproduce” is to “re­cord 11 Risks of Underground Rock Production

or produce (a song or film) in such an elaborate way that the spontaneity or artistry of the original material is lost.”2 We immediately think of excessive editing, too many technical interventions, or a surplus of special effects employed in the industrial spaces of cultural commodity production (studios, editing rooms, etc.). At one level, aesthetic overproduction is the perceived result of various kinds of technical mastery among aesthetic “experts” (producers, managers, editors, engineers, etc.). It is driven by the particular “class” of aesthetic professionals who claim the specialized skills—and control access to the material means—to intervene in aesthetic production in order to generate the standards by which artistic creativity, or simply mass aesthetic appeal, are judged and controlled by the various cultural industries. At stake in this is an underlying opposition between secondary (tertiary, etc.) elaborations of the creative act and the idea (or at least ideal) of creativity in more mundane, spontaneous, and cruder expressions.3 Amid industrial drives to professionalize art, standardize creativity, de‑ fine aesthetic appeal, and monopolize the channels through which cultural expression becomes massified and marketable, the grounds for creative resistance include punk’s reclaiming of creativity in more “primary” forms— meaning less materially alienated, more socially direct, and aesthetically scaled down. In a system where “production has the mastery over man” the everyday human creator is faced with this dilemma: the more one feels seduced by how cultural commodities are being creatively produced, amid tendencies to aesthetically overproduce and reinforce particular industrial standards of cultural consumption, the more alienated one feels from one’s own capacity to spontaneously engage in a creative process. The Situationists called this the problem of a society organized around commodities as spectacles, provoking reactions of consumptive awe rather than encouraging the impulse for active and spontaneous creative engagement. Punk intends to intervene in this arena of aesthetic overproduction by defetishizing the cultural industry norms and processes that surround creative production via whatever diy strategies are available to it: bands using cheap instruments, punks spreading subculture via fanzines, musicians distributing recordings through independent labels, or punks arranging shows through informal social networks. Punk operates on the premise that aesthetic professionalism and monopolization in the creative industries ultimately destroy, or at least inhibit, the creative acts of the “ordinary” creator. One of punk’s recurring worldly desires then is to envision one’s creative “limitations”— even the explicit limits of one’s material means to produce something—as 12 Interpretation #1

the very grounds on which to express one’s liberating creative potential. In sum: it is through the intent to celebrate aesthetic crudeness, and materially resist the cooptation of autonomous forms of creativity, that punk is a means of underproduction. If the punk means of underproduction are relative rather than absolute, surely the meanings of punk—its semiotic strategies and discursive intentions—are as well. The point is not to look for a special punk vocabulary, series of master symbols, secret list of bands, or definitive style as the way to theorize punk intentionality. I say this despite, or precisely to spite, that very real tendency within subcultures to reify authenticating discourses: the endless petty debates about real punks versus posers, true revolutionaries versus weekend rebels. Instead, I see punk as starting with a particular kind of discursive intention—this desire to use its means of underproduction to construct an irruptive voice that undercuts public discourse. Here, I would cite certain street definitions. For example, under the heading for the slang phrase “punk as fuck”—clearly one intended to connote a maximal degree of punkness— urbandictionary.com users rank these as the top two definitions: “not giving a fuck,” followed closely by “not giving a fuck if you are punk or not.”4 In other words, to be maximally punk one starts by disregarding the accepted definitions of others, including at the metapunkish level the very definitions of what punk is or can be. Punk’s primary discursive intention—what one means to say when one engages in a punk means of underproduction—is to disregard. To negate regard. To refuse to respect. To repudiate rather than hold in esteem. So punks start with acts of creative refusal and then try to figure things out from there. Rather than reaffirm this negation as punk’s oft-­noted nihilism, we might see it more precisely as a desire to disregard specifically what others consent to as hegemonically neutral public values. To reiterate, this necessarily includes what is publically assumed about what is or is not punk, since punks also, quite inevitably, construct their own internal normative publics (hence the recurring problem of purists and posers). Clearly, I am thinking of Michael Warner’s Bakhtinian-­inflected discussion of publics and counterpublics, emergent spaces of circulating discourse based on voluntary associations rather than the seemingly more fixed social categories of race, class, gender, and so on. Warner identifies the relation as being defined by constant tension rather than smooth conversation. “The discourse that constitutes it [i.e., a counterpublic] is not merely a different or alternative idiom, 13 Risks of Underground Rock Production

but one that in other [i.e., public] contexts would be regarded with hostility or a sense of indecorousness” (Warner 2002, 82). The irruptive quality of counterpublic discourse subjects those who wield it to perceptions that they are irrational actors at best, unwelcome misfits at worst. Yet counterpublics serve precisely to expose the normative assumptions that underpin accepted public discourse, veiled as they are in ideas of social neutrality, shared rationality, and discursive correctness. As Warner suggests, the outcomes depend largely on the “uptake,” on how a public discourse is effectively undercut within a given moment, in a given text, or within the frame of a specific performance. In so far as punks desire to provoke a public reaction (small or large) to their discursive disregard, a negative public uptake (e.g., the shock factor, ensuing social panic, legal consequences, etc.) is also what helps punk confirm its underground status. Punk’s potential to undercut public norms resides in the act of provocation that successfully enacts a profaned lack of respect for them. A theory of punk as the intent to appropriate a means of underproduction in order to undercut public discourse clearly finds more support from Benjamin (1968) than from Adorno and Horkheimer (1979). The latter viewed the cultural industry as all-­powerful, reinforcing bourgeois norms at best, facilitating fascist propaganda at worst. By contrast, the former pointed to the political possibilities in the proliferation of the means of mechanical reproduction amid an emerging mass culture. Part of broader modern trends to demystify the highly ritualized aspects of art and liberate it from localized senses of community, mechanization affords the “masses” a chance to appropriate the basic material means of aesthetic production and imagine a world otherwise. Benjamin’s proposal then is also thinkable in terms of punk’s drive toward aesthetic underproduction and public undercutting. Raising the question of political possibilities and imagining the world otherwise takes on unique dimensions because of the particular political context in which rock subterráneo first emerged in Lima. Contrast, for example, the 1984 show flier in figure 1.1 with the 1980s propaganda piece in figure 1.2. The latter image is a rendition of Abimael Guzmán, a.k.a. Presidente Gonzalo, the central ideologue of the Communist Party of Peru. More commonly known as the Shining Path, this Maoist-­inspired insurgency initiated armed struggle in Peru’s highland Ayacucho Province in 1980, expanded over the ensuing decade and a half, and nearly seized power amid the most devastating political violence that Peru has faced since independence from Spain. The Shining Path finally unraveled when Guzmán was captured in 1992 and 14 Interpretation #1

Figure 1.2 Abimael Guzmán, 1980s Shining Path propaganda.

President Alberto Fujimori erected an authoritarian regime with ruthless antiterrorist tactics and human rights abuses. In figure 1.1 the angry figure of the subte, guitar and mic positioned as weapons rather than musical accouterments, threatens Lima’s miniaturized skyline. In figure 1.2 another towering figure emerges, with sacred revolutionary text in hand. He watches from a transcendent point on high while tiny little militants—or subversivos, as they were often called in the context of the conflict—wage a “popular war” guided by President Gonzalo’s plan for a future communist utopia. There are certain resonances between the two images, the aesthetic of aggression being the most obvious. The subte wants to destroy the capital city. The subversives want to destroy Peru’s system of social inequality, famously by taking their Maoist struggle from the Andean countryside to the coastal city (del campo a la ciudad). But the differences are far more pronounced. 15 Risks of Underground Rock Production

While Guzmán is immediately recognizable as the great leader, the subte figure is utterly anonymous. While Guzmán’s godliness is overt, the subte is really more of a ghostly character. While the Shining Path flier connotes socialist realism, the portrayal of the subte results in more of a playful caricature (I can’t help but think Scooby Doo ghouls every time I see it). While Guzmán possesses clear military command over subordinate minions, the subte basically just wants the city to listen to him scream. My point is this. Opening up Benjamin’s box of political possibilities in mechanically reproduced art—in this circumstance via a punk scene that emerged during revolutionary proposals and a war for Peru’s political future—proved risky in very distinct ways. The question of punk posing risks went well beyond the problem of asking what else is left to risk within rock-­ n-­roll. A subte living in Lima in the 1980s—with guitar and mic ambiguously representing the alternatives of holding gun and knife or hammer and sickle—had considerably more at stake. One form of underground action was in danger of being perceived as another. In short, the particular political dialogue into which Peruvian punks inserted their subterranean message was one not merely about mass culture and its discontents. It was about life and death, struggles for social liberation and the realities of political imprisonment, a country’s repressive past and its uncertain future. I turn to some examples to illustrate.

Example One: The “First Dose” of Peru’s Rock Underground Punk seeks to realize its intentions to creatively underproduce and discursively undercut in various contextual ways and historical means. In terms of musical production, one might immediately think of the role that punk’s diy ethos played in establishing independent record labels and alternative means of distribution via fanzines and punk networking in the 1980s. In terms of punk’s desire to provoke by expressing total disregard for public values, one might be inclined to cite the famous incident between the Sex Pistols and Bill Grundy on British television in 1976 or the more recent media saga with Russia’s Pussy Riot.5 The point worth considering further is how the particular means and effects vary according to differing contexts even while these central punk intentions remain remarkably similar across them. Some of the particularities of punk’s musical underproduction in Lima 16 Interpretation #1

may be generalizable to large portions of the so-­called Global South. These particularities certainly stand in contrast to the North, where the rock music industry is heavily concentrated and where the Anglo hegemony of rock as a genre is propagated. Punk arrived in Peru in the late seventies, less the result of record imports (which were quite limited) than of those Peruvians with access to foreign markets via trips abroad or foreign friends living in Lima and studying at elite schools. As a consequence, punk records first circulated among Lima’s educated upper-­middle and upper class, because these listeners also constituted the few in Peruvian society with access to a turntable and the financial means to acquire vinyl originating abroad. However, punk’s diffusion in Peru, along with the possibility of local production, was soon influenced by the broader global trend of “cassette cultures” that Peter Manuel (1993) describes. The early eighties was precisely the historical period defined by the spread of inexpensive audiocassette technology across the world. Widespread circulation of cassettes became an essential means for a demonopolization of the music industry, since the format was imminently more affordable than the vinyl standard of the time. This proved crucial for poorer countries, where vinyl was difficult to access even for many in the middle class (in contrast to its prevalence in the North) and where domestic vinyl production was exceedingly limited and typically only engaged in by a small elite minority. In fact, it was precisely the audiocassette that set the historical precedent for the global musical “piracy” debates that now of course revolve around dominant digital formats such as the mp3 (Sterne 2012). By virtue of its two-­way nature (good for recording and copying, consumption and production), audiocassette technology did more than facilitate greater global circulation of different music. It also created the material conditions necessary for producing local music in globally impoverished countries where the barriers to vinyl production were high, higher even than the barriers to consuming it. Cassette culture was also significant in the North, of course, as the multitude of unknown, amateur garage bands and underground cassette distribution networks suggests. Yet it is also true that North-­based punk often celebrates its diy successes at challenging “the music industry” in terms of founding independent vinyl labels and establishing alternative means of distribution via mail order (Azerrad 2003). As a result, in the North, punks think immediately of labels such as Dischord, sst, and Alternative Tentacles and of records by the pioneering punk bands associated with them (Minor Threat, Fugazi, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, etc.). 17 Risks of Underground Rock Production

By contrast, there is no question that the primary means of underground rock production and circulation in Lima was the demo cassette. With rare exceptions, Peruvian punks had no expectations and minimal possibilities of “making it” to vinyl, a format heavily associated with foreign rock markets in the United States and Europe. The poor-­quality demo cassette, or maqueta as subtes typically refer to it, was the local standard. The Spanish word, also meaning “model” or “mock-­up,” says it all. A maqueta is not the “real” thing but a rough substitution for it, as good as one can do under explicitly amateurish circumstances. As Peruvian punk’s foremost icon of underground production, the maqueta has two other important implications. First, it is easily and immediately piratable in exactly the same format. No need for format conversion also means the “original” is, in effect, already a copy both real and potential. Second, while vinyl was a much more decisive symbol of significant disposable income and elite status, cassettes more easily transgressed class boundaries. Their relative economic accessibility represented a point of potential cross-­ class connection. In fact, some of the wealthier Lima punks possessed large vinyl collections and sold duplicated cassettes out of their houses via word of mouth or advertising in Lima fanzines; many people mention Martín Bernizon of the late-­seventies cover band Anarkia as a key “distributor” in this respect. Copies of rock cassettes, punk included, also circulated much like other forms of pirated, recycled, and black market goods in Lima’s expansive informal street markets in the 1980s. One of the most oft-­cited places to acquire punk, both foreign and domestic, was La Nave de los Prófugos (The Ship of Fugitives), a street stand specializing in pirated rock on La Colmena, a major thoroughfare in downtown Lima once known for ambulatory sellers and informal commerce. It was historic as a primary location for buying all things punk culture. It also held special significance as a central meeting point for Lima subtes hailing from different sectors of Lima’s complex class, racial, and geopolitical continuum. Subtes came to buy cassettes and pick up fanzines but also to gather, share ideas, and even form bands. There is an equally important story to be told about the role of print in this story of global piracy, informal street markets, and the demonopolization of cultural industries from the South. The spread of photocopying technology during the same period—the precedent to a now familiar debate about the role of the Internet in global information flows—served a similar function as the cassette. Providing an affordable, pirate-­friendly alternative 18 Interpretation #1

to offset printing (associated with mainstream publications and corporate advertising), the photocopy was to text and visual art what the cassette was to musical expression. The photocopier became another vital tool of underproduction because it represented the condition of possibility for establishing an underground circuit of show fliers, cassette cover art, and fanzines—all central elements in the diffusion of punk ideas, sounds, and visual aesthetics. To better illustrate all this in the Peruvian context, there is no better example than that of Narcosis, one of a handful of early Lima punk bands that emerged in the initial underground rock scene in the mideighties (alongside Leusemia, Autopsia, Zcuela Crrada, and Guerrilla Urbana). Formed in 1984 by Fernando “Puppy” Vial (guitarist), Jorge “Spiky Hair” Madueño (drummer), and Luis “Wicho” García (vocalist), Narcosis lasted less than a year, creating a legend that is concentrated in Peru but also extends beyond it. Their early 1985 release, titled Primera Dosis (First Dose), marked the first of many subsequent efforts to re­cord and distribute demo cassettes of Lima’s underground rock music (see figure 1.3).6 It was a crude combination of superfuzzed guitar riffs, punchy one-­liner lyrics, and tin-­can sounding drum beats. Narcosis’ First Dose revealed Peruvian punk’s cleverest strategies of underproduction. To re­cord the album, Wicho went in search of a used shoebox-­ style Sony cassette recorder with microphone inputs. In early 1985, while practicing in Spiky Hair Madueño’s garage, the group laid down an initial track of thirteen songs—guitar, drums, and vocals recorded in one go with two microphones. The shoebox recorder’s line input inspired Wicho to make something more out of this initial recording of a live practice session. He devised a method to connect the shoebox recorder to a Sony Walkman, one that also had lines in and out. The diy result was a primitive multitrack recorder made from used electronics. This allowed Wicho to dub extra tracks on top of the original recording—additional guitar parts, some backup vocals, and a handful of samples taken from other recordings. In practice, this meant recording each new track onto a blank cassette, playing it on the Walkman, and looping it into the shoebox recorder with the original recording. Engaged in a simplified process of overdubbing with different cassettes, Wicho was forced to create successive master tapes rather than using a single master. As Wicho noted in an interview, this method resulted in “losing generations of fidelity” and produced a recording that was essentially “a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy” (L. García, 2011). Here lies one of the more compelling dimensions of Peruvian punk’s particular means of underproduction and helps explain why this once simple garage recording has since become 19 Risks of Underground Rock Production

Figure 1.3 Narcosis, Primera Dosis cassette cover. Design by Jaime Higa. Courtesy of Luis García.

so iconic of Lima’s rock underground writ large. Neither the musical format nor the method of recording suggests the “firstness” (i.e., the authenticating format) of a vinyl record, complete with copyright, control over duplication, and vested economic interests to be protected. Instead, and ironically, given the title of the cassette, the format and method pointed indexically toward the recording’s immediate insertion into a musical economy that was defined by piracy, where cheap cassettes constituted both cultural norm and economic necessity. The creation of First Dose therefore was not merely a “poor”-­sounding copy. It gestures directly toward its future lives as an even “worse”-­sounding copy, art destined to be mechanically reproduced ad infinitum. The cassette contains twelve Narcosis songs and a cover of a cover that tells us much about the subterranean circuits—and global circuitousness—of 20 Interpretation #1

Peru’s underground rock influences. Track six (“Quiero Ser tu Perro”) is Narcosis’ version of Parálisis Permanente’s version of The Stooges’ 1969 proto-­ punk classic “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” The Narcosis version—the one that younger punk bands in Lima still play—was based on a version recorded by the Spanish postpunk group Parálisis Permanente from their 1982 lp El Acto. All of the members of Narcosis were obviously familiar with The Stooges’ version. But it was Parálisis Permanente’s already translated, slowed-­down, proto-­Goth adaptation that fascinated them. As Wicho insists, the intention was to “narcosify” the song, taking it from this Spanish postpunk context and repunking it with Narcosis’ faster, fuzzier, more primal sound. The catchy three-­note guitar riff that drives the song is consistent across all three versions. Yet Narcosis removed the telltale postpunk keyboards and sped the song back up to remove Parálisis Permanente’s gothic gloom. They also hyperfuzzed it with Puppy Vial’s signature guitar sound well beyond The Stooges’ 1960s treble-­sounding imagination. Puppy famously played only the bottom two strings tuned to a D chord, with the Arion fuzz pedal set to “maximum.” This tune alone requires we take note of the complex nature of punk’s global pathways. Rather than representing a straightforward United States-­ United Kingdom-­Peru circuit—an assumed North-­South trajectory or Anglo-­Latin dialogue—punk’s global itineraries are evidently more diffuse. By the early eighties, when Lima’s underground rock bands began to form, Peruvian punks were listening to as much Spanish, Brazilian, and Argentine punk as anything coming from the United States or the United Kingdom. Major points of reference went well beyond the Ramones and Sex Pistols to include Siniestro Total, Olho Seco, and Los Violadores. Thanks to many cultural and linguistic affinities, as well as long-­standing Iberian influences, Lima’s subtes were close followers of multiple musical trends beyond the Anglo rock world, sounds also made possible via transnational networks of cassette circulation. Another Narcosis gem—the one that best reveals the particularities of the subte’s intent to express discursive disregard of the Peruvian public—is the opening track titled “Intro/La Peste” (Intro/Pestilence). The cassette opens with a forty-­seven-­second sample taken from an old 45 record Wicho found lying around the house. It was a spoken-­word promotional recording titled “The Voice of Luis Banchero Rossi” released, curiously enough, by the National Society of Fisheries (Sociedad Nacional de Pesquería). Banchero Rossi, a second-­generation son of an Italian immigrant family, is well known for several things in Peru: emerging within the coastal fishing industry as one of 21 Risks of Underground Rock Production

the wealthiest entrepreneurs of the 1960s, and becoming a national spokesperson of all things business and banking, modern progress, and national patriotism. In addition to serving as president of the National Society of Fisheries, he also served as director of one of Peru’s principal national banks (Banco de Crédito). Banchero Rossi occupied the public spotlight in January of 1972 after he was found murdered, presumably by a barely postadolescent man with a stature of less than five feet named Juan Vilca Carranza (the son of Rossi’s gardener). Rossi’s murder, to which Vilca Carranza eventually confessed, citing motives of theft, provoked a national mystery that relied fundamentally on a racialized reading of the two men’s bodies. The press, and most Peruvians, refused to believe that a tall, imposing man of Italian descent (“white” by local standards) could be physically overtaken by a “petite” man of Andean origin with merely blows and a knife. Conspiracy theories abounded. Maybe the responsible party was the leftist-­nationalist military government of General Juan Velasco that took power in 1968, since Velasco nationalized Rossi’s private fishing companies shortly after his death (along with many other sectors of the Peruvian economy). Rossi’s secretary and former lover was also accused of being in cahoots with Vilca Carranza (and spent five years in prison as a result). Others speculated that even the Nazis might be involved, because shortly before the murder Banchero Rossi had publically identified a Nazi war criminal named Klaus Barbie who was passing through Lima on his way to Bolivia. No longer testament to patriotic progress, Narcosis’ sampling of Banchero Rossi redeployed him as the dark symbol of Peru’s disturbing underside. He became all of the structural problems left perennially unresolved: the racialized forms of class conflict that structure social relations; the authoritarian forms of statecraft, religious conservatism, and politically motivated violence that make up daily life; the patriarchal mission that motivates mistreated mistresses to seek revenge. Working with his garage multitrack, Wicho sampled the recording of a Banchero Rossi speech about the natural linkages between patriotism, capitalism, and Peruvian modernity in order to completely subvert it. Engaged in a bit of strategic substitution, he inserts the “Voice of Narcosis” into the “Introduction” to the recording that was intended to laud the efforts of Bancheri Rossi, delivered in the pathetically sycophantic tone of the institutional underling familiar to anyone who has witnessed formalized presentations in Peru. Below is the Narcosis “Intro” in full, with Wicho’s voice-­overs in brackets: 22 Interpretation #1

Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome [the group Narcosis], whose unique merits are plain to see in their magnificent works, which constitute the best example of what love of country, the entrepreneurial spirit, and faith in our own destiny are capable of producing. Thus, it is for me a distinct honor that [this group] has asked me to introduce this recording that compiles [a few tunes] that allow us to appreciate the exceptional personality of [a trio], which in its own right stands as the maximum expression of a Peruvian [group], projecting an image that provides a model for present and future generations. With that, let’s listen to our dear friend forever, [Narcosis].

The “Intro” barely concludes and Puppy’s simple, three-­note, fuzzed-­up guitar riff intrudes. Seconds later, Spiky Hair Madueño enters with a series of more-­or-­less timed symbol crashes, and Wicho starts to shout the repetitive, one-­liner lyrics of “La Peste” in this one-­minute-­and-­eleven-­second underground rock masterpiece: The pestilence surrounds your head and won’t leave you be. Sex. Religion. Too much repression. The pestilence surrounds your head and won’t leave you be. Panic. Terror. Destructive terrorism. The pestilence surrounds your head and won’t leave you be.

By stealing the voice of Banchero Rossi’s ingratiating introducer, Wicho refocuses our attention on the larger questions that Narcosis’ punkishness was posing. Following the demise of Banchero Rossi and his magnificent proposals of a Peruvian modernity, what has become of Peruvian reality really? The answer was not metaphorical. Peru is full of terror, destruction, and repression. Peru is a place of pestilence. Peru’s sickness surrounds you. It won’t leave you be.

Example Two: A Tale of Two Risky Show Fliers For a fuller picture, one needs to appreciate more the risk that subtes represented to the Peruvian public and to also examine the risks they faced within the political juncture of Peru’s war. Doing so entails taking account of how the broader context of political violence—the expansion of the Shining Path’s Andean Maoism to urban Lima and the terror tactics of the state’s response to militancy—shaped underground rock’s development. After all, rock subterráneo gave rise to this distinctive subcultural subject 23 Risks of Underground Rock Production

known as the subte, a figure below the urban surface and with a necessarily ambiguous status in relation to the political clandestineness of the subversivo, the Marxist militant. That ambiguity revolves around the fact that the subte’s own questioning tendencies were easy to read as questionable intentions, cultural subversiveness interpretable as suspicious political activity. Yet how exactly the subte’s aesthetics were construed depended entirely on the political position from which they were being read. The subte became a suspicious agent to both Shining Path militants and the state, albeit on different grounds. Standing apart from both of the main political actors and ideologies that otherwise defined the war, the subte conformed to neither position. This ultimately resulted in antagonistic political reactions from both, reaffirming the subte’s punkness, this provocative praxis of underproductive undercutting. We can account for this atmosphere of ambiguity surrounding the subte by telling the tale of two underground concerts via the show fliers meant to promote them. The first was an outdoor concert scheduled for September 21, 1985, on the campus of the National University of San Marcos. This show was scheduled to occur nearly a year after the initial announcement of an “underground rock” phenomenon, meaning the show in late 1984 that grouped the early Lima punk bands (Autopsia, Leusemia, Narcosis, Guerrilla Urbana, and Zcuela Crrada) under a phrase that defined the movement. In fact, 1985 was a banner year for underground rock production. The Narcosis demo First Dose began circulating in February. Other foundational recordings followed, most notably a compilation cassette known as Volume I (with songs from Leusemia, Autopsia, Zcuela Crrada, and Guerrilla Urbana) and Autopsia’s demo System and Power. Rounding out the year, Leusemia became one of the only vinyl exceptions by releasing an lp on Peru’s Virrey label, though label executives regretted the decision to sign a bunch of snotty subtes and ultimately refused to promote the album.7 By the time organizers began planning the September 1985 San Marcos concert, the subtes constituted a scene that was no longer simply consuming foreign punk or reproducing it in a Lima version (as the late 1970s cover band Anarkia had done). They were fully engaged in producing, distributing, and consuming domestic recordings, fanzines, show fliers, and other forms of visual art. With the exception of Narcosis (defunct by mid-­1985), the other formative underground bands were scheduled to play at the San Marcos concert alongside several newer ones (Excomulgados, Sociedad de Mierda, and 24 Interpretation #1

Pánico) and a rock-­folk fusion outfit (Seres Van) that was active in the scene despite the predominantly punk aesthetic. The primary organizers of the San Marcos concert were Iván “Zurriburri” (Worthless) Santos, the guitarist of a band called Flema (Phlegm) and a geology major at San Marcos, and the “two Alfredos” (surnames Távara and Márquez), who were also participants in a part-­punk, half-­hippie art collective known as Las Bestias (The Beasts). The Beasts were a group of restless visual artists. Most of them were enrolled in Lima’s architecture program at Ricardo Palma University, and several routinely lent their artistic talents to the subte scene. The show organizers met in the house of Alfredo Távara, a sociology student at San Marcos and the flute player in Seres Van. They decided on a concert slogan—“Denuncia X la Vida” (Denounce for Life)— that made direct allusion to the dramatic increase in political violence that occurred between 1984 and 1985, most of it still occurring primarily in Ayacucho Province. Alfredo Márquez, who was heavily involved with the Beasts, designed the main show flier (see figures 1.4 and 1.5). On the back of the flier a block of typed text containing a list of the band names is the only indicator that live music was even involved. Above the band names is a thick, hand-­drawn border with two dichotomous columns of handwritten words; it gives the impression that one is reading from a scroll, albeit one of the subterranean, photocopied-­on-­the-­street sort. The idea for the word list, a bit of free form dialectical poetry, came from Alfredo Távara. The list of terms includes everything from “destruction,” “disappeared,” and “repression” to “hope,” “strength,” and “truth.” It ends with “life,” separated from the rest by ellipses. Perhaps the point is that life entails, therefore encapsulates, all of these contradictions even while, noticeably, the word “death” never appears. The front of the flier is striking in what it simultaneously reveals and conceals. It shows an elderly woman, easily identifiable as native Andean by her dress and the textile draped over her shoulder, covering her nose and mouth. Something stinks. The physical measurements that surround the figure—in one sense interpretable as an architectural statement about the spatial calculations required in graphic design—reveal something else. She is being measured because she has entered someone’s sights. Márquez asks that the viewer read those lines of measurement as an act of political framing, or, more to the point, as the state’s explicit intent to make the Andean woman’s body (the “source” of Andean life) into a political target. 25 Risks of Underground Rock Production

Figure 1.4 San Marcos show flier ( front), 1985. Courtesy of Alfredo Márquez. Figure 1.5 San Marcos show flier (back), 1985. Courtesy of Alfredo Márquez.

The original source of the image is not at all obvious at first glance, although there is a reasonable chance that readers of Peru’s major newspapers might have found it familiar. Márquez extracted it as a photocopy of a cover story from one of Peru’s major papers, La República, on August 26, 1984. The image first appeared as part of a breaking news story that recounted the discovery of mass graves in Pucayacu, a rural community in Ayacucho Province (see figure 1.6). Márquez leaves hidden the dozens of cadavers of Andean villagers—blackened, rotting, and disfigured—that are grotesquely present in the original photograph. Accusing the villagers of collusion with Shining Path subversives, a navy patrol performed a series of extrajudicial executions and deposited the bodies in mass graves. Amid the dramatic intensification of political violence in 1984, the Pucayacu massacre stood out as the clearest evidence of massive human rights violations committed by state forces in response to expanding Shining Path actions across the southern highlands. The Peruvian news broadcaster of 1984 had already born dramatic witness to what Márquez subtly invited the underground showgoer to imaginatively recall. Much like in the word 26 Interpretation #1

Figure 1.6 Andean woman, Pucayacu mass graves, August 26, 1984. Photo courtesy of La República.

list, death is only indirectly present. It looms large in the background but is not placed in the foreground. At this point midway through the decade, amid the exposure of state terrorism in the Andes, the subte’s critique was still being offered in a language that was essentially life-­affirming: the concert was a denunciation of the violence and rooted in a political stance “for life” as the name of the concert makes clear. Instead of being well received at San Marcos University, the subte’s message was essentially rejected by a student population engaged in overt political radicalization. The most noticeable sign of this was a confrontation with a group of students who forced a cancellation of the concert just before it was about to start. We should recall that by the mid-­1980s many university students—in particular public university students such as those at San Marcos—openly sympathized with the Shining Path’s revolutionary message, some organizing in accordance with their communist aims. Pro–­ Shining Path graffiti, campus marches, political meetings, Marxist reading groups, taking over class sessions—these were regular occurrences on many a public university campus in Lima and in provincial cities. Iván Santos’s student status at San Marcos meant he was in charge of seeking permission to hold the concert in one of the main quads. Initially, he en27 Risks of Underground Rock Production

countered no explicit resistance from student organizations, but he also says that he did not find much support. The day of the concert revealed a remarkable difference in youth opinion about what constituted an authentic political protest in a country like Peru at this particular historical juncture. Members of The Beasts built a makeshift stage, borrowing random boards and bricks found on campus. They began to punk it up, painting banners with crossed-­out swastikas and words like $IDA (the Spanish word for “aids” with a US dollar sign). The musicians began to set up the instruments and amplifiers that the organizers had rented; it was still uncommon for any of the band members to own their own instruments. Before the underground show began—in reality before the stage was even finished—the subtes began to hear the sound of chants directed at them coming from across the quad. Leaders of two student groups, San Marcos’ Revolutionary Student Front and student members of Patria Roja (a communist party that claims origins dating back to the era of Mariátegui), had organized a spontaneous rally against the punk rock presence on campus. “North American imperialism has interrupted the sacrosanct space of San Marcos University in a rocker’s costume!” This was one of the protest shouts that Alfredo Márquez (2009) remembered hearing when I asked him about the San Marcos conflict in an interview. Dozens of Maoist student revolutionaries filed across the quad and surrounded the subtes. They even marched with a group of sicaris, Andean flute players, to signal a form of musical expression deemed politically acceptable in Peru’s context. No physical aggression resulted, but tempers definitely flared. The student protestors stated their mission to prohibit the concert entirely, and several of the more agitated bunch started kicking apart the precarious diy stage, reducing it to a pile of rubble. Recognizing that they were outnumbered, and trying to keep musical equipment from getting trashed, most of the subtes retreated to the house of Daniel F., the vocalist/guitarist of Leusemia, who lived in an adjacent neighborhood. Many subte recollections emphasize that instead of accepting defeat they went to F’s house and went on with the show, ending the night with inebriation, loud music, and the arrival of the police thanks to angry neighbors. Yet the more telling detail is that a small contingent stayed behind to accept the challenge of a debate and to defend underground rock from the revolutionary student attacks. The primary concert organizers, Iván Santos and the two Alfredos, felt compelled to participate. Fragments from the debate remain via a brief article published a week later in Chasqui, a student newspaper. 28 Interpretation #1

Julio Carmona, a San Marcos student and political organizer, spoke on behalf of the students defending a “revolutionary and Andean” standpoint and reportedly argued as follows: While our country bleeds, while our people in Ayacucho are being massacred by reactionary henchmen who are also the servants of imperialism, four long-­ haired guys are going to come make us believe we live in paradise? At the current moment, and at any moment, we have to reject with our most profound sentiment, that is to say the sentiment of our people, something that stems from imperialism. And it’s not just that it [i.e., rock] comes from the North American people; it comes from that pernicious monstrosity that is global capitalism. We are not going to think it is a distinct kind of music, and that the lyrics are revolutionary, just because they [i.e., subtes] come claiming they are putting different lyrics to it . . . (Anonymous 1985a, 8)

Alfredo Márquez responded on behalf of the subtes that stayed for the debate and was reported to argue the following: Of those that came, nobody was going to sing in English or engage in snobbery. . . . The people that came [for the concert] brought a proposal to break with imperialism, but you all [the counterprotestors] let yourself get carried away with the form and not the content. . . . We came with a proposal that was “Denounce for Life!” It’s a novelty to no one in Lima that people are being killed by applying neo-­Nazi criteria and to promote leftism. Death to rock! But long live the oppositional spirit of rock! (Anonymous 1985a, 9)

The exchange signaled a total standoff—a debate but no real dialogue—­ between the subte and the subversivo. The subtes defended rock’s rebellious potential even while forced to recognize its Anglo US roots. San Marcos’ radicalized students sympathetic with the subversivo’s cause identified with the political circumstance of provincial Andeans and revealed the cultural assumptions that undergirded their communist hopes. Hence, Carmona asked a pointed rhetorical question—“Why do you use that music?”—clearly implying that folkloric flutes, or maybe a highland huayno (a traditional Andean genre), would make for more appropriate revolutionary music in a country with a large exploited Indian population being indiscriminately massacred by state forces. An obvious contradiction is that the subversivos assumed that Marxism was a naturally occurring Andean phenomenon while punk rock somehow was not. After all, it was Mariátegui (founder of Peru’s first Communist Party and 29 Risks of Underground Rock Production

author of the very term “Shining Path”) who recognized Marxism as a presumptively “universal” theory, born in practice out of the specific industrializing context of nineteenth-­century Europe. Mariátegui proposed that Marx’s thought was in need of “heroically creative” adaptation if it was to have any autochthonous meaning in the Americas. No doubt the very fact that Mariátegui had already redefined the Indian as a world revolutionary subject in the 1920s, even rethinking the Incas as some sort of advanced Andean communists, explains why a revolutionary student of the 1980s such as Carmona understood Marxism to be organic to the Andes. Wasn’t the subte pointing precisely to the possibility that punk be something similarly creative within and equally adaptable to Peruvian reality via its expression as rock subterráneo? Although it shares a greater affiliation with anarchist influences—and therefore places more emphasis on killing idols than heralding heroes—Lima’s underground rock was a different version of Mariátegui’s creative thinking about Peruvian reality. Subverting Mariátegui and paraphrasing him at the same time, the subtes sought to make of Peruvian punk an unheroic creation. Within this debate, the subte took a strong stance against the subversives’ reductive understanding of revolutionary practice and narrow definition of Peru. At one point, Márquez argues, “Many of you [student radicals] demonstrate your own alienation when you believe that the only solution to a pluricultural country is an Andean one” (Anonymous 1985a, 9). In short, amid this first real encounter, this direct and charged political exchange between subte and subversive, “the two sides” argued their points and then went their separate ways. As the war expanded and the decade advanced, Peru’s political violence also began to engulf the capital city in ways that it had not yet done during the failed concert and debate at San Marcos. By the end of the decade, car bombs, blackouts, assassinations, curfews, and “armed strikes” that turned streets into open battles were such a part of daily urban life that Limeños could no longer rely on the initial illusion that the conflict was a provincial rebellion affecting only Andeans. It was a full-­fledged war for Peru’s future or, in view of the Shining Path’s socialist ambitions, the entire world. The expansion of the war in Lima also meant that the dynamics between subte and subversive began to change. The original standoff evolved into a more complicated dialogic exchange with a central ambiguity. The subte and the subversive operated with a seemingly unbridgeable aesthetic gap (distorted guitars vs. Andean flutes; punk collages vs. realist revolutionary propaganda) as well as different political inclinations (diy anarchism vs. militant 30 Interpretation #1

Figure 1.7 nn/kaos show flier, 1989. Courtesy of Alfredo Márquez.

Marxism). Yet the subte and the subversive also shared one clearly identifiable enemy, the Peruvian state, and both had a similar disgust for the grotesque hierarchies, structural violence, and material inequalities the state did little to hide and a lot to reinforce. What did this mean about developing common, or even parallel, actions to express that shared discontent? What consequences would follow if the state began to view the subte as another political threat not unlike the threat represented by the subversive? The best evidence that these ambiguous dialogical encounters between the subte and the subversive increased as the decade came to an end is the story of a flier for an underground show held on January 20, 1989 (see figure 1.7). With appearances by the bands G3 and Sepulcro, the show was organized primarily as a final performance of a hard-­core band called kaos (Chaos). Well known for its brutally straightforward political lyrics, kaos is exemplified in its most remembered song, “Ayacucho: Center of Oppression.” Visual artists in a collective known as Taller nn (Workshop of the Unidentified) were centrally involved in the show’s promotion. Following the dissolution of The Beasts in 1986, core members of that art collective went on to form 31 Risks of Underground Rock Production

nn. Álex Ángeles, Enrique Wong, José Luis García, and Alfredo Márquez were among the most active of these. Close friends with the members of kaos, nn offered to hold the show at their studio in Lima’s Barranco District. nn’s flier for the show is provocative for multiple reasons. This flier appropriated an image from the very same news article that broke the story of military massacres and mass graves in Pucayacu three and a half years earlier, in 1984. Yet, unlike in the flier used for the contested San Marcos concert, here there was no symbolic concealment of death in order to politically foreground life. Instead, nn artists highlight the sheer grotesqueness, the visceral reality, the almost absolute certainty of political death in “peru.” The name of the country calls out to the viewer as counterpublic satire because it is presented in the same bold block font used by Peru’s state-­sponsored tourism agency at the time. Here, there is no denunciation for anything. Instead, this is an urgent denunciation against everything that “peru” had come to represent by the late 1980s. If we return to the original image that accompanied the news article, we see a central male figure standing amid dozens of rotting cadavers that have been exhumed from one of Pucayacu’s mass graves and lined up on the streets of the small town of Huanta, where the local morgue was woefully unequipped to deal with so much death at once (see figure 1.8). Stoically blank-­ faced or emotionally hardened—perhaps both—he stares at the camera and gestures to a corpse he can identify. nn made two precise interventions that completely recode the meaning of the man’s original actions. First and most obvious is the appropriation of his indexical gesture. Not hiding the mass death that is so clearly visible in the background, the gesture redirects our attention to the event of an underground show. The flier acts as antiadvertisement, a suggestion that a viewer comes to “peru” only to witness the “Chaos” of death in a political space of nameless corpses. Second, the use of neon colors—silk-­screened onto a photocopy of the image using Warhol-­inspired techniques—creates the necessary disjuncture and discursive negation that punk’s undercutting aesthetics thrive on. The pop culture fantasies, implied in the brilliance of the fuchsia and yellow highlights in the human figure and the show banner, have no real place in this otherwise transparent display of newspaper realism about how grotesque Peruvian reality has become. But that’s precisely the point. In placing pop fantasy and newspaper realism together, subtes undercut the press’s public 32 Interpretation #1

Figure 1.8 Man and cadavers at Pucayacu mass graves, August 26, 1984. Photo courtesy of La República.

statements, and the “just the facts” logic of black and white, by employing neon silk-­screening techniques of aesthetic underproduction. The way the flier was printed and distributed confirms just how risky such an image had become by the late 1980s. Speaking informally of the event twenty-­some years later, ex-­n n members Alfredo Márquez and Álex Ángeles told me there were only a few dozen copies of the flier. They circulated it hand to hand, mostly among friends of the bands, and it resulted in a show with maybe eighty people present. Alfredo remembers the flier representing two important milestones. It was the first of several nn experiments using the silk-­screened photocopy technique. More telling of the political moment, though, he said that was also the last time it was possible to organize “a concert like that” in Lima. Álex nodded in agreement, so I asked for clarification. “Like what?” I inquired. This was hardly the last underground punk show in Lima. But I had a sense of where their thoughts were going. Their point was that to do anything the state perceived as an “underground” activity, including artistic and musical expression perceivable as having overtly antistate political messages, was to run the risk of being labeled an “apologist of terrorism” and conflated with Shining Path militancy. In retrospect, this proves rather ironic given how different the aesthetics of Shining Path political art 33 Risks of Underground Rock Production

(more realist; more use of red to connote communism; more pastoral yellow and brown to highlight a rural Andean landscape) was from subte expressions (more urban graffiti; more nihilistically punk; more pop colors). The election of Alberto Fujimori in 1990, and with it the radical expansion of the state’s hardhanded antiterrorist tactics, bore this out in ways that had direct consequences on those behind the flier’s production and the show. Enrique Wong of nn was detained in 1991 and then fled to Brazil (where he later died in an accident). A member of kaos took refuge in another country to avoid political persecution. Alfredo Márquez was arrested in 1994 on charges of terrorist sympathies and spent the next four years incarcerated. Álex Ángeles, afraid of being arrested, spent much of the 1990s in impoverished obscurity waiting for things to settle (cf. Interpretation #5). While this all speaks to the intense witch hunts of the Fujimori government during the nineties, the seemingly simple act of printing the 1989 show flier already suggested that these subtes were quite aware of the risk imposed by the image they had produced. Peru had devolved into a political culture of mass suspicion, complete with the state’s antiterrorist program of citizen surveillance (i.e., anonymous tip lines to alert police to possible subversive activity). Márquez recalls that to print the kaos flier, they felt the need to resort to a clandestine method, being fearful of what might happen if they printed it in a public place. Enrique Wong’s father owned a print shop in downtown Lima, so they sneaked in at night and printed enough copies to promote the show. When I asked Márquez to reflect on how exactly the flier was produced, I was also asking him to remember some of his most tragically charged memories. He remembered the kaos show as the last time he ever saw Alfredo Távara alive, the same friend who had helped organize the San Marcos event and defend the subtes from the subversivos’ allegations in 1985. More importantly, the two Alfredos had been close childhood friends. A few short months after the kaos show in 1989, Távara was “disappeared”—that ubiquitous, often passively phrased euphemism for state practices of extrajudicial execution—along with several other students from San Marcos and the Catholic university. When Márquez told me this, speaking casually about the kaos flier, my mind went to the lengthy interviews I had done with him a couple of years earlier. In the context of a more formal recorded exchange, Márquez identified this as one of those moments when the heart-­ wrenchingly personal morphs viscerally into something decidedly political: “Alfredo Távara, who was my best friend since we were kids and had gone to 34 Interpretation #1

San Marcos to study sociology, was kidnapped together with a group of university guys from the Catholic University and San Marcos and they were disappeared. . . . So, we had lost our innocence then. No? That’s it. We’re now talking about something where you take an image from somewhere and you do something with it, except that now you end up converting into the images themselves” (Márquez, 2009). Always a step ahead of clichés, Márquez was not simply pointing to that familiar imitative dialogue that takes place between art and life, image and reality, expression and experience. He was talking about everything Lima subtes had at stake when they risked their expressive statements. He was thinking of the specificity of how the rock underground’s artistic forms of political action had entered into an exceedingly ambiguous dialogue with subversive politics and therefore also faced potentially deadly consequences. The subtes realized themselves as a punk revolution, a generation of urban misfits articulating a provocative politics of being “under” and forced to face the dangerous consequences of one of Peru’s darkest historical moments. Faced with a war over Peru’s past and future, the pestilence surrounded the subte’s head and wouldn’t leave them be, Lima’s punk revolution really began as an act to denounce violence and express a position for life. Positioned ambiguously in relation to the revolutionary proposals of the Marxist subversive, anarchistically antagonistic to the state but therefore also in opposition to the Maoists’ central party mandates, the subtes ended the decade at substantial risk of political death.

Welcome to the Year 2011: Final Thoughts, Future Twists, Safer Turns Before we finalize this account of Narcosis’ 1985 demo cassette (an icon of Peruvian punk’s means of underproduction and modes of undercutting) and of the two subterranean show fliers (indexes of how risky underground rock became during Peru’s war), we might consider their contemporary fates. One method would be to fast-­forward to the year 2011, take a snapshot of this significant year for Peruvian punk, and see what the contemporary circumstance held in store. The story of Narcosis points us to a much broader history of how Lima’s underground rock is refracted through complex global processes of musical circulation across time and space. According to multiple accounts, First Dose circulated to Colombia soon after it was released, thanks to a subte 35 Risks of Underground Rock Production

that emigrated sometime in 1985 or 1986. The album had a notable impact in Medellín, where bands like I.R.A. and underground films like Rodrigo D: No Futuro were defining the contours of Colombian punk. Narcosis’ influence is evident, for example, in the fact that Colombian punks (including I.R.A.) arranged a Narcosis reunion tour in Bogotá and Medellín in 2007— marking the only time the band has played live outside of Peru and literally causing a riot.8 Now circulating in multiple formats, Narcosis has multiple lives and therefore many possible interpretations via punk’s global subterranean circuits. The move from analog to digital (band members released a cd version of First Dose in 2002) represents only the most obvious development to assure continued circulation in today’s online marketplace. Pirated MP3 versions of Narcosis songs—those digital copies of copies proliferating on multiple Internet sites and via pirated cds—are by far the most widely circulated. Levels of consumption are hard to measure, but one might take account of the hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube of Narcosis’ more popular tunes (“Sucio Policía” or “Represión”). None of this is surprising. In Peru’s digital era, music is consumed in pirated form with remarkable regularity, at levels approaching 100 percent by industry estimates (iipa 2010, 263). In 2011, two small labels (one in Peru, one in the United States) used a copy of Wicho’s old “master” cassette to convert First Dose to a limited-­edition vinyl format (five hundred copies), an interest generated by the labels rather than the band members, who were preoccupied with other endeavors. Soon after the lp was released, Martín Sorrondeguy, known in US punk circles as the Montevideo-­born-­but-­Chicago-­bred vocalist of the pioneering 1990s Latino hard-­core band Los Crudos, placed Narcosis’ importance within the context of global cassette piracy in a review in the well-­known San Francisco punk ’zine Maximum Rocknroll: This is a legendary Peruvian punk band from the early to mid ’80s. When I say legendary, I don’t mean they played a bunch of shows with the right bands or had their t-­shirts sold and worn by mall punks all over the globe. I mean legendary in a “I was given a tenth-­generation copy of their tape that smuggled its way up from Peru to Colombia, dubbed a bunch of times, then sent over to some punks in Mexico and they dubbed and passed it on to me, when I got away from my folks while vacationing in Mexico and got my ass to the Chopo [a street market in Mexico City that specializes in subcultural music and goods].” This is the legendary I speak of. (Sorrondeguy 2011) 36 Interpretation #1

It would be easy to see this as another instance of punk’s insistence on underground authenticity, as one means by which to erect those antimainstream standards by which “real punks” and “total posers” become judged. Yet the more fascinating point is that these exceedingly obscure but still extensively transnational subterranean circuits of punk exchange have existed since the analog era. This was well before the onset of “globalization,” at least in so far as the digital revolution is considered a vital part of it. The past and present lives of Narcosis transgress simultaneously national, linguistic, cultural, and regional borders via small-­scale processes that entail multiple material forms and temporal cycles: within the global spheres of underproduction, undercirculation, and underconsumption. Certainly, all Peruvian punk from the 1980s era does not follow exactly the same underground pathways—and much of it is in fact lost entirely to time and total obscurity. Yet, I do want to suggest that Narcosis is less an exceptional case than a paradigmatic one. There are now enough examples of eighties underground rock recordings—“made in Lima” on demo cassette, later converted to digital, and then ironically transformed into vinyl via small-scale US punk labels—that some consider it an identifiable trend (cf. Gutiérrez 2012).9 The point then is that all of this is made possible by successive generations of punks networking globally, through diffuse, multidirectional, and subterranean circuits, quite like those global cassette circuits into which Narcosis inserted its seemingly banal demo tape back in February of 1985. There is the not insignificant matter of the semiotics and material dimensions of Peruvian punk’s various formats. The two small labels that released First Dose on vinyl adopted a “gringo” logic of vinyl revival. Judging from rock subterráneo’s 1980s standards of underproduction—when vinyl was nearly impossible to produce and quite difficult to consume—the point is less about analogic anachronism than geopolitical misplacement. First Dose represented a Peruvian means of punk underproduction centered on the iconicity of the pirated demo cassette: amateurishly recorded, easily copied, impossible to authenticate, economically necessary, expressively democratizing. Vinyl in Peru represented the conspicuous musical format. Its relative affordability and accessibility in the North’s wealthy economies was unknown in a country where it was representative of more elite forms of cultural consumption. As a result of these differences in format familiarity, domestic punk nostalgias are not the same in Peru as in the North, where the pervasiveness of vinyl 37 Risks of Underground Rock Production

makes it the “authentic” if also anachronistic means of musical consumption in an era dominated by the digital. A telling example is the band Morbo, active in Lima’s underground punk scene since the early 2000s. Morbo produced their most recent release (De Baja Calidad [Of Poor Quality], 2011) as a demo cassette using an old four-­track recorder, only to immediately convert the tracks to MP3, the more practical solution for today’s Internet-­based musical circulation. More in tune with Lima’s local anachronistic imaginations of music history, Of Poor Quality emerged as the necessary metacommentary on Lima’s underground rock tradition rooted in the self-­made demo cassette. More indirectly, Morbo’s cassette also intervened sarcastically into the growing niche trend to convert the “classics” of 1980s Lima punk to foreign-­produced vinyl via small labels and foreign connections. In fact, sales of many of the limited edition vinyls now circulating occur in the United States and Europe among a niche of global punk connoisseurs. The few copies that return to Lima, to be sold by the bands, usually sell at exorbitant local prices that only an upper-­middle-­class to upper-­class income could afford (three or four times the price in the US record market). Morbo’s 2011 “poor-­quality” demo cassette—produced domestically the very same year the famous “first dose” of Peruvian punk was converted from pirated cassette to authenticating foreign vinyl—raises some interesting questions about the punkness of Narcosis. Is Narcosis still punk now that the release of First Dose on vinyl might be interpreted as an act of aesthetic overproduction, or minimally an act of hipster indulgence? Does the format elitism somehow dilute Narcosis’ original intent to undercut Peru’s public values? Rather than conclude the case with a simple yes or no, I will reiterate the idea with which I began this essay. Whether or not something is punk— the degree to which it is under- versus overproduced, the extent to which it succeeds or fails to irrupt into public discourse by disregarding the normativity such discourse assumes—is subject to ongoing, contextual dialogue containing multiple voices. Among Lima subtes there is much commentary and even the occasional agitated accusation about Narcosis’ rerelease on “gringo” vinyl as representing some sort of subte sacrilege—an apparent act of foreign authentication via a format that has always been inaccessible to most Peruvians. There’s real concern that it represents some sort of elitist betrayal of the piratable “street” standards through which underground rock made most of its history. Yet there are possible counterpoints to such condemnation. One of them is quite literally glued onto the vinyl record. It is an image of a generic cassette serving 38 Interpretation #1

Figure 1.9 2011 Narcosis limited edition lp. Photo by the author.

as the center sticker affixed to the lp (see figure 1.9). The dilemma that arises from producing on US vinyl what Narcosis underproduced to demo cassette twenty-­six years earlier was not lost on those in charge of the record’s aesthetic design. As metagesture, this decision to glue the image of a generic cassette to the center of an overpriced foreign record represents its own clever symbolic strategy to undercut the likely claim that Narcosis is now too overproduced. If we turn attention to the matter of what Peruvian subtes had at stake by risking a means of underground rock production we see a similarly dialogical process unfolding across different contexts. In 2003, under the Alejandro Toledo government, Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its “Final Report” about the twenty-­year period of political violence, declaring the war officially over and calling for the country to come to terms 39 Risks of Underground Rock Production

with its postconflict moment (see cvr 2003). Following Toledo’s successful mass mobilization against Fujimori in 2000, when widespread corruption was unveiled and the nineties Fujimori regime finally began to crumble, Peru also transitioned into an unprecedented period of economic growth. Complete with all of the expected contradictions—inequality remains high, the centralization of Lima is ever present, and provincial areas continue to lack basic state services and to serve as extractive reserves—there was in fact a real expansion of the urban middle class, growing levels of consumption, and greater integration into a global market economy. The defeat of the Shining Path’s Maoist proposal and the subsequent ousting of Fujimori brought with it more than just the relative political stability of electoral democracy, dependent of course on a collective denial of the structural forms of violence that underpin the country’s vast inequities. Making contemporary Peru “safe for democracy” also made it a safer place for reissuing what were once incredibly risky artistic statements. In July of 2011, I attended a seminar in Lima’s bohemian district, Barranco, on the role of artistic expression, violence, and state repression in Latin America during the 1980s. Organized by a network of artists, performers, and researchers from the global South known as Red Conceptualismos del Sur, the seminar title was “Poner el Cuerpo” (Placing the Body). The en riesgo (“at risk”) was very much implied. I went to the seminar with Alfredo Márquez and Álex Ángeles because I knew their late 1980s art collective, Taller nn, would be discussed alongside others from multiple other Latin American countries. It provoked an intense curiosity in me when I learned that the Lima organizer, a young curator named Miguel López, had decided to use the 1989 kaoz show flier as the central image on the promotional poster. It was a peculiar choice. While signaling social ties to the subte rock scene, the flier is relatively obscure compared to those works by nn now increasingly discussed as significant within Latin America’s art criticism circles: a 1988 project known as La Carpeta Negra (The Black Folder) and a 1989 repositioning of Andy Warhol’s famous pop rendering of Chairman Mao as an ambiguous reference to the Shining Path’s Andean Maoism (see Interpretation #5). The seminar was only one of many examples of the insertion of nn’s works into the high-­culture domains of official art criticism. In fact, Red Conceptualismos del Sur has ties to the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and in 2012 curated an exhibition related to the seminar titled “Perder la Forma Humana” (Losing the Human Form). On display in Spain’s most prestigious modern 40 Interpretation #1

art museum were several of nn’s works, along with contextualizing material from Lima’s underground rock scene. Over the next two years, the exhibit traveled back to South America to El Museo de Arte de Lima and the Museo de la Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero in Buenos Aires. This is a process of exalted artistic recognition to which these underground artists, once practicing radicalized art with their very bodies placed at risk, have simply “succumbed.” That, at least, was how Álex Ángeles put it to me one night over a chilcano (ginger ale, pisco, and lime) in a flash of ironic self-­awareness. He was reflecting on the considerable differences in political context that exist between the moment of nn’s original underground creativity and their recent recognition by the official art world. Ángeles’ self-­criticism isn’t far off from Alfredo Márquez’s occasional ironic self-­references as Peru’s “top marginal” artist. He means it as an expression of awareness of the growing interest in his early political art and the bizarre juxtaposition it creates with spending half of the 1990s in a Peruvian prison accused of having terrorist sympathies. Much as it would be possible to conclude that Narcosis is now overproduced thanks to its release on foreign vinyl, one could easily conclude that the considerable political risks Lima subtes once assumed have now been reduced to petty artistic squabbles of who gets recognition for having made what radical artistic statement back in the 1980s “when it actually mattered.” Some certainly might conclude that it’s no longer very clear what exactly is at risk, that these subte bodies are no longer in danger or that many of them are in fact now enjoying the relative comforts of Peru’s economic expansion and middle-­class delights. Yet this conclusion is also only one possible reading as Peruvian punks navigate a postconflict period, new economic booms, old social denials, the authenticity of Yankee recording formats, and the authority of museum curators and art critics. Other conclusions, tied to other interpretations, are certainly still possible. For me, this calls to mind some telling parallels in my ongoing conversations with the likes of Márquez, the same guy who offers me free housing every time I set foot in Lima. As lucidly as if it were yesterday, I recall some charged dinner conversation the night of the “Placing the Body” seminar between the much younger Lima organizer, Miguel López, and Márquez precisely on the matter of how today’s petty artistic squabbles do not always have such petty political implications. The subject of Herbert Rodríguez, another visual artist central to the 1980s subte scene, came up. Representing a slightly older generation, Rodrí41 Risks of Underground Rock Production

guez was at times something of a mentor for various underground artists in the 1980s. In recent years, he has publically challenged nn members to confess their involvement with the Shining Path despite his own occasional involvement with nn in the eighties. After a few comments about Rodríguez’s possible desire for greater recognition, Márquez intervened with a sarcastic comment that was tinged with great risk of political ambiguity: “Not all of us were fortunate enough to arrive at the enlightened conclusion of being anti–­Shining Path.” I had a sudden flashback to another moment in one of our lengthy interview sessions: Shane: What was the date that they arrested you? Alfredo: October 5, 1994. Shane: What do you remember about the week before that? Alfredo: Not sure if it’s of any use to tell this, but I remember very well those moments. Shane: What were you up to? Alfredo: At the Catholic University they were starting a program in visual anthropology and . . . they invited me to participate in an event. . . . There was a roundtable discussion . . . and somebody asked me what was my position on the internal conflict. And I responded, among other things, that the Shining Path doesn’t disgust me. . . . What I was trying to say is that I won’t be limited to saying that they are the “Other” . . . and all of us are, actively or passively, part of the conflict. . . . When I said that, I did it consciously without expecting any kind of repercussions; after all, it was in a classroom! But it’s also possible that by then I was already under surveillance. I don’t know. In fact, we did a few more activities there, and just a few days later was when they detained me. (Márquez, 2009)

The resemblance between the two statements is clear. Márquez expressed an absence of disgust at the Shining Path in 1994, just before his political imprisonment, when nn artworks were used as evidence against him, and produced this sarcastic double negative of being “not . . . anti–­Shining Path” in 2011, just after an art seminar signaling an ascent to artistic recognition. Yet something else remains provocatively ambiguous, and I suggest that the reader be clear on both the power and the fearlessness in this central ambiguity. A refusal to declare that the Shining Path represents the “Other” and a statement declaring oneself “not anti–­Shining Path” are not the same thing as articulating a position for the Shining Path. Yet, Márquez knows better than most just how likely the Peruvian state is to conflate such statements, 42 Interpretation #1

perhaps even more so in an era defined by the Shining Path’s clear defeat and retrospective demonization. The provocation in these statements is consciously intended to express the same sort of risky subterranean ambiguity aesthetically displayed in the kaoz show flier from 1989. Once printed clandestinely, despite the terrorizing scrutiny of an authoritarian state, the flier contains a peculiar power of suggestion. It suggests that there were then, and there still are now, other political positions to consider beyond those of the state and the Maoist subversives that sought to take it over. In other words, the riskiness of Peruvian punk is found not only in this real historical context in which a state eagerly conflated the Lima subte with the Marxist subversive. It is also easily misunderstood by the militant that makes the mistake of concluding that there is only one true way of being subversive. nn’s flier still has the power to suggest that there are significant political questions left unanswered, ones with fleshy material and simultaneously symbolic bodies at stake. After all, by the year 2011, how many of the provocative questions posed in the 1989 show flier had the Peruvian state really answered? What of that man’s singular gesture toward only one identifiable injustice amid an overwhelming, grotesque background of so many more still unaccounted for? How many of those historical ghosts still haunt contemporary Peru? What if this peculiar gesture toward kaoz’s last show also points toward other injustices yet to be uncovered in the present moment? The unearthing of chaos is always at risk of being followed by a reburial of social contradictions that prefer to hover beneath the surface anyway.

44 Interpretation #1

interpretation #2 el problema ierra de la sub-­t Any treatment of the problem of the punk underground—­ written or verbal—that fails or refuses to recognize it as a socioeconomic problem is but a sterile, theoretical exercise destined to be completely discredited. Good faith is no fucking justification. Almost all such treatments have served merely to mask or distort the reality of the problem. The punk critic exposes and defines the problem because he looks for its causes in the fuckedupness of the system and not in its administrative, legal, or ecclesiastic machinery, its racial dualism or pluralism, or its cultural or moral conditions. The problem of the punk underground is rooted in the fucked-­up power structure of our totally fucked-­up system. Any attempt to solve it with administrative or police measures, through cultural studies or by an antisocial personality reform program, is superficial and secondary as long as the fuckedoverism of the snotty intellectuals continues to exist.1 I mean, seriously, what a tremendous ton of dog shit those Birmingham wankers were on about back in the 1960s and 1970s. Cultural studies started with the best of dialectical intentions, riffin’ off Gramsci to make culture the terrain of political battles and rippin’ on vulgar Marxism by demonstrating that material production might be the determining factor in the first but never the last instance.2 Exploring the concept of youth subcultures in this context was crucial. Subcultures represented the fact that the system of power could never complete itself. They were living testaments to the fact that there are inherent limits built into hegemonic consent—and that dissent does not arise necessarily from a subaltern position on the margins (the proverbial wretched of the earth, second-­class citizens, or second sexes). Resistance also emerges from the very center of modern urban life, where the logic of capital pre­sents itself as most complete. It emerges from the underground spaces of deep, dark, dystopian dissatisfaction within the very center of capital production, circulation, and consumption. Punk is the most iconic of these underground spaces.

Taking up the question of subculture, the classic cultural studies theorists distanced themselves from the stupid sociologists of deviance and ignored the ridiculous psychological impulse to proclaim the normal of cultural behavior by simply declaring the subcultural abnormal. This required exploring subcultures as spaces of rebellion that emerge from within the urban core of capitalist societies and in which the complexity of generational, racialized, and class-­based forms of consciousness intersect. This is true even if the lack of attention to gender politics made it clear that cultural studies was mostly a bunch of guys performing an academic circle jerk to see who had the biggest—purely theoretical—dick. This we know is the historical baggage of a lot of interesting ideas. If these were their critical interventions on post–­World War II youth culture, what was the problem? The problem is that the cultural studies gurus clusterfucked it when it came time to answer the most critical question they posed. Are subcultures not just rebellious but revolutionary? They answered with a simple “no” because subcultures’ “highly ritualized and stylized form suggests that they were also attempts at a solution to that problematic [class] experience: a resolution which, because pitched largely at the symbolic level, was fated to fail” (Hall et al. 2006, 35). They assumed they had to decide if subcultures represented a position from which to completely fuck the system—to cite The Exploited. Here emerged the crucial mistake. They invoked an older version of anthropology and reduced subcultures to a matter of ritual rebellion. Didn’t you learn fuck all from the errors of your anthropological predecessors, running around declaring the colonized world full of exotic peoples without history, forest Indians frozen into cold societies, natives living on mythical islands? That was the means to justify the idea that history starts and ends in Europe—and to ease the anthropologist’s complexes about his own pathetic lack of pigmentation and profound insecurity when confronted by the hotness of tropical rhythms.3 The second big mistake came when cultural studies channeled too much of its energy into the idea of “style” as the mode with which to engage analytically with subculture. Style was initially a kind of not fashion, meaning antimainstream from the point of view of the subcultural underground.4 Or at least this is the idea until the culture industry gets a hold of subcultural styles and sucks the cool and the controversial right out of them, a never-­ ending problem that subcultural theorists have long struggled with thanks to the Frankfurt farts.5 The problem is that the paradigmatic concept of subcultural style—­ 46 Interpretation #2

particularly when applied to the punk underground—has a fatal flaw. And Dick Hebdige is the guiltiest of the guilty parties, although the idea was circulating well before his famous little 1979 book made punk into the iconic urban subculture. Sure, his book made two crucial points. First, punk is more semiotically open than prior subcultures, eager to appropriate and then subvert the meaning of all manner of charged (e.g., the swastika) and ordinary (e.g., the safety pin) symbols. In his view it represents the culmination of a particularly subversive form of symbolic action. Second, he identified punk as part of a “frozen dialectic” of charged racial relations, specifically black and white tension in the UK context.6 But Dr. Dick Head also really reified punk, and, by extrapolation, subcultures in general, once punk became the iconic instance of such youth rebellions. He did this by playing, semiotically, with himself. Like too much semiotic analysis—whether duped by Derrida’s dumb-­ass deconstruction or not—there is a problem if reading or seeing signs becomes an end in itself, divorced from an analysis that locates the social relations of power by which signs, through styles, are produced, circulated, and consumed materially in practice—and thus from what kinds of social and material politics signs and style can become enmeshed. This second big mistake in subcultural theory directly reflects the first mistake—different side of the same fucking coin. The idea that subcultures are ritualized rebellion rather than revolutionary action, resulting in primarily semiotic stylistic youth statements rather than critically productive political consciousness, ends up reinforcing a whole series of stubborn Marxist dichotomies that cultural studies presumably sought to transcend: materiality versus idealism; false versus true consciousness; history versus stasis; rebellion versus revolution. In short, these butthead British blokes thought of cultural studies as the place to speak about codetermination of such dichotomies. Yet, at least when it came to the question of subcultures, by reading them as stylistic signs and assessing them as incapable of expressing a revolutionary praxis, they implicitly did something else. They resubscribed to that old Enlightenment Marxist ideal of “true” political consciousness, of “real” revolution, of an imagined total historical rupture that allows one to escape the past and found a completely different utopian future. Then came the self-­branded postsubculturalists. But mostly what they’ve done is just complain about having arrived at the debate too late. They focus too much energy on accusing classic cultural studies of “essentializing” subcultures, that is, treating them as too distinct and bounded when in fact 47 El Problema de la Sub-Tierra

youth culture is more fragmented and overlapping. I’m so fucking tired of the antiessentialist status quo I don’t know where to start, although it occurs to me to tell the antiessentialists to essentially fuck off. They so clearly suffer from the same historical penis envy that poststructuralists and postmodernists do. Anything with a “post” in front of it is immediately suspect on simple grounds: whining about not having been present in the past doesn’t position you to declare a radically new stage of history.7 This is what most of the theorizing of subculture has left us with. Subcultures are semiotically subversive styles that are also highly susceptible to mass commercialization, a Dookie-­filled dilemma we might as well call the Green Day effect.8 Subcultures routinely express structural antagonisms but don’t breed a real revolutionary consciousness powerful enough to really fuck the system, provoking real systemic ruptures that result in real historical change. The insight into underground subcultures isn’t found in the irresolvable dichotomies of materiality and ideology; embodied practice and abstract semiotics; historical revolutionary action and ritualized rebellion; autonomous cultural production and massified cultural industrialization. The insight is to imagine, and identify in material-­political practice, other possible framings of the underground experience without giving in to the impulse to believe in an enlightened Marxist idea of revolution as some sort of total systemic rupture. Stop placing so much fucking faith in the idea that liberation lies only on the other side of absolute destruction followed by total revolutionary renewal. Stop dreaming of completely fucking over the system. Learn to underfuck the system in your daily practices. This is a task to which underground punks have long dedicated themselves. Let me explain with a couple of quick examples taken from this geopolitical elsewhere of Lima, Peru, and by visiting a clear example of Peruvian punk’s underfuckedness: that first widely circulated, crappy-­quality, self-­ pirated cassette of rock subterráneo music produced in Lima. I refer again to the cassette titled Primera Dosis (First Dose). The three members of Narcosis recorded it in a matter of days in 1984 and released it in early 1985, engineering it in diy bricolage fashion. The entire production was done with a couple of microphones and a makeshift two-­track recorder (a small Sony shoebox cassette recorder hooked up to a Sony Walkman). Why the fuck does this matter? One: The fact that it was produced directly to cassette with no ambitions to vinyl makes it a transgressive act of material-­cultural production directed against the intellectual property logics that maintain the culture industry. 48 Interpretation #2

Cassette technology represented the most antipropertied form of musical circulation that existed before the digital music era—and the primary mode of pirated musical circulation outside the “First World” centers of cultural industrial monopolization. One must measure it against mainstream cultural industry standards of the time, which were focused on vinyl and eventually cassettes with anticopy technology, but also against the standards of other forms of underground production. Most underground punk bands in the North—certainly the classic ones in the United States and the United Kingdom—set their sights on vinyl even if they never got there. Certainly their musical imaginations (like their collections) were filled with as much vinyl as cassettes. The many who did re­cord to vinyl outside the mainstream industry via small labels accessed the means of musical production for their own punk purposes but did not appropriate them—you always still had to buy access to a vinyl printing company. By contrast, working in your garage with homemade cassette technology in effect allows you to control the means of musical production from start to finish and to engage directly in the informality of piracy economies that reject vinyl’s authenticating format. Punks in the North did this largely because they weren’t “good” enough to be on independent vinyl labels. Peruvian punks did this because that was the very precondition of musical production. Two: Primera Dosis quickly began to circulate transnationally, having a significant influence on other Latin American scenes, especially in Colombia and Mexico. It eventually reached the United States thanks to punk actors invested in Latin American punk. One of the more important conduits was Martín Sorrondeguy, born in Montevideo but raised in Chicago. He was not only at the forefront of Latino punk as lead singer of Los Crudos in the 1990s, but since the late 1980s he had begun circulating Latin American–­ produced punk in the United States via underground Spanish-­speaking punk networks and via his label, Lengua Armada. The second important element of Peruvian punks’ underfuckedness I want to explore revolves around the fact that they built a movement in the context of pervasive political violence. The early subtes represented a generation of young Peruvians growing up in an environment defined by revolutionary Marxist ideas and a “people’s war” that the Maoist Shining Path purported to wage in the name of a future communist utopia. This part is totally crucial—so wake the fuck up. Being subte was ambiguously equitable to and necessarily distinguishable from being subversivo. The “under” implied in subte could mean militant 49 El Problema de la Sub-Tierra

underground politics, and in some cases of punks turned militants or sympathizers it did. But it never meant so necessarily. In fact, quite often it meant a form of dissent that was underground like the Shining Path’s but ideologically and practically distinct from the highly hierarchal and centralized party proposal of the Maoists. Given the degree of anarchist political philosophy that surrounds punk, subtes more often than not staked out positions of dissent that were actively critical of the Shining Path alternative while still representing an active, sometimes militant, antipathy toward the state. So the fuck what? This makes a real difference to political history. Peru’s period of violence was not simply a war between the state and Marxist insurgents, described variously as either populist revolutionaries or terrorists depending on who was defining them. Nor was it simply a continuum of political sympathies or antipathies for or against the Shining Path. Many of Lima’s underground punks staked out a different position of dissent. One finds in the Peruvian underground of the time various explicit attempts to articulate and defend an anarchic position as part of the political atmosphere. The point is that the subtes practiced punk politically as something that can’t be simply reduced to a ritualized form of youthful rebellion. Or, to the extent that rituals were involved, they brought with them both a distinct political proposal and confronted the visceral material (life vs. death) and political (imprisonment or international refuge) consequences that we rarely, if ever, associate with ritual in the anthropological sense. So, in the end, what’s the fucking point? It all hinges on what the hell you mean by “revolution.” What does it mean when punks emerging out of England, like The Exploited, scream “Fuck the system!”? How might that compare to a sentiment emerging from Lima, as in the band Autopsia screaming “Anarchic rupture, against your system! / Anarchic rupture, against your shit!”? If the answer always returns us to the question of revolution in the classic Marxist Enlightenment sense, we’re all deeply fucked. This immediately results in two things. First, it results in a reification of “the system” to begin with—making it hard to conceptualize systemic processes as anything other than totalizing and giving rise to the phantasm of an all-­powerful external entity that is impossible to defeat except through complete destruction and a total purifying renewal. Second, this immediately results in a trap, a repetitively circular form of antisystemic thinking rather than one that assumes other possibilities. I call this the trap of fuckedoverism—the tendency to 50 Interpretation #2

believe that the system fucks us over so bad that the only real revolutionary response is to completely fuck the system over as the only measure of “real” revolutionary resistance. This then produces that familiar impulse for antisystemic actors to become that which they hate: people who were fucked over soon become people who fuck over others. History bears this out repeatedly like some sort of Freudian nightmare of endless traumatic repetition. Why is it that Marxist revolutionaries that finally succeed in taking the state never know what to do next—except to erect their own oppressive state? But there is a new approach to the problem. It emerges out of the underness made evident if we take the vantage point of being punk and becoming subte in wartime Peru. Instead of channeling revolutionary dreams and antisystemic actions into a program of completely fucking over the system, we think and act and create ourselves with a different battle cry: PUNKS OF THE WORLD UNITE TO UNDERFUCK THE SYSTEM!

Underfucking the system implies a series of refusals. We refuse to accept that systemic forms of power approximate to anything even remotely resembling absolute! We refuse to believe that the alienating logic of capital is so expansive that it fills all empty spaces and, instead, we irrupt into all empty spaces by filling them with our emergent forms of underproduced creativity! We refuse to contemplate revolutionary practice as just another shitty version of an overintellectualized Enlightenment process! We refuse to act on the assumption of a difference between the false consciousness of the oppressed and a true consciousness of the falsity that oppresses us! Fuck you, we cry! We have come to underfuck the system! Punk from the underground is the most expressive technology we possess.

51 El Problema de la Sub-Tierra

interpretation #3 el problema del pituco Imported “rags” cover your body / But you’ve only got trash on the inside / You made a London out of Lima / But you’ve never even been to the poorest neighborhoods / Imitating a punk, you’re rotting / Dickhead poser, you’re sinking / We are shitting ourselves with hunger / And with our hunger you buy your bread / Rot you pituco / You complain about things that are my problems / You’re a dirty stinking farce / What kind of bullshit are you saying in your songs / If you’ve got everything in your mansions / Rot you pituco / You say there is no future / But yours is totally secure / You’re white, just like your father / Rot you pituco—reconchatumadre! Society of Shit, 1985

Terminological Traumas The date is June 6, 1987. The street address is Coronel Inclán 112. It’s right off Avenida Brazil, a major thoroughfare that starts in central Lima, passes through the districts of Jesús María and Magdalena, and dead-­ends in Avenida Ejército, parallel to Lima’s Pacific coastline. The club is called Magia. It’s one of few regular spots left for punk shows after the boom of 1984 and 1985, when Lima’s “underground rock” phenomenon first emerged. With the intensification of the war—no longer confined to the southern Andean provinces, steadily encroaching on the capital city—it’s getting harder to organize events that police could perceive as suspicious “subterranean” activity. There are military-­enforced curfews at night. Sympathy for the Shining Path is expanding in Lima, particularly in shantytowns and among those young people invested in the idea of radical change. Street militants paint Maoist graffiti on city walls. Students in public universities form a myriad of revolutionary committees and reading groups to learn Marxist theory.

Masked persons barge in on university classrooms to spread the word of a “people’s war” against Peru’s “semifeudal country.” That was the quick characterization Shining Path ideologues used to describe Peru’s material historical conditions in the late twentieth century. Lima’s youth—all those destined by age to think through the promises of representing the generation of political change—also start to feel a particular kind of burden. Ready or not, they become Peru’s “car-­bomb generation,” to cite the provocative title of Martin Roldán’s (2007) novel about urban middle-­class youth involved in the underground rock scene of the 1980s. The press images of violence in Ayacucho province that appeared in 1984 and 1985 suggested a dramatic uptake of political violence, particularly more disturbing incidents, such as those revealed at the end of August 1984 following the discovery of mass graves that pointed to extrajudicial military executions of rural Andeans in Pucayacu. Yet, it was the events of June 18 and 19, 1986, that brought an undeniable realization to urban Limeños that the war also threatened the coastal capital and was no longer confined to the countryside. That great geographic and immeasurable symbolic distance that separates coastal Lima from highland Peru was definitively breached when no Limeño could ignore the grotesque news reports and international attention that followed the “prison massacres” on those two days. A coordinated uprising of political prisoners in three different Lima penal facilities ended in the extrajudicial execution of more than two hundred inmates. It was a product of feigned negotiations and a president, Alan García, whose campaign promise to respect human rights was totally contradicted by the order for military command to retake control of the prisons by any means necessary. Voz Propia, one of the earliest Lima bands with an eerie postpunk sound, would write the political hymn to mark the magnitude of the event: Han gritado toda la noche Han matado hasta hartarse Todos sus pasos rompieron rostros Hoy apuntaron hacia las carceles

They’ve screamed all night They’ve killed till they got full All their footsteps smashed faces Today they took aim at the prisons

But let’s go back to that punk show that took place the first week of June 1987, almost one year after the prison massacres (see figure 3.1). kaos, Descontrol, and Kaos General are all listed on the flier. G3 is also part of the lineup. The three G’s stand for Gonzalo Farfán (guitarist/vocalist), Juan Gabriel “El Gordo” Bellido (bass), and Guillermo Figueroa (drums). Guillermo and Gonzalo were part of the early hard-­core quartet Autopsia 53 El Problema del Pituco

Figure 3.1 Magia show flier, 1987. Courtesy of Guillermo Figueroa Tangüis.

in 1984. After Autopsia disbanded, Guillermo and Gonzalo sought out El Gordo for a new project and one of Lima’s best-­known hard-­core outfits was born. In 1986 they started cranking out a sound—melodic riffs, positive messages instead of punk nihilism, lots of “whoa, whoa, whoa”—inspired by iconic US straight-­edge bands such as Seven Seconds and Minor Threat. When G3 gets on the Magia stage, the insults from the audience begin almost immediately. Right before they launch into the song “Falling to the Other Side,” a barely audible voice from the crowd shouts something that sounds like “Death to pitucos!” The song ends, and another voice, this one much clearer, screams, “Son of a bitch!” Ironies follow insults. Preparing to play “Betrayed,” some guy from the pit provokes a reaction from the band. Gabriel steps up to the mic and mocks him, “Forget him, he’s punk,” pointing unconsciously to the fact that despite all of the efforts of subcultural self-­affirmation the term “punk” never loses its essentially pejorative connotations. It always retains the sting of masculine abjection, one guy calling another guy his bitch (Nyong’o 2005). The tension building between band and audience eventually explodes as G3 cranks out the song “Presión” (Pressure). Listening to a distorted recording twenty-­some years after the fact, it’s impossible to know exactly what’s happening in the pit. The song isn’t even finished and Gonzalo abruptly stops playing the riff, throwing his band mates off, and blurts into the mic: “Son of a bitch! Get out, you fucking asshole! If that dumbass doesn’t like it, kick his ass out!” From the behind the drums, Guillermo challenges the guy to a fight on stage: “Yeah, get up here with me!” Gonzalo intervenes again, telling the anonymous provocateur to leave: “Go the fuck away, asshole. Nobody’s asking you to stay, dumbass. This concert is for intelligent people, not dickheads.” Some requisite questions: How did a small underground rock scene that started in the early eighties become deeply internally divided just a few years later? Why did it morph into hostile factions, generating an environment in which group violence at shows and bitter insults in fanzines and lyrics became the norm? Was the conflict merely the consequence of adolescent minds in need of discourses of authentication? Those pervasive subcultural dilemmas about purists and posers, straight-­edge philosophers versus self-­ destructive Sid Vicious wannabes, redneck metalheads beating up skinny street punks because of their funny hair? Such dynamics were certainly present in the Lima scene—both the impulse to authenticate one’s own underground status by defining this or that 55 El Problema del Pituco

person as a poser, and declaring particular musical genres off-­limits based on one’s own subcultural tastes. But there’s only one truly remarkable thing about these conflicts. They ultimately served to mask a deeper problem, a more contextual problem. It was a problem that we can account for only by clarifying how Peru’s big war—so full of racial, class, and geographic antagonisms writ large—became a little war within Lima’s underground rock scene. It is then Peru’s primary problem, the problem of the pituco. The conflict that one hears but can’t see on this old recording of the Magia show reveals a series of race, class, and spatial divisions specific to the way Limeños otherize each other in their very own urban slang. The punk war took place explicitly within a peculiar Lima lingo that demonstrates the deep conflict that exists between the pituco and the cholo. In the latter half of the 1980s, these social designators became routinely used as prefixes, attached to subcultural identifiers imported from abroad. Not long after the appearance of the term “subte,” which was derived from the 1984 show flier designed by Leusemia’s Leo Escoria, another street discourse emerged. Subte was of course rooted in an act of collective self-­designation for underground rock in Lima. By contrast, the newer terminology obeyed a rationale of imposing names onto Others defined in terms of Lima’s complexly conflated race, class, and spatial categories. The subte scene was soon talked about as being divided between pitu-­punks and cholo-­punks.1 The stress is undeniably on the Peruvian qualifier rather than the foreign-­language noun to which it is awkwardly attached, especially since those same qualifiers proved transportable to other genres (e.g., pitu-­metal versus cholo-­metal). Most significantly, the discourse of mestizaje—the messy, interstitial, mixed races and cultures presumed to predominate in Latin America—was nowhere to be found in this context. There simply is no evidence of “mestizo-­ punks” despite the fact that almost all of those concerned here now identify as mestizo, something I gathered by interviewing them twenty-­some years later amid Peru’s postconflict moment. If the eighties generation of Lima subtes now see themselves as mestizos, why did they not consider themselves as such in the 1980s? Why the emphatic contrast between pitucos and ­cholos? This proves quite curious, since, starting around the mid-­twentieth century, “cholo” refers to recent generations of Andean rural-­to-­urban migrants—Lima’s new arrivals rather than its established residents. The answer to this conundrum is found in the historical moment, a period in which Peru’s deepest contradictions were being violently revealed rather than his56 Interpretation #3

torically resolved. Throughout Latin America, “mestizaje” is an ambivalent ideological construct. It allows Latin American elites to obfuscate difference and silence subaltern voices (Gould 1998). Yet, as an inherently unstable rather than fixed figure, the mestizo is also used to speak about national reconciliation, pro­ject a contrastive image to the US version of imperial whiteness, and articulate diverse forms of social mobilization and hybrid cultures (de la Cadena 2000; García Canclini 2005). The absence of “mestizo punks” points to the fact that Lima’s punk war took place in the most polarizing language of urban conflict available. Ultimately, the division between pitu-­punks and cholo-­punks spoke not just to the broader context of political violence, where overlapping racial, class, and spatial antagonisms where obvious. It provides a distinct vantage point for commenting on Peru’s late twentieth-­century historical transformations. The underground infighting was another expression of the massive demographic changes that converted Peru from a rural country into an urban one, completely redefining Lima’s social and spatial dimensions in the process. Rather than elaborate further on the broader theoretical significance of this key and problematic figure of the pituco—or confuse the reader with an inadequate translation—let me do something else. Let me go back and try to locate the origins of the problem. Reopen the wound. Let it bleed again. Examine the underground trauma in its originating moment and the term in its multiple Lima connotations. Maybe then it will appear as obvious, even necessary, that we vomit up the primary problem of Peru as a problem of the pituco.

Gastrointestinal Rupture Most punk recollections—and the basic narrative of Carlos Torres Rotondo’s (2012) oral history of underground rock—suggest there was an original moment of subcultural glory. Multiple memories tell of an early period (1984 to 1985) full of collective effervescence and subte solidarity, later destroyed by a handful of socially resentful punks entering the scene to cagar la movida (shit on the movement). This is little more than revisionist history mixed with wishful nostalgic thinking of forty- and fifty-­ year-­olds, many of whom are now riding the wave of Peru’s postconflict economic boom and middle-­class expansion. What evolved into open conflict in the late 1980s was already latent from the beginnings of the rock underground. At any rate, those punks who threw the first stones were already par57 El Problema del Pituco

ticipants in the scene well before they became protagonists of bands with the explicit mission to antagonize other bands by labeling them punks of pituco privilege. The punk war first took the metaphorical form of a gastrointestinal rupture, a little sensation of discomfort that builds and builds until eventually it is violently vomited out. In early 1985, just a couple months after Leo Escoria designed the flier that christened the movement with the name “rock subterráneo,” a new punk fanzine appeared in Lima. It was called Kolera (Anger), with the subversive Spanish k substituted for the c to connote harshness. Kolera was the brainchild of two emerging bands: Sociedad de Mierda (Society of Shit, SdeM for short) and Excomulgados (Excommunicated). The first issue reprinted the lyrics of what became SdeM’s controversial claim to fame, a song titled “Rot You Pituco”—the lyrics now serving as epigraph to this Interpretation. The tune was a deliberate attack on pituco punks whose antisystemic attitude seemed in direct contradiction with their apparently upper-­class background, hailing from Lima’s wealthy residential districts and attending private foreign-­language schools. The entire song lasts forty-­six seconds, a testament to punk velocity perhaps but also a sign of the need for this psychosomatic purge. With the exception of a linguistic element—speaking in a snobbish tone or dropping English terms to demonstrate familiarity with the world’s dominant language—almost everything the pituco represents is clear from the song. The pituco is defined by an orientation toward foreign culture rather than concern for the domestic (i.e., imported clothing), an elite class position (i.e., mansions, exploiting hunger, a secure future), a racial status (i.e., white), and an exclusionary relation to urban space (i.e., unfamiliarity with poor neighborhoods). No one criterion is more determining than the other because that is how the fuzzily mixed relational logics of social division operate in Peru, like in much of Latin America. The cholo, the pituco’s urban counterpoint in Lima, is similarly associated with this complex array of overlapping sociological and material realities. The cholo represents Lima’s poor migrant population, the sprawling shantytowns full of sketchy infrastructure and human lives dependent on economic informality, and has assumed racial ties to Peru’s primordial Other, the rural Indian of the Andean interior. Occupying relative but always contrastive positions, the pituco and the cholo are the primary social manifestations of Lima’s overdetermined class, racial, and spatial divisions. The first issue of Kolera clarifies that a dramatic outpouring of resent58 Interpretation #3

ment against pitu-­punks began as early as 1985. With the ironic title “Punk in Lima?” an anonymous Kolera writer states with certainty that a pituco is never a real punk because he is “a disgusting, full of shit poser.” The author pukes out his anger, ending the piece with an unambiguous series of commands: “Monsters, spoiled by daddy, go kill each other, rip your tongues out. You make me sick. I vomit on you. BBuuaaaaaaaa . . .” (Anonymous 1985b). A precise form of reasoning accompanies the graphic expression of visceral disgust, this quasibiological reflex to purge a long-­suppressed irritant and puke out a new kind of Other. The sentiment of the anti-­tucos—a term of negation used to refer to their anti-­pituco attitude, and occasionally as self-­affirmation (in the case of SdeM’s drummer, nicknamed Ricardo “Anti-­ tuco”)—was grounded in a specific demand. They claimed exclusive rights to punk’s infamous nihilism, that “no future” spirit that the Sex Pistols made globally popular in the late 1970s. They believed punk was essentially born out of the urban working class and that any punk of privilege found appropriating it need return it to the rightful owners: “Give punk back. punk is from the dirty streets, from the poor neighborhoods with dirty smeared walls, from the gutters and its rats. . . . punk is for the marginalized, for the exploited, not for the exploiters” (Anonymous 1985b). The claim relies on accepting a false premise. The sociological accounts of late 1970s London paint a picture of a punk scene that was at least half made up of kids from middle-­class families, many with university or art school backgrounds (Laing 1985; Frith 1981). It was never simply a product of Londoners from the East End slums. In fact, the UK punk aesthetic pointed beyond any particular class motif, especially if compared to earlier youth subcultures such as the skinheads (Hebdige 1979). If anything, it was the antivalues of alienated, largely white, middle-­class youth that predominated, certainly in the US case (Lamy and Levin 1985). Despite this sociological complexity, the generalized ethos of economic recession that set in with Thatcher and Reagan no doubt aided in giving life to that global myth of the punk-­as-­proletarian. It’s no surprise that these anti-­tuco punks perceived themselves as marginal—at least relative to punks of much greater privilege. Most were from lower-­middle to working-­class neighborhoods rather than the wealthiest residential sectors. But they were also not from Lima’s most impoverished and precarious migrant settlements that surround the core urban districts. By adopting this global myth of the punk proletarian, and adapting it to Lima realities, they nonetheless imagined the true punk as symbolically connected 59 El Problema del Pituco

to the cholo rather than the pituco. Pitu-­punks, the Kolera author says, “don’t know shit about people from below, they ignore Lima’s poor neighborhoods. People from the provinces aren’t shit to them and the worst thing one can be is from the highlands and the most shameful thing one can do is talk about chicha” (Anonymous 1985b). Although the term “cholo” is not used in an explicitly self-­referential sense, the move to associate the anti-­tucos with Lima’s cholos is clear enough via references to highland provinces, poverty, and chicha (a musical genre that grew out of the broader Andeanization of Lima).2 After the allegations were issued, those who felt alluded to as pitucos, principally those associated with the band G3, crafted a response. In March of 1986, G3 and friends began circulating their own fanzine called Ultimos Recursos (Last Resort), always using pseudonyms in print.3 The first issue included an article with the title “Does Unity Make for Strength?” and addressed the question of pitu-­punks directly. The article is full of statements meant to communicate a sense of bewilderment at the anti-­tuco attitude. It starts, “I have the lyrics to a song [i.e., “Púdrete Pituco”] in my hand. The title is so suggestive that it made me think it was directed at those young pitucos in our midst that are so tied to the latest trends. But no, I was wrong. It was directed at steadfast participants in underground shows, those whose very presence supports this movement. What’s worse is that it was directed at the underground bands themselves” (Poroto 1986). The author’s confusion—“I don’t understand the attitude of these groups”—then evolves into a series of rhetorical questions: “Do they want to destroy what has begun to be built with such effort? Who are they? Where did they come from?” (Poroto 1986). The expression of confusion belies some basic facts. The author, and the band, knew exactly what band had authored the song “Púdrete Pituco.” It was already clear from the fanzine Kolera and from the compilation cassette (known simply as Volume II), on which SdeM’s anti-­pituco anthem appeared alongside the songs of twelve other bands. While the text feigns bewilderment, the anonymous drawing that accompanies it makes transparent that G3 and company had the harshest of Peruvian stereotypes at the ready; it was quite clear where battle lines were being drawn (see figure 3.2). There is perhaps some ironic humor intended in the image, since it is unlikely the artist actually confused SdeM members with recently arrived Andean immigrants. Regardless, the image depicts a “new enemy”—G3 later used that very phrase as the title to a 1987 demo cassette in reference to the anti-­tucos—appearing here in the form of Lima’s familiar cholo Other. The stereotype in the image is obvious as the multiple logics of racial, lin60 Interpretation #3

Figure 3.2 Cholo-­punk drawing. From the fanzine Ultimos Recursos #1.

guistic, class, and cultural superiority work to rationalize the privilege of the imagination that constructs it. The cholo-­as-­punk sports a homemade T-­shirt that reads “Soy un panc” (I’m a punk). The misspelling is more than a reference to the fact that Lima punks commonly substitute the Spanish a for the difficult-­to-­imitate, short English u sound. Since pitucos are presumed to have greater familiarity with foreign languages, the implication is that the cholo-­punk’s bad English is really just a symptom of his poor execution of language in general, his apparent lack of cosmopolitanism specifically. The cholo-­punk can’t pronounce “good” English in the global city, just like his Quechua-­speaking cousin misspeaks Spanish in the cultureless countryside. In Peru the idea of possessing inadequate language skills cannot be divorced from a history that imputes linguistic, and by association cultural, inferiority to the Indian (see Interpretation #4). It’s also relevant to point out that sev61 El Problema del Pituco

eral of those identified as pitu-­punks are also those who studied in Lima’s exclusive foreign-­language private schools. Their exposure to and familiarity with dominant languages, primarily English, has a basis in reality.4 In the drawing, the cholo-­punk wears racial inferiority on the body, starting with some bizarrely hybrid footwear. The combat boot’s deployment as symbol of subcultural militancy is negated by the comment on the figure’s brutishness. He amounts to no more than a head full of noise (ruido) and a boot-­for-­a-­brain (cerebro), obeying animal-­like instincts rather than formulating any reasons for his enactments of violence. The ojota on the other foot, a cheap rubber sandal made from recycled tires stereotypically worn by rural Andeans, makes the racial imputation of Indianness brutally transparent. The chullo on his head, a woolen cap with earflaps that the poor Andean is supposed to wear, only deepens the “dumb Indian” effect of the image. Finally, the rat in the corner declaring his starvation (“I’m hungry!!!”) is a symbolic inversion of what was already becoming a familiar anti-­tuco trope. The anti-­tucos sought to symbolically affirm the figure of the hungry street rat as an underground urban survivalist. This was already present in the 1985 Kolera article cited above. It became even more elaborate in the lyrics to songs such as “Ratas Callejeras” (Street Rats) by Eutanasia, the primary band to take up the anti-­tuco mission following SdeM’s dissolution in 1987: In alleys where fearlessness is born / On the corners where no one is better than anyone else / In the suburbs where a false peace dies / Somewhere there are rats scratchin’ / Hey hey / Rats, go to the struggle! / Rats, go gnaw! / Rats, go fight! / Rats, go fuck things up! / We’re so tired of eating shit!!!

Contrary to Eutanasia’s lyrical imagination, the depiction of the cholo-­punk as Other strips the hungry rat of his potential for feisty urban resistance. Instead, he just stares up at the cholo-­punk figure stupidly, shrugging his shoulders, declaring his impotence at taking care of his basic material needs. To be clear, this retaliation for the anti-­tucos’ public expressions of social resentment was not solely the sentiment of the band G3. As with all logics of social hierarchy that structure collective feelings, the reaction represented a more general attitude. In the third issue of Ultimos Recursos, circulated in July 1987, one finds anonymous remarks sent to the editors and published in a section called “Verbal Aggressions.” One of these, signed by “The Fan,” reads, “To all those hungry, poor, loudmouth punks, we’re giving away bread and water over here in San Isidro and Miraflores.” In other words, whatever individual artist constructed the caricature of the cholo-­punk, the crucial 62 Interpretation #3

point is that there was a willing public ready to receive and perpetuate the stereotype, to craft responses to anti-­tuco resentment in ways that reveal the pituco’s deep-­seated paternalism toward the cholo Other. Was there any critical substance to the pitu-­punk comeback? Actually, there was. If the pitu-­punks had one convincing critique it was precisely that the anti-­tuco position tended to rely on a simplistic form of Peruvian nationalism, overlooking the fact that punk in Lima is necessarily involved in a global appropriation and transnational circuits. “I only listen to national music,” reads the sardonic bubble quote attributed to the caricatured cholo-­ punk. The jab here points out the inherent weirdness of a Spanish-­speaking Peruvian asserting exclusive ownership over a rock genre that is so associated with foreign, specifically Anglo, origins. It reveals that the cholo-­punks are implicitly claiming to be the more authentic Peruvians in the act of claiming themselves to be the only authentic Lima punks. The fact that they are doing so primarily on class and race grounds clarifies what Peruvian common sense dictates: the whiter and wealthier the pituco, the less the pituco is perceived to belong in a country that should belong to Indians and their cholo descendants. However ironic his own global interest in punk’s foreignness, in wanting Peruvian punk to be his and his alone, the cholo-­punk runs the distinct risk of becoming an ethnonationalist.

Residential Refuge, Mosh Pit Warfare One day in April 2009, I was hanging out with Julio Durán, author of the semiautobiographical novel Incendiar la Ciudad, set in Lima’s 1980s punk underground. The topic of the many battles waged between pitu-­ punks and cholo-­punks came up, and it occurred to me to ask one of those open-­ended ethnographic questions: “Seriously, man, what was all that shit about?” His answer was so quick that it was as if he were citing some sort of urban common sense: “It was about Lima, man, this side versus that side of Javier Prado.” Virtually every interview I’ve done confirms that the conflict was also about Lima’s spatial divisions. Julio was just the first to explain it with such brilliant succinctness. Not long after he did so, G3 drummer Guillermo Figueroa—who has lived much of his life on the opposite side of Javier Prado from Julio—repeated the exact same idea.5 The symbolic significance of Javier Prado is found in its spatial function. A major multilane thoroughfare running east-­west and spanning the entire metropolitan landscape, it cuts Lima 63 El Problema del Pituco

geographically into two parts, symbolically dividing the core of the city into the haves and the have-­lesses. In reality, most of the really have-­nots form a ring around the city, living on sandy hillsides on the outskirts of the central urban districts. Regardless, Lima common sense says that those living north of Javier Prado are poorer and browner (i.e., more cholo-­like), while those living to the south are wealthier and whiter (i.e., more pituco-­like). Javier Prado marks other important differences. The wealthier areas referred to as “residential districts” are located to the south (San Isidro, Miraflores, Barranco) for historical reasons. In earlier republican times, before Lima was “invaded” by Andean migrants, the Lima elite lived in the colonial center and maintained summer homes in these areas that are closer to the coastline. With the influx of Andean migrants that began mid-­twentieth century, Lima’s colonial center became the primary site for ambulatory and informal street commerce. This resulted in a “deterioration” of downtown Lima—plagued by crime, prostitution, and unsanitary conditions—that lasted until the mid-­1990s, when a new mayor, Alberto Andrade, crafted a plan to restore the city center, modeled in part on New York’s transformation (cf. Gandolfo 2009). While the city’s new cholo inhabitants flooded the center to eke out a meager economic existence, the Lima elite took flight, setting up permanent residence in what were historically vacation areas. In contrast to the propertied wealth that “residential” implies in Lima, the areas that are geographically and symbolically closer to Lima’s historic center and north of Javier Prado (Breña, La Victoria, Barrios Altos, Rimac) are more often than not called barrios. This means “neighborhoods” but has more of a “hood” connotation. Of course, no spatial division is the perfect metaphor for social hierarchies. Jesus María and Lince fall somewhere in the middle of all this—in geographic, economic, and symbolic terms. La Molina, the ritziest of all of the residential districts, is located at the eastern end of Javier Prado. Chorrillos, located south of Javier Prado, is a complex blend. Regardless, the prominence of Javier Prado as a border to cross makes it the easiest landmark to cite if one wishes to simplify Lima’s sociospatial hierarchies: this side versus that side, us versus them. The Javier Prado divide and the implied difference between residential district and ’hood—do not account for the most peripheral and poorest areas in the metropolitan space. The sprawling Andean shantytowns that began to form in the 1960s and 1970s, known as pueblos jovenes (“young towns”), 64 Interpretation #3

effectively form a large, ever-­expanding ring around the city’s core. The marginal nature of these outlying areas is further evidenced by the fact that Limeños commonly refer to them as conos (e.g., the extreme poles of metropolitan Lima). If I describe Lima’s spatial logics in detail it is because they reflect the intensification of the pituco-­cholo conflict as the eighties progressed. What began as accusations in lyrics and fanzines morphed into group violence at shows and a geographic divide in venues. The memories are so many. There was the time a mob of cholo-­punks vandalized a Miraflores New Wave club thought to cater to a pituco clientele (ironically, they smashed windows at the wrong place, revealing a relative ignorance about where things are located in the ritzy Miraflores District). There is also my interview with Gabriel Bellido (2009), who confessed to carrying a gun inside his bass guitar case because of the constant threats against his band, G3. By 1988 things were unpleasant enough that those directly involved in the conflict retreated into respective city corners on opposite sides of Javier Prado. Punks associated with Eutanasia—the band that took up the anti-­ tuco position after SdeM disbanded in 1987—started holding shows at a place they called El Hueco (The Hole), located in the small district of Santa Beatriz, the family property of Eutanasia’s second bassist, Pepe “Asphyxia.” El Hueco became the gathering place for a rowdy, occasionally downright vicious, gang of punks that went by the name Bandera Negra (Black Flag). Most were from the downtrodden ’hood of Barrios Altos, located just east of Lima’s colonial center. Their propensity toward street vandalism and violence—the reasons that some consider them some sort of dangerous lumpenproletariat—is something that former Bandera Negra members don’t deny. Key members, such as Chovi and Chiki, explain it as a complex combination of things that resulted from the particular moment, a mix of anarchist-­ inspired radicalization inspired by the context of political militancy, gestures of their social resentment, and straightforward acts of self-­destruction.6 Meanwhile, several hard-­core and metal crossover punks—specifically those who felt most clearly signaled as pitucos—started holding shows at a place they called La Casa Hardcore (The Hardcore House), located in the center of the relatively well-­to-­do Barranco District. In addition to G3, multiple hard-­core bands (Sentido Común, Kaos General) played regular weekend shows there, as did a variety of thrash and metal bands (Curriculum Mortis, Hadez, and Sepulcro). Like El Hueco, La Casa Hardcore was made 65 El Problema del Pituco

possible by kinship, since the house was the family property of Raúl Andrade, who was a mere twelve years old at the time. Later, in the early 1990s, he became a member of the hard-­core band Fuerza Positiva. Other elements make the divide between El Hueco and La Casa Hardcore apparent. Police relations are the most telling. Those that frequented El Hueco recall multiple police raids and punks being detained as suspected militants on minimal evidence or simply out of guilt by association with someone else detained. Many remember a massive raid in 1993 following the police detention of El Chato Victor. El Chato Victor had gone to a Lima prison facility to visit a Bandera Negra punk nicknamed Chiki, who was serving a sentence on trumped up terrorism charges. Chiki acknowledges that he was caught with materials to make Molotov cocktails but insists on his utter disdain for Peru’s militant groups. In an interview, Chiki says he was planning an act of individual, vandalistic anger but was prosecuted on “sympathy for terrorism” charges anyway, forced to do ten years’ time alongside the very Maoist militants he detests (Valverde del Aguila, 2009). Evidence supports such memories. Take, for example, an excerpt from a fanzine titled Asco (Yuck) describing a raid that took place at a concert in December 1989 at which at least eight bands, among them Desayunados, Combustible, Anti, and Genocidio, played at El Hueco. After milling around outside for a bit and then barring entry to late arrivals, the police violently entered using force (pamphlets and fanzines were hidden or destroyed right then), some guys were able to escape through the roof. Everyone present was forced to exit the place, threatened with machine guns and ak-­47 assault rifles, then like criminals, with our backs against the wall and on the ground, we were blinded with a powerful spotlight from a parked truck. Finally, amid shouts and insults, they let the majority go and took 10 away detained (plus 2 German anarchists), beaten up and booked for the crime of being subterráneos and protesting against all the shit that surrounds us. (Anonymous 1990)

The presence of two German anarchists is curious here. The anti-­tuco contingent associated with El Hueco clearly had its own relationships with foreign actors via the global circuits of anarcho-­punk subculture despite the simplistic nationalism implied in their social resentment toward the pituco. This is also telling because ultimately three out of four members of Eutanasia emigrated to Germany after the band broke up in 1991, leading some to eventually question their commitment to an anarcho-­punk radicalism 66 Interpretation #3

rooted in Peru. These contradictions notwithstanding—and nobody’s saying the cholo-­punks were perfect—this all still suggests that El Hueco produced a police response full of suspicion, surveillance, and arbitrary arrest. By contrast, accounts of La Casa Hardcore reveal that the police had a total disinterest in the young men dressed as punks and congregating in a house that was located less than a block from the Barranco police station. The only time the police ever interfered there was in June 1989 when an annoyed neighbor called about a bottle breaking a window. Raúl Andrade, the only responsible party, recalls how he and Armando Millán (bassist of Kaos General) were taken to the police station and his parents were called. So there are no stories of raids, searches, and detentions, only of a young adolescent in trouble with a father who immediately demanded that La Casa Hardcore be closed. The point should be clear. While much of Lima was on precarious lockdown by the end of the 1980s—with armed tanks on street corners and state-­ enforced curfews—the state-­citizen relation was never exactly the same in every area. An appearance that was more cholo than pituco—more brown, less white—was its own reason for suspicion. As was the precise location of one’s daily, or nightly, activities. Police never entertained the thought that there might be militants at La Casa Hardcore—despite various rumors of involvement with militant ideologies among certain bands that played there regularly. Police routinely presumed they would find subversives at El Hueco, despite any concrete evidence that the main actors were anything other than a bunch of aggressive street punks. Fliers and fanzines became central media for commenting on the conflict in the late 1980s. The idea that Lima punks were all still subtes, participants in a scene defined by the term “rock subterráneo” was thrown into question. Fliers suggest that those in charge of El Hueco (and certain shows in downtown Lima) continued to use the term “subterráneo.” By contrast, the term never appears on show fliers for La Casa Hardcore. Instead, genre markers such as “hard-­core” and “thrash” predominate. In the fanzine Espantapajaros (Scarecrow) an interviewer asked members of Kaos General, a band that played almost exclusively at La Casa Hardcore, “What’s your position on the scene?” (Anonymous 1988). The vocalist, Alejandro Peña, responded, “We consider ourselves a hard-­core band. We’re not so-­called rock subterráneo. First, because we don’t play ‘rock,’ and, second, because we are with the people who think positively and not in self-­ destruction.” The idea that hardcore—a subgenre of punk that is a subgenre 67 El Problema del Pituco

of rock—is not rock suggests that, in reality, Peña is talking in code here. He invents a pretext to avoid talking about what was present on everyone’s mind at the time, namely the cholo-­versus-­pituco conflict. The second comment about punks with a positive, rather than self-­destructive, attitude was simply another way of speaking indirectly about peaceful pitucos and confrontational cholos. Those most frequently found at La Casa Hardcore felt wrongly accused and started avoiding the term “subterráneo” precisely because the cholo-­punks appropriated it for themselves. Figures such as Silvio “Spatula” Ferrogiaro, singer of Ataque Frontal (a later iteration of Guerrilla Urbana, one of the earliest rock subterráneo bands) stated the issue more directly. “With respect to the ‘subte’ thing, I don’t like its leaders,” he declared in the same issue of Espantapajaros. Silvio, along with his bandmate José Eduardo Matute, were actually some of the most materially privileged punks around. Ironically, they were spared the intensity of anti-­tuco attacks that bands such as G3 and Kaos General received. Regardless, they must have felt implicated. Hence, Silvio’s sardonic comment to me in an interview that he had to live with the reputation as “the richest punk in Peru” (Ferrogiaro, 2010). From his point of view, it was precisely a rebellion against his family privilege that made him want to become a punk in the first place. Matute wrote Ataque Frontal’s late 1980s battle hymn, “Ya No Formo Parte de Esto” (I’m No Longer Part of This), hoping it was possible to occupy some sort of individualist position of critique that transcended what looked like adolescent clique behavior. In an interview before he unexpectedly died in 2010, he declared all those involved in the cholo-­pituco conflict little more than “groups of imbeciles” (Matute, 2009). The organizers at La Casa Hardcore, feeling constantly accused—and on several occasions physically attacked—employed an exclusionary logic of residential refuge. Maybe one can’t blame them for wanting to hold a show in relative peace. But the language used on certain show fliers is uncomfortably similar to that used by Lima’s elite clubs and discos to prevent entry of “suspect” figures typically based on racial or class-­based cues. The appearance of the phrase “right of admission reserved” on a June 10, 1989, flier advertising a G3, Sentido Común, Bazofia, and DR Hardcore show is particularly damning. One also finds a language of “prohibition” on La Casa Hardcore fliers (see figure 3.3). There was a “Thrashcore” show in August 1988 at which kaos, Curriculum Mortis, Hadez, and DR Hardcore played. The flier for the show reads, “Prohibited: alcohol, drugs, chains, any kind of weapons.” Of 68 Interpretation #3

Figure 3.3 “Thrashcore” show flier for Jato Hardcore. Courtesy of Guillermo Figueroa Tangüis.

course, many of my interviews suggest that the real issue was the perceived threat of violence rather than a strict adherence to “straightedge.” This same flier clarifies that specific actors were prohibited, along with the unworthy characters they presumably represented, hence the reference to banning the singer of Eutanasia and his ilk (“Kike, and his anti-­tucos, resentful cowards with closed, rotten brains”). Inevitably, the maximal expression of conflict between pitu-­punks and cholo-­punks occurred in that most sweat-­filled of symbolic spaces: the mosh pit. Through a complex mix of personal recollection and urban legend, many remember something like a final showdown between pitu-­punks and cholo-­ punks during a concert held at the Reyes Rojos school in Barranco, one of few examples of lefty, alternative education in Lima. Accounts vary a bit as to which concert it was, since there were a few memorable shows held there. But it seems likely it was a show held in May 1989 featuring G3 and a Chilean metal band called Warpath that was visiting Lima. Recollections vary considerably less on what went down that night. A large group of punks—allies of Eutanasia and members of the Bandera Negra gang—showed up and entered the show, refusing to pay admission. The physical aggression that slam dancing is supposed to dissipate started to build instead and finally exploded into a form of violence clearly determined by Lima’s antagonistic social categories. El Topo, who was part of the Eutanasia crowd that night, remembers, “First, it was pushing, and then if you saw somebody that was whiter than you were, bam, just throw a punch” (Heidersdorf, 2009). The targeted punches led to retaliation from the “whiter thans,” who were in the majority and possessed the home court advantage. The fighting in the pit soon erupted into a brawl. The organizers of the concert, including the principal of Reyes Rojos, began trying to physically force the cholo-­punk crowd outside the gates of the school. The crowd responded with sticks, bats, and bottles, trying to smash their way back in. Guillermo Figueroa of G3 got trapped outside the gate in the commotion and received a severe beating as a result. Before retiring to El Hueco—­crossing back to their side of Javier Prado—the mob set ablaze a Mercedes-­Benz that was parked nearby. All of the first-­person accounts add up, whether it is that of Guillermo remembering how he got trapped outside—“Fuck, I don’t know, I was being the hero” (Figueroa, 2009)—or of Chovi, the Bandera Negra legend, expressing pride at having put his “little grain of sand” into an effort to burn a Mercedes (Caballero, 2010). Now the stuff of urban mythology, at the time these group fights were 70 Interpretation #3

Figure 3.4 “Slam o Bronca?” drawing. From Ultimos Recursos #3.

inscribed within underground ’zine and lyrical discourses that reinforced a seemingly absolute divide between pitucos and cholos. This is evident, for example, in a drawing found in the third issue of Ultimos Recursos with the rhetorical title “Slam o Bronca?” (Slam or Brawl?; see figure 3.4). It is a reference to similar fights that broke out during the 1987 Magia show, my initial point of entry into this essay. The ’zine article that accompanies the drawing laments, “We suffered some aggression in the pit” by guys who “could not bear the envy of others having fun, free of complexes and limitations.” Of course that envy of others having fun, an allusion to the resentful cholo, is relational; structurally it depends on the ideology of superiority and experiences of privilege that help give rise to it. Once again it’s a graphic code communicated through an anonymous drawing that matters more than the less-­than-­explicit discourse of the ’zine text. This is neither a mosh pit of manageable adolescent aggression nor a depiction of a fight resulting from individual excesses. To the left are the good-­ guy punks with their muscular superman poses, short and well-­kempt hair, and plaid shirts (ironically, the pitu-­punks were enamored of the Chicano-­ 71 El Problema del Pituco

punk look that emerged out of LA’s Venice Beach with the band Suicidal Tendencies). Several of them are smiling, confident they will win the war if not the battle (since at least one of them is being trampled). To the right are the bad-­guy punks. They are skinnier and so hungrier. They spit venom because they act like snakes. They pull out weapons and fight dirty. And, inevitably, they possess spiky, dingy attire and gaping mouths that express their inner animal. The story this drawing illustrates is one with multiple levels: a punk scene succumbing to group warfare; the desire to delimit a radical Other; the drive to define clear battle lines around irreconcilable differences. It tells us that Lima’s mosh pits—that most physical of symbolically charged punk spaces, that home to the frenetic antidance that gives sweaty life to buried bits of anger, insecurity, and rabidity—became little war zones. It is also a particular reference to Lima’s most telling social divisions. Relative, contextual, and abstract in certain moments, the pituco-­cholo divide proves devastating, visceral, and absolute in others. Finally, if Lima’s urban divisions appear as markedly violent here—rather than controlled and repressed, as they often are—it is because they reflect the way the war brought to the surface, through mass violence, Peru’s complex mess of racial, class, and spatial relations. This, then, is what I mean ultimately by the “problem” represented by the pituco.

The Pituco Problem José Carlos Mariátegui intended the first line in his most famous essay, “The Problem of the Indian” (initially called “Peru’s Primary Problem” in a 1924 Mundial article) to provoke. “All the theses about the indigenous problem that ignore or elude it as a socio-­economic problem are just a bunch of sterile theoretical exercises—sometimes merely verbal—condemned to be absolutely discredited” (Mariátegui 1971, 22). Mariátegui was punk like that. He was saying that everything everyone else had been saying about the Indian was total bullshit. Writing in the wake of centuries of alternately pessimistic and optimistic thought about how to solve the Indian problem, he sought to redefine it. Solving such a problem—so historically real and so theoretically abstract at the same time—was particularly relevant for a country like Peru, with its large native Andean population. But it had far-­reaching implications. The Indian was not just Peru’s primary problem but also one of the modern world’s principal subalterns: a construct generated out of Europe’s global 72 Interpretation #3

desire to materially dispossess other peoples by territorially possessing other lands only to ideologically make other subjects into an inferior version of Europe’s self-­image. Despite those Latin American traditions that praise vanquished autochthonous empires of the civilized sort (e.g., the Inca, the Maya, and the Aztec), the common, downtrodden, and brutish Indian of postconquest history came to symbolize many of Latin America’s unfinished projects: nations not yet done; a modernity stalled; isolated geographies full of backward cultures; a racial dilemma in need of a final solution. Latin American thought about the Indian—and it was all the thought about the Indian that served to obfuscate the thoughts by Indians—runs the gamut and spans centuries. Early colonial debates about whether the Indian had a soul (Fray Bartolomé de las Casas ultimately convinced Spain that the Indian was in fact a moral man) laid the foundation for their being treated as childlike figures in need of tutelage, paternalism, and protection. The colonial Christian impulse to save the Indian’s soul was eventually transmuted at the turn of the twentieth century when the site of the Indian’s moral uplift shifted from the church to the school (de la Cadena 2000). The first half of the twentieth century also witnessed the rise of indigenista intellectual and artistic efforts that sought to revalorize the Indian for the twentieth century. Mariátegui was only the socialist variant. José Sabogal represented the militant muralist version, José Vasconcelos the political philosophical approach, and José María Arguedas the suicidal literary figure. The colonial caste system—Spain’s elaborate codification of “mixed blood” peoples that gave rise to the mestizo as the primary in-­between category— assumed the Indian’s blood, like the African’s, was a toxic contaminant to the moral purity of white Christians. These protoracial differences were later elaborated, and given scientific legitimacy, amid the birth of physical anthropology and eugenics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Mestizaje was therefore written deeply, and always ambivalently, into the narratives of Latin American nationhood. It was the stuff of utopian possibility, future hopes of a perfect mix to contrast with the United States’ imperialism in the Western hemisphere. It was also a sign of racial-­cum-­cultural decline, presumably the inevitable result of miscegenation within an emerging global order that values the purity of whiteness above all else, according to race scientists such as Samuel Morton, Arthur comte de Gobineau, Gustave Le Bon, and others who wrote explicitly to justify white supremacy. Regardless, both the positive and negative narratives of mestizaje rely on at least one central idea: the mestizo is always ahead of the Indian in modernity’s timeline. 73 El Problema del Pituco

Writing in the 1920s amid the expansion of socialist and anarchist praxis in Latin America, not long after the Russian and Mexican revolutions, and determined to “heroically create” a Marxism adequate to American realities, rather than derivative of Eurocentric history, Mariátegui proposed a radical idea: the Indian, not the proletarian, is the revolutionary subject. The Indian’s primary problem was not his racial, cultural, or spiritual status but the problem of land, a material historical problem. “Land” was shorthand for several things. Mariátegui was writing at a moment when Andeans lived in essentially feudal conditions despite Peru’s formally liberal republic, their labor and land exploited by a system known as gamonalismo.7 Peru had a fledgling capitalist system on the coast, managed by Lima’s creole class, but it was completely captive to the imperial interests of British and US capital, a clear form of peripheral “dependency” before there was even a theory as such. Mariátegui’s idea that the problem of the Indian was in reality a problem of land was also a demand for analysis to begin by accounting for the historically specific relations of power through which the Indian as a dispossessed subject was created. The point was not to depart from common assumptions about an inner Indian essence defined in the terms of race, culture, or religion. The solution, Mariátegui imagined, was socialism of course. But Mariátegui never presumed that this would require a simple importation of revolutionary practices from Europe. In fact, he thought the Andean’s communal traditions, elaborately developed by the Inca state and therefore not so easily dismissed as a “primitive communism” of the evolutionary past, would serve to build autochthonous political solutions to America’s problems. Mariátegui’s brilliance was in this early attempt at a non-­Eurocentric reading of the Indian problem via a simultaneous decentering of basic Marxist assumptions. He was already thinking in terms of the postcolony when Fanon was still a newborn. His work showed an eagerness to account for power’s multiply entangled forms, a restless search to locate a creative angle, and an anarchist impulse to resist all received authority, even from the very school of thought he was most committed to. As if paralleling the race-­class analysis that W. E. B. Du Bois developed after he too was exposed to Marxism, Mariátegui (2011, 314) insisted in a famous speech prepared for the 1929 meeting of Latin American communists in Buenos Aires, “The race factor is compounded by the class factor, which revolutionary politics must take into account.” His analysis of literature and promotion of art were as central to his famous journal Amauta as any of his more political-­economic essays. The cultural dimension took on an almost spiritual quality at times, driven by Mariá74 Interpretation #3

tegui’s faith that authentic forms of aesthetic expression revealed an inner socialist spirit, a universal human being expressed through particular forms. Thinking with Mariátegui also generates problems, dilemmas that require thinking beyond and even against anyone who might follow him too blindly. There is always a distinct tension generated by abstractly theorizing historical context while living amid the influence of a particular historical moment. Mariátegui’s creative reworking of Marxism in 1920s Peru—his analysis of power as a material problem but never merely that; his thought that the Indian is subjected to but also resistive of what has been historically made of him—is an attempt to grapple with precisely this core dilemma of how to theoretically account for history while being part of its unfolding. This is why Mariátegui’s analysis of Peruvian reality, and Latin America generally, carries forward—and why it needs to be creatively remade. Mariátegui’s Marxism emerged in a Peru that was still fundamentally rural. A small Lima elite dominated politics, claimed “culture” for themselves, and held a monopoly on foreign exports and imports. Yet, the predominant social antagonism revolved around a highland region in which large landowners (gamonales) claimed the labor and land of largely illiterate Andeans as their own. This moment was thoroughly distinct from the last two decades of the twentieth century, when the Communist Party of Peru, known popularly by a name inspired by Mariátegui’s famous phrase about a “shining path toward revolution,” declared a war on the mistaken premise that Peru was still a “semifeudal” country: hence, their call for a Maoist-­inspired revolution that would move from the countryside to overtake the city. Misrecognizing historical material reality, Shining Path ideologues also missed an opportunity to theorize late twentieth-­century Peruvian reality differently. Massive historical shifts occurred during the twentieth century, reflective of broad global trends that Hobsbawm (1996) synthesizes in The Age of Extremes. All deeply related, three of these shifts are of the utmost importance. First, Peru, like most parts of Latin America, experienced a significant agrarian reform in the 1960s, effectively bringing an end to the hacienda-­ style land system that held many Andeans in peasant conditions. The peculiar outcome of one of Latin America’s only left-­populist military governments, Peru’s 1969 reform led to massive land redistribution and forced large landowners to begin seeking other forms of capital from urban centers or industrialized coastal agriculture. Amid depeasantization and failed experiments with agricultural cooperatives, most native Andeans found themselves living in isolated impoverishment despite gaining more collective land titles. 75 El Problema del Pituco

This led to a second major shift, in effect the total demographic remaking of Peru into an urban country. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, Andeans began to migrate en masse to cities, and overwhelmingly to Lima, in hopes of better opportunities. The fact that land reform was not a real economic solution to the Indian problem Mariátegui had described resulted in an intensification of the process. In 1940 the 661,508 persons living in Lima represented only 9.4 percent of the country. By 1993, Lima’s population had exploded to 6.4 million and has constituted a third of Peru’s entire population ever since (inei 1996). Massive rural-­to-­urban migration in the span of four decades, and in a country with profound geographic, racial, and cultural differences, meant a total reworking of political-­economic and social dynamics. Armies of reserve migrant laborers arrived in Lima. They invaded the sandy hillsides that surround the city’s core districts. They began to survive in the informal street economy as low-­skilled workers or in service positions for middle- and upper-­class households. They also began to demand an expansion of state infrastructure and basic services in precarious shantytowns. In short, they became reracialized as urban cholos instead of rural Indians and began to feel even more ashamed of speaking Quechua than they did in the highlands. In the third major shift, reflecting this widespread process of urbanization, Peru was witness to a tremendous expansion in secondary and postsecondary educational institutions. Countless first-­generation students, most notably those of Andean and poor mestizo backgrounds, gained access to the educational experiences, literate cultural ethos, and professional expectations associated with the middle class. Yet, the economic payoff for such education continued to prove radically limited. In fact, it was precisely the emergence of a whole generation of post-­secondary-­educated, institutionally literate, and recently urbanized young people—with no hopes of a decent job—that accounts for the origins of the Shining Path in the town of Huamanga, according to Degregori’s (1990) authoritative account. This also explains why the Shining Path found such sympathy in public university populations throughout the country, since that sector also represents those in lower classes and closer to the mestizo-­cholo pole of the racial spectrum. None of the above pertains to a context dominated by feudalistic class conditions or the early colonial relations that designated the rural Andean as Peru’s marked moral subject and primary racial other. Counter to the Shining Path’s misreading of a “semifeudal” order, other intellectuals struggled to define new social analytics and construct different narratives of late twentieth-­century Peruvian reality. As early as the midsixties, Aníbal Qui76 Interpretation #3

jano (1965) proposed that the cholo was the emergent historical actor with which Peruvian society, and therefore social science, had to grapple. This proved only the first of many attempts to redefine Peru’s primary social issue in the late twentieth century as one defined by the dynamics of choledad (“choloness”), evident in the historical shifts described above. In fact, it constituted an emergent trend that came to pervade analysis, whether implied in Matos Mar’s (1984) “popular overflow” or Vich’s (2001) ambulatory “street discourse,” or made explicit in Nugent’s (1992) “labyrinth of choloness” or Bruce’s (2007) “we’ve cholofied so much.” It is also routinely used as a means of explaining similar dynamics in neighboring Andean countries, reflecting a regional dimension on the nature of choledad (Weismantel 2001). However diverse in theoretical orientation, from psychoanalysis to postcolonial sociology, there is an updating of Mariátegui’s old problem that underlies these various approaches, one that presumably accounts for the present historical moment. The meaning of the term “cholo” has varied over time, of course. Akin to “mestizo” in certain moments (at least in so far as it too indexes a process of mixture), it ultimately imposes on the subject a subhuman quality. A cholo is a mutt, a mongrel, a dog. In a country like Peru, a cholo is not an Indian per se but an Indian per quod. Over the course of the twentieth century, then, the problem of the Indian became the problem of the cholo. Herein lies Mariátegui’s other, more serious, problem—one so serious that none of these newer proposals to redefine Andean nations in terms of choloness can address it. In truth, Mariátegui’s contact with the Indian was radically limited by his own coastal creole upbringing. His creative Marxist imagining of the Indian as the new historical subject was utterly disconnected from the Indian’s lived reality. Was it not Mariátegui (1927) who agreed with legendary indigenista writer Luis Valcárcel when he suggested that the In­dians were “waiting on their Lenin” to make a revolution possible? Didn’t he revel in his own urban contradictions from that very first essay about the Indian problem? The “solution of the Indian’s problem . . . should be the Indians themselves,” he says (Mariátegui 1924). In the very next breath he praises the Indian for making contact with “the men at the vanguard in the capital” (i.e., Lenins like himself living in Lima), only to lament the Indian’s provincial political consciousness, which he saw as not even national in scope and much less universal. “Something still very vague, still very confused, is being sketched out in this human nebula that probably, surely, contains the seeds of the future of the nation” (Mariátegui 1924). Even in Mariátegui’s 77 El Problema del Pituco

radically new Marxist proposal, the Indian is constructed as historically passive, lacking enough political awareness to become revolutionarily independent, even when the vanguard from the capital city places on the Indian this ridiculous burden of representing the world’s new revolutionary subject. This solution of renaming the problem—yesterday’s Indian is today’s cholo—proves in the end to be a reinscription of another quite serious problem, one more obscured by the ideology that constantly wants the Indian to be the most visible subject of Andean history. The deep-­seated paternalism once reserved for the Indian reappears in contemporary declarations that Peru must now solve the problem of the cholo, which is merely the updated version of the problem of the Indian that was never really solved. Lest we forget an essential point: it is a position of privilege that allows one to define the problems of another, with the implicit intellectual pretension to solve them, in the first place. This logic—so old and familiar but rarely brought to the surface—overlooks a completely different solution. I am here to simply vomit out a different problem, an idea that Sociedad de Mierda’s anti-­tuco anthem from 1985 inspired. Why not just invert how the problem gets named? The primary problem of Peru is the problem of the pituco. The pituco with domestic servants at home. The pituco who thinks it isn’t really rape when he rapes his domestic servant at home. The pituco who goes for a weekend getaway on one of Peru’s exclusive southern beaches with domestic nannies in tow to give little pitucos everything they want. The pituco who frequents the exclusive dance club, or the ritzy sports club, or the Turkish baths with little security boxes for large wallets, or the high-­end restaurant with the brown or black guardian who pushes away brown and black street sellers that might annoy the customers, or the expensive brothel with the mix of cute little cholas and wannabe blondes to choose from—rights of admission reserved and good appearance required. The pituca who strolls the shopping mall knowing she is there to buy stuff and not to loiter wanderingly. The pituco who has a late afternoon snack at the overpriced cafe by the roundabout in the center of Miraflores, ensuring that the consumption is conspicuous. The pituco who has a pool and a Mercedes and a bodyguard and a small fortress-­like structure in La Molina made to seem minimal by calling it mi jato. The pituco who doesn’t have a well-­paying job or all that much money but enough inherited property and cultural skills to get by. The pituco who pronounces the English word “brother” as “broder” and inserts it into every third sentence. The pituco who likes to leave Lima in order 78 Interpretation #3

to leave Peru. The pituco who thinks Lima is the same as Peru anyway. The pituco disguised in cholo’s clothing. The pituco who now wears the hipster cholo clothing brand to prove he is not a pituco. The pituco who goes to the center of Lima looking like a cholo so he doesn’t get robbed. The pituco who never goes to the center of Lima because there’s too many cholos hanging around there. The pituco who must go to the center of Lima because that’s where the presidential palace, Congress, and all of the ministries are. Somebody has to run a country full of cholos! The pituco who swears up and down he really is just another cholo. The pituco, or the president, or lots of different intellectuals, who mobilize intellectual or political arguments to justify the idea that at the end of the day everyone in Peru is a cholo, even though with no opposite the term ceases to make sense. The pituco who pads his genealogy with as many references to the Andean provinces as possible in order to shed the embarrassment of having the privileges of a pituco. The pituco who has so many cool things to talk about with his gringo cousin when he arrives in Lima but treats all of the overprivileged gringo tourists like shit. Because the pituco doesn’t really need the gringo’s attention anyway. The pituco has enough attention to go around. The pituco has at least twenty times the attention of any cholo, since every four Indian witnesses counted the same as one single Spaniard in colonial courts. History has a way of multiplying problems instead of solving them. I mean, damn, I’d say the pituco has become a really big problem. I’m a gringo, I can relate. Is there a solution to the problem of the pituco in Peru? Should you exterminate the pituco and all pituco kind? How do you know you’ve got them all when there are so many of them and they appear in these different guises, shapes, places, and sizes, across so many different contexts? Pituco one moment, not pituco the next. Bad pituco today, nice pituco tomorrow. Plus, the pituco usually has a lot of security around. It might be difficult and dangerous and, if the history of the Shining Path tells us anything, most of yesterday’s Indians and today’s cholos would die in the process. It’s time to try imagining a different solution to this vomited-­up inversion of a problem. Sociedad de Mierda presented one such solution at the end of their anti-­ pituco anthem. It came in the form of a familiar Spanish insult attached to a now legendary lyric: “Rot you pituco—reconchatumadre!” Again, there’s no need to translate because there is no adequate equivalent in English slang. The easy thing would be to draft it as “motherfucker” and let it go, except the logic and therefore the solution would all be wrong. Maybe there are certain similarities between the Spanish and English words, starting with the severe 79 El Problema del Pituco

degree of vulgarity. Both also make reference to some sort of sexualized dimension of one’s mother. Yet, unlike other mother-­related profanity—hijo de puta and “son of a bitch,” for example—the insult is not really intended for the mother or for the feminine gender in general. “Reconchatumadre” and “motherfucker” are squarely directed at the subject being insulted, often a masculine object of disgust. This is where the similarities end. “Motherfucker” results in something melodramatically bourgeois in the end, worthy of psychoanalysis. The term carries insult because it implies that you are a scumbag who fucks your own mother, like Oedipus. By contrast, we have to break reconchatumadre down into re (a prefix connoting emphasis), concha (“pussy”), tu (“your”), and madre to figure out what the hell is going on. The term is in fact just an abbreviated version of the original phrase, and that is where its real intention is revealed: Ándate a la concha de tu madre (“Go back to your mother’s pussy”). So, sure, the mother is probably not completely free from harm here. But, in reality, the whole point is that this constitutes an act of repudiation. Go back to before you were born. It represents profanity because you demand of your insulted object a return to a moment of nonexistence. From the great depths of that large reservoir of real resentment born from systemic inequalities, from all that complex ideology in which stating Peru’s Indian problem is tantamount to saying Peru’s problem is having too many Indians, from all the intrepid philosophizing about how and when the Indian transformed into a cholo in order to transform Peru, Sociedad de Mierda ushered in a different era. Pituco—cease to exist! No one says SdeM was infallible or without its own contradictions; cholos also dress in pituco clothing. The members of the band weren’t anybody’s hero, and they were definitely not the Lenins from Lima that yesterday’s Indians, and today’s cholos, are supposedly waiting for. They were just eighties subtes, some angry and rowdy punk kids, the ones ready to say something that no one else was saying and needed to be purged. But a new day dawned; a new Peru was thought possible; different solutions for differently named problems could be imagined. This was what had to be done: to name the pituco the problem and then, because they were punks, despise the pituco as a thing, repudiating power, detesting privilege in all its corrupt and hideous existence. Don’t get so upset, poor pituco—that is not my intention. I know how you feel. I am your gringo cousin after all. I’ll even be your broder. I come 80 Interpretation #3

with a blue passport that provides easy access to your cholo country. I arrive with an interpretation for why you feel so deeply accused by and so in denial of accepting yourself as part of Peruvian reality. Power and privilege might go by other names elsewhere. But el pituco is the primary problem of Peru.

82 Interpretation #3

re: interpretation #4 is a fire, e u g n o t e h t traitor an agent, a Y si mover la lengua quieren, mis vecinas y mis tías, que vengan conmigo un día, que a moverla mejor yo les puedo enseñar. María T-­ta I myself am somewhat dubious that a punk counterpublic can be constructed within academia. Editor of an academic journal

This “Interpretation” has a funky history. I begin with a brief retrospective regarding its three prior lives because I detect a danger in silencing echoes of the voices associated with them. I won’t dwell either. Telling the full story makes it about my habits of provocation, a less enticing adventure than exploring the ambiguities of punk, militancy, language, and gender in mideighties Peru. So I’ll move toward a reinterpretation, this fourth act in a longer play. Per prior efforts, I maintain a heavy focus on María T-­ta, though toward the end Támira Bassallo helps me think differently through the contradictions of difference that Peruvian reality entails. For a brief time in the eighties, T-­ta and Támira were the two most visible women performers among a small handful in the subte scene. Writing songs with guitarist Iván “Zurriburri” Santos, T-­ta put the rock in punk as front woman of the band Empujón Brutal (Brutal Push). Támira played bass in various groups, including alongside T-­ta on occasion. As a singer with a more ethereal voice, and maybe because she was an art history major, she veered toward the “post-­” in punk with her bands Salón Dadá and Col Corazón (Cabbage Heart). Both made total departures from Lima’s underground scene by the close of the eighties. Patricia Roncal, the birth name behind T-­ta’s stage name, immigrated to Germany and cut ties with Peru entirely; it was only recently that her mother reported that she died in 2012 (Mejía Vergara 2014). Támira still lives in Lima, but she

also distanced herself from all things subte until about 2009, when she began trying to recover her bands’ isolated recordings. My first approach to T-­ta sought a postpornographic conversation on punk and sex positivism, inspired by T-­ta’s distinct fondness for vulgarity and the Manifiesto Contrasexual of queer theorist Beatriz (now Paul B.) Preciado (2002). With ambitions as pretentious as placing a “post-­” in front of something, the exercise was doomed to fail at getting past anything, at least some of the time. Various Anglo academic venues (seven to be precise) saw the voice as too glib or simply “inappropriate,” the essay mired in normative assumptions about (women’s) bodies and wishful sexual thinking. Meanwhile in Colombia, a cultural studies journal published a Spanish language version of the text with no request for revisions (cf. Greene 2012b). A few years later, this same piece is cited in Peru’s popular press as a punkish celebration of T-­ta before her death become public knowledge (Bazo 2013; Hare 2014). Also notable, a collaborative group of feminist cultural studies scholars working in Mexico understand the piece as an attempt to theorize punk feminism while “writing radically” and engage in an “analysis that is critical” but also comes from the “margin” that questions the norm and incites one to “sin” (Garzón Martínez et al. 2014, 168). A small bilingual public at the Instituto Tepoztlán in Mexico heard me verbally perform a second, scaled-­down version of this piece in the Spanish voice of a subte; they understood it as provocation for its own sake and a bit like comic relief from the scholarly doldrums. In a third attempt, I rewrote the thing as a parody of the masculine/feminine dichotomy that structures gender hierarchies and compulsory heterosexuality—something like a “missed encounter” between the sexually self-­conscious “punk girl” and the emotionally self-­absorbed “punk boy.” Those who happen to be familiar with my character read this one as in character. But an anonymous reader of the book manuscript saw it as fatally flawed in its failure to create a proper scholarly dialogue with the many possible interlocutors working at the intersection of gender and punk and (again) just too much sexually wishful thinking. One could enter the terrain of why the experiments appear to work better over “there” (in Latin America) than right “here” (in Anglo America), where I write this reinterpretation. Maybe it is easier to imagine a man celebrating punk feminism, rather than simply lusting after predictable body parts, when he uses the exact same malas palabras (“bad words”) that his “subject” was screaming on stage, or those already articulated as scholarly arguments 84 Interpretation #4

(I thought I was playing around with Preciado’s vulgar queer theory). Maybe something gets lost the moment that same man reveals his dirty gringo side, the one that forces his Spanish-­speaking interlocutors into the imperial English (also the language in which Anglo readers were grappling with my apparently wishful sexual thinking). Then again, I am equally happy to conclude I’m neither the postest of postpornographers nor the mostest of master parodists. I was definitely schooled on a thing or two along the way. Yet another certainty I learned is that my audiences, destined to interpret these seven Interpretations differently, also revealed (and at times revel in) their own differences. Sex and gender are but two on a much longer list. For this fourth act of and re: interpretation, I went back to the earlier iterations, the published, performed, and perished ones, and kept landing on this one recurring line about María T-­ta. It never changed, though most everything around it has: “It’s really her lyrical abilities—the way she uses her tongue, la lengua peruana—that allow us to fully entertain the punkness of her feminist message.” I want to indicate that this is not the first time the thought occurred to me, that it was there all along. If I am to start over again with María T-­ta, it is to continue insisting she represents a radical singularity in need of our attention, within the subte scene and across the general ambit of gender politicking at the time. It’s not that she was the only woman involved in underground rock in Lima, a fact that other women’s actions will document as this essay proceeds. The point is that she was the only punk that was so damn profanely funny about the wondrous struggles of womanhood. Her singular status starts with an avoidance of the plural in her symbolically somatic stage name. “T-­ta” stands for teta, the Spanish word for “tit.” She liked to clarify that this was a default because María “Pussy” was already taken.1 Here, I argue that this unique staging of Mary’s “tit” (and heretofore any and all aforementioned claims to “pussy”) is a provocative performance of distraction from what always mattered most: the tongue. As evidence, I submit this curious portrait of María T-­ta from 1986 (see figure 4.1), one to which I return later for more exhaustive commentary. As an image of departure, the photograph already suggests the tongue’s ability to produce some seriously sensual symbolic entanglements. i do declare: The tongue is a thing with purpose in this world, one full of figurative and fleshy articulations worth exploring! In this simultaneous being a thing and doing of things, the tongue is also hell-­bent on saying some things about histories of struggle over gender, domination, and forms of alterity. What if, via this 85 The Tongue Is a Fire

Figure 4.1 María T-­ta, 1986. Photo by Dalmacia Ruiz-­Rosas. Courtesy of Dalmacia Ruiz-­Rosas.

image of T-­ta titillating us with her tongue, she is suggesting I consider how the tongue is more generally relatable to matters of voice and fire, matters of body and agency, and also matters of difference and betrayal?

Matters of Voice and Fire The tongue—this thing we all have in our mouth—is a figure of fire. The deep etymological significance of the Latin lingua of language, also la lengua of the Spanish lenguaje, exists because of its literal vitality in the ongoing physical production of communication. Linguistics tells us that the anatomical apparatus that produces the voice is buried in the body; it emanates from down in the throat, past the larynx, and well into the lungs. There are multiple articulators (palate, teeth, tongue, lips, nasal cavity, etc.) that provide phonetic shape to our specific voices before they exit the bodily interior and enter the worldly exterior where another awaits to make a moment of communication (or miscommunication) happen. Like nails, skin, and hair, lips are not in the body but on it. They are like our clothes, or part of a “social skin,” says Terrence Turner (1980), representing this hardened exterior surface that continually confronts the outside and everyone in it (this is why we color, tattoo, pierce, and otherwise draw attention to them). The tongue is by far the most flexible articulator, the one that moves in every 86 Interpretation #4

imaginable direction to issue the phonemes a particular language demands (the jaw’s movement is sophomoric by comparison). The tongue is the spark in our speech. It is also the tongue—and only the tongue—that has the unique power to hide inside the body in one moment and then appear as an unmistakable protuberance the next. It goes forth out of the mouth when it wants to and retreats back inside its hidey-­hole when desired or required to do so, surrounded by the mouth and protected by the teeth. So the tongue is more than an articulator. Like the voice, it is a mediator of self and the world of others outside it. It is similar to the voice in the sense that it too begins inside the body and extends outside of it into a waiting public. Unlike the voice, the tongue’s materiality is a lot more self-­evident; there’s no need to know anything about sound waves to relate to its physicality. The voice’s relative invisibility is overcome by the tongue’s straightforward thingamajigity. Despite all the divergent strands in feminist thought, one consistently unifying theme is a problem of voice, as Deborah Cameron (1990) points out in the very act of bringing together distinct feminist voices. Who gets to speak and who is silenced? Speak in what genre or tone? With what words deployed as generics and universals? On whose literal or figurative terms? Matters of voice represent a recurring dilemma. To speak of them is to speak in some kind of feminist lingua franca, with a certain kind of frankness, of the feminist tongue. Any number of feminists from diverse times and places come to mind. Due to certain anarchist leanings, Emma Goldman comes to mine: “I began to speak. Words I had never heard myself utter before came pouring forth, faster and faster. They came with passionate intensity; they painted images of the heroic men on the gallows, their glowing vision of an ideal life, rich with comfort and beauty: men and women radiant in freedom, children transformed by joy and affection. The audience had vanished, the hall itself had disappeared; I was conscious only of my own words, of my ecstatic song” (Goldman 1931, 51). It was an act of writing about one of her first political actions of public speaking, stirred to do so by the Haymarket affair that saw several anarchists hanged after Chicago protests over the working day turned violent. Another anarcho-­figure, both disputer and defender of Goldman, made the connection between the power of her speeches and the fieriness of her tongue. Contrasting her own voice as being more “cold, calculated,” Voltairine de Cleyre (1894) declared to a Philadelphia audience that Goldman possessed a “tongue of fire.” 87 The Tongue Is a Fire

I think I’d get along with Goldman because she uses the voice her fiery tongue produces to say things even the most radical of audiences—feminists, sexologists, socialists, anarchists—don’t really expect to hear. Her public defense of alternative sexualities bothered many anarchists. Yet, her rebuttal of sexologists intent on celebrating Frencho anarcho-­feminist Louis Michel’s presumed lesbianism was also a critique of the wishful side of identity politics. She impolitely asked the suffragettes to face their statist liberal assumptions. And her speeches to the “working man”—like the one she describes above—left him “speechless” because she sometimes didn’t bother to talk about the working day. Her tongue was committed to setting fires, engaging in provocation as its own end, rather than to articulating a voice full of easily defendable or expected positions. Emma was punk like that. Within studies of punk “proper”—a weird term to have to use in reference to something that intends to be improper—there is much said on the matter of feminism, fiery tongues, and discordant voices. There is nothing so useful here as Jayna Brown’s thoughts on British punk’s oft-­remembered “white riot” (à la the Clash). Brown marks the unmarked masculinity behind punk anger. Unlike many emotions attributed to femininity, she says, anger is presumed masculine because of its easy associations with “performances of rebellion, militant resistance, and insurrection” (2011, 457). By contrast, she hears a distinctly “brown girl” rage in the voices of Poly Styrene (X-­Ray Spex) and Annabella Lwin (Bow Wow Wow). As immigrant daughters, each possesses a biography that also refuses England’s white desire to pretend that the racist imperial past in Asia and Africa is over, bringing the rage of race into their voices of feminist anger. Brown’s term “performances of . . .” is my point of departure because it draws attention to the distinct lack of “actually existing” militant insurrection in the British context she’s describing. There is still much about organized political violence that is performative. But the viscerality of violence, not to mention the life-­and-­death stakes, makes for something quite distinct. The canonically alienated white man moment of the Clash belting out “White Riot” to London crowds, and the angry brown girl that interrupts his monologue by getting “in the ring” (Brown’s unexplained boxing metaphor) don’t exactly translate to Peruvian reality amid an open battle for the state. There are distinct effects on bodies, affect, and voices to consider. In war-­torn Peru anger was never generically masculine. It was coded as part of a rising crescendo of the peoples’ fury, a reservoir of resentful rage accumulated after centuries of colonial and neocolonial abuse. The Shining 88 Interpretation #4

Figure 4.2 “Break the Chains, Unleash the Fury of the Woman,” Shining Path propaganda, 1980s.

Path articulated this as a central tenet in revolutionary ideology, a motivation to get involved in the struggle to overtake the state and create a new society. This anger was also explicitly gender inclusive. Shining Path is one of remarkably few insurgencies to place women in high ranks within the party’s decision-­making structure and successfully incorporate women as armed militants, mostly women from provincial Andean and poor urban migrant backgrounds (Kirk 1997). Organizers did this by explicitly invoking a “feminine fury” to be channeled toward revolutionary aims, as can be seen in political fliers used to recruit women (see figure 4.2). The feminine fury the Shining Path “unleashed” during the eighties did not translate into a more generally progressive gender or sex politics. Leadership under Gúzman (his first and then second wife always playing the part of “first lady”) was a decidedly patriarchal affair, the “party” ultimately a sad Marxist twist on Peru’s conservative Catholic culture in which father and familia are paramount. Revolutionary ideology explicitly forbade homosexuality, and leaders also encouraged militants to couple up, cut former ties to those not loyal to the Maoist cause, but not to propagate. In fact, women militants were often forced to abort (rearing children was a “distraction” from the priority of armed struggle). Although also formally prohibited in revolutionary ideology, sexual violence against women was a tactic used by all parties in the conflict and not just the signature sin of a repressive state appa89 The Tongue Is a Fire

ratus (Henríquez Ayin 2006). Engagement with feminist thought existed via the Movimiento Femenino Popular (Popular Feminine Movement). But the Shining Path’s “feminine” leadership (and note the avoidance of the word “feminist”) considered gender struggle a secondary contradiction, one presumably magically resolved once the “real” problems of land, production, and class were overcome. By contrast, Lima was a hub of transnational feminist and queer movements that began developing in the late seventies throughout the region. After a first in Bogotá in 1981, the second major “Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounter” took place in Lima in 1983. The main agenda was a critique of patriarchy as manifested in church, family, and sexuality. It also evolved into a debate about internal politics within the movement, specifically the need for the creation of separate spaces to talk about lesbianism and obligatory heterosexuality (Restrepo and Bustamante 2009). These are crucial details required to understand why María T-­ta brought a radically distinct proposal into Peru’s mideighties moment. Born Patricia Roncal, of a Chilean mother and a Peruvian father, T-­ta grew up in the middle-­class Lima neighborhood of Lince. While attending Lima’s premiere art academy, she formed the band Empujón Brutal in 1986 with guitarist Iván “Zurriburri” Santos. In an old interview, she describes this as trying to assure that “the participation of women be more active” in the subte scene, specifically by composing lyrics and occupying the vocalist spot (see T-­ta 1987). She notes repeatedly that women are “the first victim of violence” and reveals that she is primarily motivated by the free expression that rock allows. “Only dead people and mutes don’t use vulgarity,” she says, suggesting that she employs the voice of the “indecent” woman with political purpose. Then, at one point, she suddenly declares that none of this means “going so far as to become a militant in feminism.” Fabiola Bazo (2014) suggests that this distancing from the word feminismo is common because in Spanish the term can be misunderstood as a direct inversion of “machismo” (a main object of feminist critique), generating the awkward assertion of women’s superiority. This is certainly plausible given the transparent ways that Spanish, like most romance languages, is so decisively gendered, most notably in the rules that govern nouns and adjectives (i.e., the a vs. o rule). I would emphasize instead T-­ta’s distance from the phrase “become a militant.” She was not adverse to collaboration with self-­identified feminists. The 90 Interpretation #4

best example comes from her fanzine, artistically rendered as · de placer (Pleasure Point) and directed against ma/fa/chistas (fascists/machistas), as the cover clarifies. In a 1986 issue T-­ta includes interviews with her bandmates, a tribute to Nina Hagen, artistic renderings of her lyrics, and a handwritten text titled “Computo Feminista Mujer Joven” (Feminist Calculations of a Young Woman). The manifesto-­like manuscript appears under the name Katia Ovulo (Katie Ovary). According to several sources, the author of the text was a young woman active in the Movimiento Feminista Flora Tristan, Lima’s main feminist movement at the time. Ovulo was part of subte circles because she was dating a musician in the fusion band Seres Van (Beings Go). The musician was later brutally assassinated in 1989 after being rounded up by military during a paro armado, one of the armed strikes organized by Shining Path supporters. Ovulo spent more than a decade in prison, having been accused of terrorism. Her text displays the distinct tone of militancy. Yet, unlike the gender simplification characteristic of Shining Path’s “feminine” leadership, this text evidences a more complex understanding. It explicitly argues for resistance to the monopoly of private property and patriarchal repression of women as a dual priority rather than reducing one form of struggle to the other: “We will struggle against the values of the bourgeois family, against the moral and religious onslaught that has castrated millions of women. We will struggle against the sexual division of labor, against the sexist language that is a sign of the machista psychology that informs us” (Ovulo 1986, 28). By contrast, María T-­ta was reacting against the atmosphere of violent anger and the visceral commitments that accompany militant insurrections when they become something more than “performances of . . .” With occasional growls and screeches inserted, T-­ta’s voice generally transmits an intentionally sarcastic sugariness, one driven by her flare for humor rather than an exhibition of anger. Like Goldman, T-­ta stood up, grabbed a mic, and refused to say what Peruvian audiences expected to hear: just another version of youthful rage or the explicitly furious language of the militant’s emotional discharge. Her iconoclasm starts with her self-­definition, one that comically refuses all of the major political discourses operating in Peruvian reality at the time. In the sardonic song “La Desbarrancada” about a girl gone over the edge (desbarrancar means “to go off a cliff ” but she also refers to the Lima district of Barranco, known for middle-­class bohemianism), T-­ta goes on this verbal jaunt: 91 The Tongue Is a Fire

Since I was born in the capital I think I’m a capitalist. But since I’m not a common girl I’m not a communist. Since I fuck Marcos I must be a Marxist. And since I fool around with a black guy I’m not a racist. But I won’t let them convince me so I’ll never be conventional.

Intent on creating a space for punk humor, T-­ta composed masterful lyrics in a way that no other subte did. Avoiding the angry literalism common among subte bands (and hard-­core punk in general), she engaged primarily in genres of comical discourse that rely on exaggeration (i.e., caricature, stereotype, parody, mockery, and sarcasm). Her lyrics involve such complex wordplay that most of the laughter is lost in translation. A crucial example is the song “El Amor Es Gratis” (Love Is Free): (Verse 1) And my momma says, “As long as you don’t remove your mask you’ll get married one day, you’ll see, and you’ll avoid walking down Arequipa Avenue.” And my poppa says, “You will come home early, go to bed alone, and not be on the streets without your brother.” My grandma tells me that in the time of Pepita the little whores were not like this. And all my cousins and aunts gossip with the neighbors, asking, “What is she up to now?” And my girlfriends ostracize me with their jealousy and their envy; they can’t even imagine what it’s like to have a pussy. Squatting and hiding and confused, but just trying to enjoy life with my boyfriend [mi costillo]. Our knees are really hurting!!!! (Chorus) I know what I want, I know what I want, I know what I want. It doesn’t cost anything and it doesn’t cause anybody pain. (Verse 2) I tell my mom that I prefer to ride a motorcycle even if it leaves my dress all tattered and my butt all battered.

92 Interpretation #4

Dad, who do you sleep with other than mom while she’s in the kitchen and never finds out? Grandma, if I’m gonna stay single I don’t wanna get old without tasting life’s sweet delights [manjar].2 And if my aunts and neighbors want to use their tongues they should come out with me one day and I’ll teach them to use them even better. And if my girlfriends have no idea what a pussy without stomach cramps is they should come out with me one day and get to know a black guy [mandinga].3 Me and my boyfriend we get tired of kissing and groping each other without our pants down and getting scared as shit. And that shouldn’t bother you and it if does . . . tough shit!!

The song is a general indictment of the patriarchal family that represses young women’s bodies and minds that also reveals the particularities of its social structures (an extended family and neighbors in contrast to the nuclear unit typical to the North) and clear contradictions (Avenida Arequipa is a well-­known site of Lima’s street prostitution). Her provocation proves especially powerful in the realm of sexual desire, which T-­ta identifies as a site of pleasurable resistance. Sex is what she wants even though everyone says her body is not hers to do with as she pleases. Here we should note the doubleness of T-­ta’s tongue, its dual role in the hot pleasures of oral sex (via the lesson she offers to aunts and neighbors) and its fiery necessity in the provocative language game she wants to win. The most delightful detail occurs at the precise moment T-­ta inverts the gender generics of Spanish by subverting the sexist specifics of Peru’s colloquial speech forms in a single line. When she refers to the boyfriend in the song, she terms him mi costillo, or “my rib.” There are three crucial readings here. At the first, most basic structural level, T-­ta feigns a misspelling to invert the gender of the word, substituting the masculine “o” for an “a” since la costilla is conventionally feminine. Second, and more specifically, she is mocking the everyday term that a Peruvian man historically uses to refer to a woman partner as “my rib.” The expression relies on the biblical absurdity of God creating Eve from Adam’s own body, one of many origin stories that perpetuate the image of woman as derivative helper to man in God’s grand plan. Third, back at the level of structural play, T-­ta’s ironic masculinization of the word results in a subversion of the gendered relations of linguistic-­ cum-­bodily possession. The boyfriend-­as-­her-­rib is subject to the sting of be93 The Tongue Is a Fire

coming her possessed bodily object, via her linguistic mastery, and forced to deal with her claim to be what she wants. In short, T-­ta is engaged in a familiar feminist fight to contest the way language allows the masculine to remain unmarked or stand in “innocently” as the universal, about which Cameron (1985; 1990; 1995) has written extensively. T-­ta does so addressing the generic problem of gendered thought implicit in all Spanish while simultaneously revealing the deeply sexist dimensions of everyday speech used by a Peruvian audience that is mostly macho. She does it in the register of play, trying to provoke laughter rather than express anger. In the 1980s, many young Peruvians entered a distinct historical moment of rage, many furious women explicitly included. T-­ta wondered instead: What if we joke our way out of this? The spark of her talented tongue helped articulate a unique voice, but it also mediated a peculiar punk personality, truly the only one that defined laughter as its own form of liberation.

Matters of Body and Agency The tongue—this thing we all have in our mouth—is a figure of fire, always engaged in material activities. Tasting, flipping, turning, licking, sticking out, doing circles, flicking wildly, pushing forward, making that weird semicircle, making the irksome w shape, retreating backward, moving up, going down, constantly adventuring to and fro, in then out. We imagine doing, and actually do, all kinds of things with our tongues, including some we are not ready to admit or those we are lucky enough to find ourselves doing. The tongue is a beautiful beast bursting with this physical propensity to constantly make something happen. Unlike other parts of the fleshy bodies we inhabit, especially those that mistakenly get pitted as passive, we experience the tongue as a decidedly active agent. This thing, the tongue, does its things in relation to our own body and in various relations with the bodies of others. These others might call our tongue long, subtle, hard, assertive, short, sharp, dry, pretty, pink, subversive, derisive, conversant, blue, transversal, purplish, tenuous, divergent, ugly, sexy, pointy, spotted, spoiled, true, silver, stinky, cold, pierced, dirty, soft, or sticky. However its character gets considered and cared for, or is called “uncalled for” and outright condemned, the tongue is determined to do something in the world. The way the tongue’s symbolic capaciousness merges messily with its material capacity, especially the naughty things it does in certain sex maneu94 Interpretation #4

vers, has been explored in the queer feminism of Dianne Chisholm (1995). Chisholm’s provocations are clear from her title “The ‘Cunning-­Lingua’ of Desire.” She intends the title as more than an analytical encounter with writer Mary Fallen and the porno-­erotic play with language in the lesbian stories of Working Hot. Chisholm calls what she’s doing, with an author she is attracted to, “litclit” for that reason. Her tongue is not in her cheek. She demands the reader feel it darting around other spaces of bodily happenings. I’m not inclined to follow Chisholm into the Deleuzian fractal world that results in her peculiar feminist psychoanalysis. There’s nothing with more potential to go wrong than the man who already made a so-­so (post) porno deciding to throw in some psychoanalysis. Yet, at a basic level Chisholm does encourage us to think about the fact that the tongue does considerably more than articulate the voice or act merely as “representation of ” communication. The tongue is a thing in a thingy world. As a thing it does things, materially speaking, in the world of objects, bodies, organisms, spaces, and the many relations between them. Its somatic activities and semiotic adventures are so deeply entangled that trying to separate them is kind of pointless. The tongue’s symbolic fire is its physical force; its figurative power is also its visceral flare. Let’s return then to that curious picture of María T-­ta from the beginning of this essay, the one with her tongue sticking out at the camera (see figure 4.1). This picture appeared with a short article about the subte scene in a supplement of the radical left newspaper El Diario in 1986. It was the very same paper that broke off from a predecessor, El Diario Marka, in 1985 and evolved into a clandestine mouthpiece for Shining Path militancy, at least until President Fujimori’s 1992 “self-­coup” led to an all-­out hunt to destroy the remaining elements of the militant press.4 This particular portrait of María T-­ta is both more obscure, and substantially more dangerous, when compared with the more widely circulated images of her that first appeared in Peru’s most popular weekly magazine, Caretas, in 1987. There she was the feature in a rather sardonic article about the subte scene, and appears with two staged images taken by photographer Alejandro Balaguer (see figures 4.3 and 4.4; Bedoya 1987). In these more iconic images, T-­ta calls attention to the explicitness of her body politick. She reclaims the sexualized body as hers to do with as she pleases. (This performative praxis places her in the long history of sex positivist feminism that has been ongoing since at least the 1960s.) In figure 4.3 she does so with a strange mix of seduction, subtlety, and surprise. The cha95 The Tongue Is a Fire

Figure 4.3 María T-­ta, 1987. Photo by Alejandro Balaguer. Courtesy of Caretas.

Figure 4.4 María T-­ta, 1987. Photo by Alejandro Balaguer. Courtesty of Caretas.

otic collage in the background and the ecstatic look on her face divert attention from the subtle, but not so subtle, statement she’s making in the center of the image. A glove missing the middle finger, a naked finger placed on a bass guitar, an anxious hand hovering above more intimate parts, she gestures toward the activity of self-­pleasure that defies the apparent passivity of a woman lying supine. In figure 4.4 she is back to asserting that her main pleasure is playfulness, including the games of sexual objectification. She translates the dirty slang of her stage name into its clownish counterpart, an inflatable appendage plastically out of proportion with any marketable sexiness. Teta becomes the parody of the tetona, the woman heaving large breasts into the lens of the camera “man” that stands ready to produce an image for the gaze of the everyman. Soft porno shots of a mostly exposed seductress (basically, the “hottie” of the day, week, or month) are a routine feature in Peruvian periodicals, in97 The Tongue Is a Fire

cluding the “respectable” journalistic sort like the weekly magazine in which these photos appear. By thrusting one gigantic clown boob into the camera, rather than two miraculously sculpted tits that the hetero man awaits with jaw ready to drop, T-­ta reaches into her repertoire and pulls out some feminist slapstick. Yet, in both cases she performs this punk feminism in front of a man holding a camera at one of Lima’s most powerful media enterprises. The degree of collaborative support versus confrontational strain needed to construct the imagery is unclear. Given the less-­than-­congratulatory tone of the other man, the journalist writing the article, I’m not inclined to think it was the former. The less-­circulated image of T-­ta sticking out her tongue is a variation on her bodily theme but one that opens up some different registers, starting with the fact that it appeared in the most radically leftist periodical during a war over Peru’s possible socialist future. Unlike the Caretas images, staged from start to finish, this photo was a candid shot taken by Dalmacia Ruiz Rosas, who worked at a competing magazine (Oiga) at the time. More importantly, Ruiz Rosas was part of a small cadre of older bohemian poets, those involved in an early eighties collective known as Kloaka, that sought to document the youthful spontaneity of the subte scene as it emerged. Whatever other gazing publics T-­ta encountered, in this particular instance she was clearly performing in front of a camera wielded by another free-­spirited rebellious woman. In fact, when I spoke to Dalmacia about the photograph, the first thing she said about her friendship with María T-­ta was they were compinches, a term that clearly indicates mischievous forms of collusion. At the most immediate level, the image represents this instantaneous concoction of feminist complicity, one underwritten by the joint adventures of a tiny feminine minority jostling for a voice, and a means of autonomous representation, among a decisive masculine majority in the subte scene. In Dalmacia’s photo, T-­ta is also her playful self. But this image captures something that the more posed shots do not, a sudden spontaneity less weighted down by the calculations of intent and more open to my re: interpretation. I suggest it represents a moment in which T-­ta’s feminist performance veers into that place of curious “switch points” between punk rock and queer culture. The term “switch point” is not mine and belongs to Tavia Nyong’o (2008). Following a first piece by Nyong’o (2005) that left little doubt about punk’s colorfully queer genealogies in the United States—the term’s long-­standing associations with men’s prison sex, as part of black speech forms, and with men’s prostitution in general—he started using this 98 Interpretation #4

railroad metaphor. A switch point is that place on the tracks where punk and queer overlap but don’t conflate. They share an enemy in normativity and a common desire to transgress it. But this doesn’t mean they share the exact same destination, resulting in a convergence that is also a divergence, or a going that way versus going this way after starting from the same originating point. T-­ta’s protruding tongue then is not a statement about radical cultural otherness or a simple act of weirdness. She’s not eating enemies or somatically saying something about the power of speech or the generative potential of the penis in the way Maori men do in indigenous New Zealand.5 She’s not declaring the lack of a black tongue with evil intent as if she were a Tibetan Buddhist. She’s also not playing the part of the quirky scientific genius as Einstein once famously did for the camera. T-­ta’s switch point is intriguing because it is issued from within rock subterráneo’s process of global transubculturation, this simultaneous going under while going across the world of popular cultures (cf. Interpretation #1). It is impossible to look at this image, know T-­ta is in dialogue with seventies and eighties rock culture, learn the photographer is one of few other women in the scene, and not see her gesture as a queerly feminist version of Gene Simmons. Now, we already know that Gene was to Paul as a sexual “Demon” is to a romantic “Starchild.” This image of T-­ta allows us to reconsider just how dear Mr. Simmons is slotted into the sad cliché of the rock macho, the one with long, strong tongue that offers to “lick it up” with as many women as possible (and maybe take a few pictures). Like T-­ta, Gene was distinctly melodramatic and gender-­playful on stage—all that makeup, all that prancing around on high heels. T-­ta is the Demonesse that Gene secretly wants to be, not just another woman on the rock man’s list of feminine objects to devour. Or that’s how I interpret such things. We might corroborate some of the queerness in T-­ta’s spontaneous kiss with Peruvian tongue by looking at the quirk of her geopolitics, via artistic accounts of the international relations she imagines between words, tongues, and bodies across nations (see figure 4.5). In the fanzine version of her brutally pushy love song to Ronald Reagan, she writes lines such as “Ronald, Ronald, today is my birthday and you’re the lover that hasn’t ridden me in so long. You’re my cool daddy, a son of a bitch, and the son of Uncle Sam.” The lines come flying out of an ugly mouth and off a spotty tongue while a tiny trans version of the unladylike “Liberty” struggles against the current of this crass punk voice emanating forth. T-­ta graphically twists all of the 99 The Tongue Is a Fire

Figure 4.5 Page from María T-­ta fanzine · de placer.

major laughing points in the song with intriguing sexual imagery: a global aids crisis as an invention of the US media; the cowboy president forced out of the closet by the anal adventures of his colon cancer; a series of “undiplomatic” exchanges with macho man Maggie Thatcher. She’s engaged in a queer critique of the Monroe Doctrine. The play with perversion is less a comment on other sexualities than it is a satirical use of them to suggest how perverse the “relations” between the United States and Latin America are. The former fucks the latter any way it wants to and with regard only for its own corrupted pleasure. T-­ta’s queer critique of global geopolitics, and Latin America’s subaltern place in them, generates another kind of switch point. Unlike in Nyong’o’s account, this one is not about punk’s complex resonances with gender and sex per se. It’s about how gender and sex become switch points for other social and political phenomena. In this instance, I mean those between rock subterráneo and the subversive left, and to complete the circle, those between everyday machismo and institutionalized state misogyny. In all of the above, the body qua tongue stands in for more than gestural languages and somatic agency. In the first instance, and the last, the tongue qua body is the personalized physical force required for any action that points toward the possibility of any broader freedom. We can’t just say things with our tongues; we have to do something with them. We have to make our tongues be seen and felt in order to be heard. Unsurprising then that repression of the body qua tongue that seeks liberation is quick to follow. The power that silences a fiery tongue is also one that suppresses a bodily spirit. This proved true for María T-­ta, whose provocations also resulted in direct violence to her body. Despite everything that pointed in other directions—her punk humor in lieu of militant anger, her denunciations of violence rather than call to deploy it—she too found herself absurdly accused of being a militant. It’s absurd, because María T-­ta was so intent on trying to make people laugh, and so we now face that other truth that hard-­line leftist militancy is never very funny. I mean, they call it “Soviet realism” for a reason. The “real” communists, like any other purported radical that believes in some sort of final enlightenment, take themselves way too fucking seriously. In 1986 police detained María T-­ta and subjected her to interrogation. According to Jaime Bedoya (1987), T-­ta was waiting on the street outside San Marcos University the day Shining Path members attempted to assassinate Gerónimo Cafferata Marazzi, a former high-­ranking military official 101 The Tongue Is a Fire

and president of the Banco Industrial at the time. In a video interview, T-­ta recounted the experience in her characteristically ironic tone: I had the opportunity, the lucky opportunity, to be in jail. . . . And I remember that they violated my rights as a person, of course without leaving any marks. I was subjected to a little torture session of five hours. They blindfolded me. They choked me. They stuck my head in the toilet. They shoved me around. They made me dizzy. And they called me dirty words like “whore” and a bunch of other stuff. But on the inside I was laughing because that type of aggression is everywhere, even at the shows. Your own buddies say stuff like that to you. (Pérez Luna 1996)

T-­ta was picked up because of the weird (i.e., “punk”) way she was dressed and because she was carrying a copy of her fanzine that police interpreted as evidence of possible “terrorist” affiliation. Yet, she was also simply one more among the multitudes that experienced these (and often much worse) violent interruptions of bodily integrity by a repressive state apparatus on the basis of vague suspicions and contrived evidence. The crucial point in T-­ta’s account is that she makes a direct association, generating a different switch point in the dark spaces where a body’s power is repressed, between ostensibly extraordinary acts of state-­supported misogyny (things “made necessary” by a “state of emergency”) and the quotidian abuse she received from the majority macho punks “at the shows.” I translate it as “buddies,” but the word she uses is pata, a Peruvian way of indicating she is talking about guy friends. As no one I have interviewed denies, and as Támira Bassallo recently recalled (Hare 2014), most of the guy punks simply hated her. They responded to her comical feminist proposal to laugh with her by laughing at her. They resorted to the most boring but effective of everyday taunts that shake almost anyone’s performance—booing, yelling, and, yes, sticking out their tongues as an act of disapproval. It was after her detention, after a brief stint as the funniest feminist among Lima’s punk provocateurs, and after an excommunication from her conservative family that T-­ta decided she was done and went back to being Patricia Roncal. People say she receded from the scene, and most learned well after the fact that sometime in 1988 she had the chance to move to Germany and took it. She never reestablished contact with even her closest friends in the underground rock movement and rarely returned to Peru, according to her mother. The comic curiosity of her tongue and the tremendous parodic power of her T-­ta were gone, though legends survive in the surge of retro102 Interpretation #4

spectives that followed announcement of her death, the 2011 release of a vinyl ep of her band, and, if I have any luck, in this final little twist about the singularity of T-­ta’s tongue.

Matters of Difference and Betrayal One might want this to lead into the land of native tongues, mother tongues, foreign tongues, and so on. But I’m here to tell you that the tongue—this thing we all have in our mouth—is a figure of fire, always engaged in material activities, and a total fucking traitor. The tongue is a dirty rat bastard. At one point or another, the tongue will betray every possible cause. All that stuff about the tongue getting silenced or tied, suggesting the possibility of its passivity, leaves explicit that this is either a temporary state of affairs or one brought on by a restraining force trying to get its unrelenting activity under control. The tongue is so hyperactive that we understand it as a semiautonomous entity, almost an alien force with a mind, a body, and desires of its own. When someone tells me to bite my tongue, as they have done on occasion, they are telling me that my “I” is not in control of this untrustworthy fiend in my mouth. They are telling me that my tongue has the potential to act with its own interests, maybe even pitting them against mine, or maybe setting a trap for how my voice gets interpreted by interested others awaiting my acts of communication. I need to get my tongue back under control! Then, when the tongue is bitten, it hurts with that smart kind of pain. There is a sudden somatic realization that the tongue is part of us all. As something that belongs to everyone, and therefore no one, it is not the easy enemy some might make of it. Body and mind, thoughts and things, selves and others, politics and praxis: they reveal themselves as out of sorts and unable to coordinate multiple operations, interests, and desires. Someone is bound to feel betrayed, even if the “real” cause is never entirely clear and the “core” contradiction never ever evident. The tongue’s willing but unwitting betrayal is where one struggle of alterity fails to articulate actions, or comprehend other contradictions, within the infinite horizons of difference and power. One language of liberation, because its universality is always also particular, fails to translate into another. We are forced to live with this reality that every proposal for a final liberation is just a lover’s promise that eventually gets broken. When this happens, maybe the 103 The Tongue Is a Fire

thing to do is push back and open oneself to critique at the same time; to ask questions of those posing questions in the answering of the questions posed; to initiate an action of reinterpretation as another performance in the fourth act of a play. This problem of inarticulate differences is not unique in punk studies. For example, at a certain point rebellious feminism and nonnormative sexualities become not the contribution of isolated actors but the project of entire scenes, something often attributed to the riot grrrl movement of the nineties (e.g., S. Marcus 2010). This is also when the collective voices of riot grrrls become more open to critique from other sites of difference. This is how I interpret Mimi Thi Nguyen’s (2011) skeptical concern about the rush to gender celebrations that envelope the riot grrrl movement. At one level, she reveals the liberal precepts of the bourgeois self buried in the emphasis on women’s “intimate” encounters within the movement. More forcefully, she questions the middle-­class riot grrrl’s blinding whiteness, the inability to recognize racial privilege or just let stand the anger that race can generate for those who came to riot grrrl from the critical standpoint of color. When it comes to Peru, and Latin America in general, there’s plenty of need to account for inarticulate differences and endless contradictions. I’m just not a fan of imposing intersectional imaginaries on a region where the messiness of hybrid mixedness is explicitly recognized, and therefore crucial to hegemony and counterhegemony, rather than officially denied, as is the case in the United States, where Ngyuen’s analysis is so clearly rooted. I prefer not to impose the geometric reasoning of race, class, and gender/sex, implied as intersecting points on the grid of social life, as many US-­based accounts do when they think through their genealogy in terms of critical theories of this, then that, and then the other thing. What makes sense within the interpretative domain of Peruvian reality is how racial difference is so deeply enmeshed within a broader “coloniality of power” (Aníbal Quijano’s [1992] term) that relations of alterity never escape it. This prominently includes Peru’s primordial linguistic Other. There are many accounts that reveal how the multilayered exclusion of Andeans is a product of their ostensible linguistic-­cum-­cultural inferiority (de la Cadena 2000; M. García 2005). Indians are backward because they speak an Indian language that holds them back, says the hegemony that reigns over the Andes. This is why José María Arguedas, that most transcultural of indigenista writers from the mid-­twentieth century, used his native Quechua and deliberately infused its ontological reasoning within the practice of confront104 Interpretation #4

ing the Spanish literati. Writing “poems” in Quechua, using words ritually rooted in Andean forms of exhortative speech, he demanded a discussion on how these conflations of race, language, and colonial domination constantly reoccur. In one of his poetic pieces, the one he translated into Spanish as “Un Llamado a Algunos Doctores” (A Call to Some Doctors), he spits this out onto the page: “Dicen que ya no sabemos nada, que somos el atraso, que nos han de cambiar la cabeza para otra mejor” (They say we know nothing, that we are backwardness, that they oughta change our head for a better one; Arguedas 2011, 22). “They say” is not “we say” because they refuse to know us on, and in, our own terms. This, as the power of coloniality dictates, is related to that hegemonic assertion that Indians don’t think properly because they don’t speak properly in Spanish—once the language of colonial masters and the soul-­saving code of catechizing priests, now the language of the recognizable citizen and the slightest hope of social mobility. In the context of Peru’s war, one need simply consult one of the most significant conclusions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s “Final Report” on the period of political violence (cvr 2003). Peru’s 1993 census estimates that 20 percent of the population speaks Quechua or another native language. In total disproportion, the trc found that those reported to not possess Spanish as a “mother tongue” constituted 75 percent of the deaths and disappearances. These people also lived in the most impoverished of Peru’s central and southern Andean provinces until they were made to die, often in such a manner as to suggest that they existed only as disposable bodies in the first place. Suddenly, María T-­ta’s funny punk feminism, concocted entirely in Spanish and from the coastal capital, confronts a truly powerful form of difference. She’s just plain wrong when she says, “Women are the first victims of violence,” at least in this generic version of “woman” that much mainstream feminism still clings to. The subaltern that can speak Quechua and lives in the impoverished provinces is the structural target of violence in Andean countries, though clearly if one adds being an Andean woman to that experience one has reached into even messier contradictions. Examining diverse instances of gendered and sexual violence in the war, Rocío Silva Santisteban (2008) decided to call this basurización. Notice, there’s no geometric referent implicit in her formulation. She imagines a historical process in which there are many in Andean societies who are converted into social trash because of how this constant mixing of inarticulate differences morphs into a stinking mass. 105 The Tongue Is a Fire

T-­ta tried to account for those more structurally targeted than her in Peruvian society, la chola, a more particular woman racialized as the feminine version of the poor Indian that comes to the city. She did so by appropriating what she ventured was a comical stereotype. The results reveal just how middle class, more Limeña than not, and ultimately more European than not T-­ta really was relative to her subject in feminist parodies about the chola’s implicit escape from political violence and explicit search for economic improvement. One of Empujón Brutal’s most remembered songs is “Se Necesita Muchucha.” T-­ta invents the word out of muchacha (young girl) and places the vulgar emphasis on the chucha. Also used as an informal interjection in Peruvian slang, “chucha” means “cunt” and is one of the harshest words available to refer to the feminine body. Se necesita muchacha (“young girl wanted”) is the transparently patronizing phrase used in want ads for a woman domestic servant. In the 1980s context, the implication that this young feminine labor will be Andean is clear, given the dramatic intensification of mass migration to Lima that the war, and total economic disaster, helped assure. In the move from “young girl wanted” to “young cunt wanted,” T-­ta makes plain that a simple ad for housework carries with it a hidden demand for other forms of “labor.” The chola must also work at being the routine object of sexual abuse by men in the household, or, at a minimum, tolerate daily bouts of manly entitlement to flirtation as part of her other crappy household chores. María T-­ta’s lyrics recount the experience of a chola working in the house of an upper-­class Lima family amid a conflation of sexual, political, and racial violence. The patriarch’s enforcer is a bossy matriarch that orders the muchacha around, making her eat shit, clean toilets, and so on. At night the family overlooks it when Raúl, the young man of the house, rapes her. The plot takes a turn when the chola’s cousin visits her from the provinces. A former policeman, he has flipped and become a Shining Path member asking her to hide dynamite under her bed. The story ends with violent fates all around. Raúl again rapes the muchacha (claiming her his muchucha), but his cigarette inadvertently lights the explosives and kills them both in the act. Meanwhile, the militant cousin ends up being captured and burned alive amid the military massacre at the El Frontón penitentiary (a real suppression of an uprising of political prisoners in 1986). This is comedy as tragedy. When one notices the utter lack of hope in this account of Peruvian social relations, and the inarticulation of differences it entails, one wonders if this was one more reason T-­ta returned to being Patri106 Interpretation #4

cia Roncal and left Peru behind. Raúl, who at least gets a proper name, is a symbol of multiple kinds of rape, the rape of all Indian bodies and all Andean territories as much as this particular woman’s bodily integrity. Raúl dies, but only by accident. And the generic chola and her generic cholo cousin apparently must die with him, the former playing the role of helpless victim of abuse and the latter that of a militant emasculated by the superior violence of the macho state. The damning detail here also occurs at the level of T-­ta’s language play, her very fire also her very flaw. In this eagerness to make someone laugh at the tragedy that is Peru, she adopts the first person and impersonates the stereotyped chola. Appropriating her voice and stealing her tongue, she calls attention to the way the generic Quechua Indian supposedly misspeaks Spanish, regardless of gender. There is the rather obvious point that she is forcing the chola to speak Spanish in the first place, a colonial point of departure, and she does so with no desire to reciprocate in Quechua. Hoping it’s funny, she inserts the telltale pronunciation “errors” that Spanish speakers desperately expect the Quechua speaker to make in order to clarify there is a hierarchy of languages in which Spanish must be spoken and should be spoken right. Enter the specter of Spain’s forgotten empire. As one example of many, T-­ta writes in her lyric sheet and sings accordingly, tudo il déa barriendo, tudo il déa trapeando (“sweeping all day long, mopping all day long”). These intentional misspellings by an educated Spanish speaker are meant to make funny the unintentional mispronunciations attributed to the Quechua speaker. T-­ta’s emphasis on vowel “mistakes” throughout the song (u instead of o, i instead of e in the example above) is crucial. In part, the explanation resides in the fact that vowels in Quechua are less open than in Spanish, causing the phonetic ambiguity in what linguists would call “the vowel space.” Yet, when colonial legacies order different people along that familiar teleology, from primitive to modern, they also order different languages. The coloniality of language power then suggests that Quechua also suffers from a “lack” of vowels relative to Spanish, much like early linguists insisted that native languages (e.g., logics) were tied to a “concreteness” of cultural stasis while European ones allowed the “abstraction” of constant historical progress.6 T-­ta wants her racism to be ironic of course. She wants us to say she’s not mocking how the Indian speaks but making fun of those who do. Yet, T-­ta is also distinctly unable to relate because her middle-­class Chilean Peruvianess makes it impossible for her to fully embody the chola. More crucially still, 107 The Tongue Is a Fire

her tongue can never reciprocate, say, with a joke in Quechua. Like in most forms of ironic “isms,” she performs her own privileged removal from the lived experiences she imagines for the stereotypical Indian who is forced to speak Spanish and then expected to fail at doing so. So we have reached the point where T-­ta’s tongue betrays her and I reveal a final betrayal of my own. I know nothing of the interior experience of Quechua after all. At most, I claim to have consulted a few with distinct investments in runa simi (“human mouth”), which more simply probably means “human language.” For starters, these deep investors in Quechua, some native speakers and some not, all suggest that the tongue might be something the runa people experience as a functional muscle but not necessarily something one would want to go on and on and on about.7 In our double treachery, T-­ta and I reflect the broader betrayals of the subte movement. Rock subte certainly offers a uniquely anarcho-­commentary on Mariátegui’s classic “problem of the Indian.” Like Mariátegui, it does so exclusively in Spanish, from the city, and with foreign referents always hovering in the background, since “underground rock” can never fully escape its Anglo pop culture “roots” even while making them distinctly part of Peruvian reality (cf. Interpretation #2). One of the clearest patterns I found in doing forty plus interviews with subtes from the eighties generation was a total absence of significant exposure to, much less fluency in, runa simi (much less the dozens of other native languages spoken in Peru). Even those bands such as Del Pueblo or Seres Van that fused rock with more “folkloric” sounds by incorporating flutes, charango, and cajón never sang in Quechua. The idea of fully inhabiting runa simi, as an act that expresses the global contours of rock and reconstructs indigenous cosmopolitanism with it, never had a home in Lima’s subte scene. No one had enough Quechua in their voice or on their tongues to do so, and Peru had still not really arrived at its current “multicultural” moment in which such things were imagined as possible, even necessary.8 Yet, this brings me to one last, also quite exceptional, musical gesture that questions the linguistic privilege, the power, and the just plain indifference to how the runa speaks through the simi. This gesture comes from my friend, Támira Bassallo. Támira possesses a distinct calm that contrasts with the frenetic urbanism and, more often than not, macho sensibility of so many other subtes living amid Lima’s chaos. Salón Dadá and Col Corazón, the two related musical projects Támira organized primarily with Jaime de Lama Marrufo on guitar, came out of the underground scene, but they demon108 Interpretation #4

strated some needed experimentation with sound, appearance, and especially lyrical message. Sonically, one notes distinctive postpunk influences: droning melodic keyboards, delayed guitar lines, minor keys, Támira’s wraithlike, high-­end voice. They gave themselves artsy band names, The Dada Salon and Cabbage Heart. The prominent visual clues were the barely lit stage, the musicians wearing black and gray, and a woman vocalist standing still with her boyishly cropped hair and singing that stillness into a microphone. It is the lyrical imagination of these bands, and Támira’s peculiar generosity within the world of rock subterráneo, that represents the possibility of a truly original reinterpretation. In both bands, Jaime typically composed the music. Támira vocally interpreted their shared literary inspirations, the hellish French surrealism of Antonin Artaud right alongside the avant garde poetry of Lima-­born Jorge Eduardo Eielson. They also made musical the indigenismo of José María Arguedas, the provincial-­born anthropologist whose passion drove him to experiment with runa simi as part of (rather than opposite from) the “worldliness” of Spanish literary culture. However much romanticism is in his work, Arguedas’s proposal was always a radical one. He was pointing toward the need for a decolonization of languages as absolutely central to the struggle of peoples, of thought, and of landscapes that are magically inhabited. Arguedas did this by inserting an enchanted Andean ontology into Spanish-­language novels and short stories (stones that pulse, mountains that speak, water that walks) at the very level of grammar and by constructing poetry out of extremely emotive speech forms. Támira is thoroughly Limeña, like most subtes from the period. Like them, she “does not speak Quechua,” as she once wrote to me unironically, even though we were communicating about the fact that she made an effort to sing it. In addition to other homages to Arguedas, Salón Dadá put one of his Quechua poems—“Katatay”—to the eerie sound of postpunk. Arguedas would later translate it as temblor in Spanish (in the sense of the physical emotion, and not an earthquake), or “tremble,” if I move it over to my English. Like many of her bands’ productions, Támira’s not sure there’s a recording of this song, since they were among the many bands that did not make a consolidated effort to document their sound. In fact, this self-­effacing ephemerality of underground rock, its explicit humility in sometimes thinking it doesn’t really have to matter to the world, is its own kind of distorted exchange with the linguistic invisibility that the modern world expects from runa simi. The only caveat is that the Indian subaltern has been told for centuries to speak, and to speak poorly, in a language that is utterly foreign, while 109 The Tongue Is a Fire

the punk is the one who sometimes screams aloud that nothing anyone says really matters anyway. Támira tells me she started practicing the pronunciation with a native speaker, another university student at San Marcos University, in order to musically memorize the lines of “Katatay.” Here, a small snippet from Arguedas’s runa simi, accompanied by no gesture of translation to pretend I understand: —Manchakunin, taytay. Intiqa kañanmi, uywakunata, kausayta. Orqokunapis, may sacha sachakunapis, yarqasqa machaqway, Intip churin. —Manam Intichu, sonqonpa kusiy, qapaq kanchariynillanmi kunturpa sombra ñawimpi hamuchkan. Manam Intichu; kanchariynillanmi. ¡Sayay, sayariy! Chay mana chanin kunturpa ñawinta chaskiy; katatay paywan. Hatun yunka sachakuna hina, kuyuy, qapariyta kachaykuy. ¡Huñunakuychik, llaqtay runa kanchiriywan katataychik! Arguedas 2011, 16–17

Those who say they understand the lines are saying that it is rooted in the powerfully ritualized speech typical of the Southern Andes, forceful words recited to invoke reverence for the sacred or note the sublime nature of the beings that inhabit the earth with the runa (see Ajens 2012). Arguedas wrote this in the 1960s as a poetic rendering recognizing the powerful voices that live in the shadow of condors, saying things about their fear of blood-­thirsty serpents, calming their trembles in witness to the heart of a sun that gave birth to them as its sons. On Támira’s tongue, or maybe from within her cabbage heart, it becomes some sort of light in Lima’s dreary underground darkness and Peru’s moment of militant anger, a subterranean sorrow song lit by the tiny hope that communication is somehow still possible across the messy violence of inarticulate differences. Only if you ask for help to say the right words. I understand it as a post-­punk gesture toward the idea that getting filthy and furious, or even so cleverly comical that you become criminally cynical, is not at all the same thing as just sitting down and trying to listen to what someone is saying. To conclude, I would counter Clifford Geertz (1973) and his frequently 110 Interpretation #4

mentioned metaphor of the endless stack of turtles, standing in for infinite hermeneutical depths. My point is slightly different. Neither turtles nor tongues matter much in the end. It’s the contradictions that go all the way down, and power that always rises to the top. Still, here and there, someone somewhere like Támira gets inspired and looks for the faint light of a dialogue that might be slightly fairer, listening intently to see what others say they are saying in a language they live every bit as intimately.

111 The Tongue Is a Fire

interpretation #5 hree stages t in t r a f o the worth duction of underpro I live in a dead city. Guerrilla Urbana, 1985

Stage One: The Dirt of Art in the Age of Maniacal Destruction In the decline of middle-­class society, contemplation became a school for asocial behavior; it was countered by distraction as a variant of social conduct. Dadaistic activities actually assured a rather vehement distraction by making works of art the center of scandal. One requirement was foremost: to outrage the public. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

When punk broke in Lima, Peruvian society was not in a period of decadent decline. When punk broke in Lima, Peruvians were immersed in absolute political chaos and full-­scale economic crisis. When punk broke in Peru, Limeños were living in a dead city. Curbs were covered in trash and dog shit. Street recyclers rode around on three-­wheeled carts, picking up junk and reselling it to street venders that resold it as junk elsewhere on the street. Migrants erected thousands of precarious domestic structures on recently occupied sandy hills overlooking the city’s colonial center. There was also hyperinflation upward of 2000 percent and a total liquidation of middle-­class incomes after Alan García assumed the presidency in 1985. Indian cadavers were piling up in mass graves in the Andean provinces and showing up on daily newspaper covers. Executive-­ ordered military massacres of rioting political prisoners were something you learned to expect in Lima detention facilities. Disfigured corpses, once the bodies of journalists mistaken for militants, laid out in a line on a frigid

mountain landscape: this image would be burned into your brain. The scent of charred flesh and the image of smoldering concrete, a result of just another daily car bomb, might occupy your thoughts as you walked down the street. These were only some of the quotidian experiences of Lima’s 1980s urban landscape. Peru’s promising return to electoral democracy in 1980 following more than a decade of experimenting with left-­populist military rule was historically juxtaposed with dynamited utility towers, ransacked voting stations, and Soviet symbols set ablaze to brighten the electrical blackouts of a sleepless capital city. You could expect to awaken one day to a dead dog hanging from a lamppost with a sign that read, “Ding Xiao Ping Son of a Bitch.” For the Shining Path, this was a symbol of China’s Maoist society undergoing revisionist tendencies and a proposal to make Peru into a new Maoist utopia with no room for compromise. To your average Limeño, it was just another quotidian sign of the extraordinary reach of political dreams and depth of the violent nightmares one had to expect with the morning newspaper. The years between 1980, when the Shining Path announced its revolution by burning ballots in a small Ayacucho town called Chuschi, and 1992, when Abimael Guzmán was captured, was Peru’s “long decade.” Drowning in historical dialectics, these twelve years are defined by the steady growth of the Shining Path’s messianic desire to purify Peruvian society by polarizing it and drowning it in blood. The state’s response was no less Manichean. The military initially hoped to suppress the Shining Path as a minor provincial revolt, just another “Indian rebellion” in Peru’s long history. When that proved impossible, and the Shining Path proved successful at expanding to most parts of the country, successive governments revealed the depths of state terror that would be “necessary” to defend the myth of democracy. The period not only brought the country to political and economic ruins but reduced Peruvians to shit in the process, especially all of those disposable bodies in the Andes or in the shantytown hillsides surrounding Lima. Indio de mierda. Cholo de mierda. Every Peruvian knows the interchangeability of these insults directed at Peru’s racialized and impoverished populations. It was within this context that subtes constructed a multimedia aesthetic of sights, sounds, and ideas in the mid-­1980s. Multiple visual artists and a few poets and writers (e.g., Roger Santivañez, Dalmacia Ruiz Rosas, and Oscar Malca) were closely linked to the underground rock scene. They routinely collaborated in the sharing of ideas, the design of show fliers and cover art, and the production of fanzines. At times the aesthetic choices seem like pre113 The Worth of Art

dictable punk appropriations, as if any generic sign of chaos or earthly disgruntlement would do. It was common to see Lima subtes appropriating old World War II images from magazines or making generic references to an abstract “system” in need of fucking off. There’s nothing particularly surprising about generic dystopian restlessness in the long history of punk rock; it’s a specialty of the genre. The crucial difference is that becoming a punk in Lima in the 1980s actually meant experiencing chaos, expressing discontent, and facing consequences in much more politically immediate and corporally intimate ways. To experience punk discontent was to do so amid the bloodiest and most politically unstable period in the nation’s history since independence from Spain. This is just not at all the same thing as expressing discontent amid the conservative malaise of the Reagan-­Thatcher era as the Anglo punk narrative often goes. As soon as one scratches beneath the aesthetic surface of the Lima underground, these generic appropriations of punk dystopias start to blur creatively with more complex aesthetic references to the most visceral and the deepest of Peruvian realities. Lyrical references to the war, often to the centrality of Ayacucho as the master symbol of resistance, repression, and destruction, are literally too many to analyze effectively.1 Visual references also abounded in fanzines, fliers, and cover art. If there is one recurring aesthetic intervention that emerged from the subte scene—one intended to poke at the nation’s conservative moral conscience and denounce the particular political circumstance Peruvians found themselves in—it rests on this one central idea: Peru, as a society, is full of shit. Full of excess dirt, too much trash, too many lies left uncovered. Things unvalued, unworthy, and not useful. Stuff that stinks. Thanks to Herbert Rodríguez, a visual artist, the phrase Sociedad de Mierda (Society of Shit) hung on a highly public banner at the October 1985 “Rock Subterráneo Vuelve Atacar Lima” (Underground Rock Attacks Lima Again) show in Miraflores. Other banners hung alongside it, such as one that read “Ayacucho—Death’s Corner.” This outdoor show, marking one year since Leo Escoria’s flier announced underground rock’s first attack on Lima, proved deeply significant because a news crew from Channel 9 filmed parts of it, resulting in a two-­day special news report that labeled this youth movement “some type of creole punk.” It was the first, and essentially the only, televised account on a mainstream news program about the emergence of underground rock in Lima. This also made it a crucial moment in publicly breaking the news about the existence of punk rock in Lima to the majority 114 Interpretation #5

of unaware citizens. The television report offered Peruvian viewers the chance to feel scandalized. It also offered Lima’s discontented youth, the many still ignorant of underground rock’s existence, a chance to get involved. Counter to the Shining Path’s dead dog hanging on a lamppost, a threat intended to warn any “revisionists” of Maoist orthodoxy delivered in the form of a grotesque scare tactic, Rodríguez’s banner denounced an imminent societal implosion with the irruptive directness of the subte. The very juxtaposition of “Society of Shit” and “Ayacucho—Death’s Corner” made clear that underground rock was a scene containing filthy-­mouthed nihilism and politically aware declarations at the same time. Sociedad de Mierda (SdeM) even became the name of one of the crudest bands of the mideighties era. Formed in late 1985, SdeM began asking what seemed like the crucial rhetorical question when they screamed the lyrics of their song “What Fatherland Is This?” Que mal tiene el Perú? Si contestar no puedes tú Te lo diré pero recuerda Tiene una sociedad de mierda

What evil does Peru have? If you can’t answer this I’ll tell you but remember It’s a society full of shit

A cadre of disillusioned plastic artists proved central to elaborating on this recurrent idea of a Peru full of shit. All of them were at different points on Peru’s convoluted race-­class-­geography continuum: some more middle-­ class mestizo, others more upper-­class pituco; some from long-­standing Lima families, others with provincial city roots in Arequipa or Piura. With exceptions such as Herbert Rodríguez and Jaime Higa, most of the visual artists active in the underground rock scene were architecture students at Ricardo Palma University. In 1984 they grouped themselves into an experimental art collective known as Las Bestias (The Beasts) and began organizing a series of events called Bestiario (Bestiary). Creating a venue for the underground bands, this concert series also included makeshift staging and ephemeral artistic installations. The intention was to consolidate the overlapping material, visual, and musical practices involved in the underground scene via a temporary occupation of specific public spaces (primarily university campuses and parks). The Bestiario events reflected a core principle The Beasts were developing at the time, an idea they called des-­hechos. Without the hyphen, the word means simply “residue.” It reflected the fact that the collective’s interventions often involved random things found lying around the spaces they occu115 The Worth of Art

pied: trash that others considered discarded, and unused boards, buckets, and bricks whose utility could be invested with aesthetic intent. The insertion of the hyphen in the word called attention to its semiotic ambivalences. As the past participle of deshacer (“to undo”), des-­hechos contained several imaginative possibilities (des = negation; hecho = something that is done, a fact, a completed action). Clearly, des-­hechos was a comment on the perpetually precarious, never finished nature of Peru as nation. But it also served as a reference to the diy dialectic of instability and ingenuity in Lima’s informal street economy, the daily grind of modest urban folks barely but creatively getting by in Lima’s mass market of recycled, resold, and improperly acquired goods. At one aesthetic level, The Beasts were trying to undo Peru’s image as a nation on course toward completion—that mythical path to a modern telos—and suggesting instead that Peru was little more than a big pile of random shit. The Beasts were simultaneously engaged in constructing a subterranean self-­portrait. The entire concept was necessarily ironic, since building art from des-­hechos meant being creative with trash, which also results in reducing art to shit. The architectural structures they built and the visual statements they enunciated—based on ephemerality, flimsiness, and haphazardness—suggested as much. Despite, or probably to spite, their professional training in Peru’s best-­known architectural program, they became the crude architectonic equivalent to underground rock’s primitive sound structures. The point was to engage in a mode of social critique that contained the possibility of critical self-­reflection. The Beasts had to face the fact that they too were standing knee-­deep in shit, not operating from some transcendental point of “high culture” above and beyond it. The entire enterprise was undertaken in temporary moments, with minimal budgets, and in necessarily borrowed spaces. This guaranteed that whatever The Beasts did would return to being undone (from des-­hecho back to des-­hecho). It also suggested a central underground dilemma. If you all you do is deal in shit, is it even worth the bother? The culminating act in this multimedia aesthetic of shit was a six-­month-­ long effort called La Carpa del Teatro (Tent Theater), the most enduring of these impermanent aesthetic interventions. It was unique because it briefly enjoyed support from Lima’s then leftist municipal government (see figure 5.1). With the help of Herbert Rodríguez, The Beasts erected La Carpa as a large installation in the latter half of 1986, occupying a vacant lot near the Santa Rosa Bridge that connects Lima’s historic colonial center with the 116 Interpretation #5

Figure 5.1 La Carpa del Teatro, Lima, 1986. Photo courtesy of Alfredo Márquez.

Rimac neighborhood. Crafted into a circus-­like utopian space, the desire was to fill it with what Bakhtin once called grotesque realism: various popular forms of cultural expression, music, and performance that emphasized the mundane and bodily as a contrast to the aristocratic status and earthly transcendence of “high” culture. The Beasts erected the installation in their signature shitty style, raising architectonic structures from wood scraps, plastic bits, rubber tires, and all manner of urban detritus. Given The Beasts’ connections to the subte scene, La Carpa morphed slowly but surely into a primary venue for the expanding number of underground bands. By 1986 several of the initial groups—Narcosis, Leusemia, and Autopsia—had already disbanded. Their members had gone on to found new bands such as Kaos, Feudales, Gx3, and Eructo Maldonado. By 1986 there was also an explosion of new bands (Yndeseables, Voz Propia, Salón Dada, Excomulgados, Eutanasia, Sociedad de Mierda, María T-­ta y el Empujón Brutal, Lujuria, Flema, and Pánico) and therefore a large influx of younger malcontents entering the underground scene. Virtually all of them played at La Carpa one or multiple times during its six months of existence. At this point we should pause to ask what insight one can derive from 117 The Worth of Art

these multiple artistic movements, all manifesting this basic idea of Peruvian society as completely full of shit? One thing stands out, particularly when compared to the public emergence of punk in other world contexts. There is a curious absence of scandalized public reaction aimed at Lima’s underground movement in its opening moments. Perhaps I will be judged harshly for expecting direct comparisons. But given punk’s explicit intent to provoke scandal, and that Lima’s subtes proved as snotty as punks anywhere else, one can’t help but wonder why there was no significant public outrage when punk broke in Lima in 1985. Why is there no rough equivalent to the mass public panic over punk’s “filth and fury” like that which followed the Sex Pistols’ live interview on the Bill Grundy show in 1976? Where are the city officials publically declaring punks the “antithesis of humankind” and suggesting they all be exterminated, as a member of the Greater London Council did following the Grundy incident? Is there nothing resembling the role that US punk played in 1980s legal battles over obscenity and the invention of the mandatory “Tipper sticker” that now warns consumers about offensive musical content?2 One might point to the police action that shut down a large outdoor rock concert, Rock en Río Rimac, held in February 1985 that included some of the early underground bands alongside more mainstream cover bands. When Narcosis took the stage close to midnight and, a few songs into their set, decided to play their tune “Sucio Policia” (Dirty Policeman), police swarmed the crowd, firing shots into the air to stop the concert. Yet, the mainstream press reports that followed Rock en Río Rimac proved more understanding than condemning of underground rock. For example, in the widely read newspaper La República, one finds an article that begins like this: For various reasons, the night of February 17th of this year will be difficult to forget. That was the date of Rock on the River Rimac, a most surprisingly spectacular concert to be remembered in our capital city in which thousands of young people found themselves involved in a street happening, unleashed by that tumultuous social effervescence that rock contains. Ultimately chased down by the police, the underground rock-­n-­rollers demonstrated themselves to be protagonists and essential spokespersons, not only of the revitalization of Peruvian rock but of that explosive discontent that engulfs the youth in Lima. (Malca 1985, 4)

This is hardly the condemnation punks have come to expect in their early public appearances in the press. Indeed, the tone of sympathy rather than 118 Interpretation #5

outrage is representative of a general tendency in many early newspaper and magazine accounts of underground rock’s emergence in Peru’s mass media. Early television coverage of underground rock is similar in this respect. The two-­day Channel 9 news report on the “Underground Rock Attacks Lima Again” concert held in Miraflores in October 1985 is the only real example of mass television coverage during underground rock’s media emergence. The segment featured footage of Guerrilla Urbana, Zcuela Crrada, and Leusemia on stage, along with scenes from the mosh pit and some telling commentary from the crowd. When a reporter asked Leo Escoria, bassist of Leusemia, about his politics, Escoria publicly declared his nihilism: “Null, zero . . . neither to the left, nor the right, zero to the center. Nothing.” When asked about his “ideal society,” he responded with befuddlement as an answer: “My ideal? What I want to do! What I want to do! I still haven’t found it.”3 It is true that on the second night of the report a Catholic priest appeared to offer a predictably negative moral appreciation of underground rock, declaring famously “this is not art.” Yet, the initial tone had already been set, and more memorable commentary offered, the night before when two psychological experts were brought in to discuss the phenomenon on camera with reporter Patsy Adolph. When asked his opinion, Dr. Baltazar Caravedo called it a movement of loving self-­discovery: “Well, it is apparently an anarchist movement with a destructive ideology. But I would say that below that there is a message and it is a message of reconstruction of the person, a message of love.” The second psychological expert, Telma Rossi, called those involved in the underground rock scene “very lucid people” and the “vanguard of their generation.”4 Despite various attempts by Adolph to solicit a more negative response, both experts painted a basically positive picture of underground rock as a youth movement rooted in solidarity and a creative search to overcome Peru’s outdated, hypocritical social conventions. It is also worth noting that some of the early artistic work of the Beasts and Herbert Rodríguez garnered public support rather than provoking public scandal. In an interview, Herbert Rodríguez recalls La Carpa as important precisely because “it was the only time in this shitty country that there has been a cultural policy . . . by Lima’s municipal government with enough coherence to be relevant” (Rodríguez 2009). Rodríguez was referring to the fact that La Carpa del Teatro, the longest-­lasting installation that he helped The Beasts construct, was in fact the product of a formal proposal that received public support from Lima’s municipal office. 119 The Worth of Art

La Carpa briefly enjoyed this city sponsorship thanks to Alfonso Barrantes Lingán, a dedicated leftist sitting in the mayor’s seat at the time. Barrantes ran for the presidency in 1985 and lost to Alan García and his ostensibly “populist” American Popular Revolutionary Party (apra). Soon after that Barrantes lost reelection to Lima’s municipal government, and Jorge del Castillo, another loyal apra member, assumed mayoral responsibilities. The Beasts immediately recognized that the change in municipal leadership would likely have repercussions for the La Carpa project. In a last-­ditch effort in December 1986 to save La Carpa, key members of The Beasts organized a Comité Autogestionario de la Carpa (Committee for the Tent’s Self-­Management). The acronym caca (poop) spelled out their desire to continue developing a shitty artistic agenda according to their own diy criteria. The Beasts also began organizing underground rock shows to try to raise awareness and save the artistic experiment. Alas, the punkish intent to protest while retaining public support proved futile as the political winds swung decidedly away from Barrantes’s leftism. The new apra mayor entered office in early 1987 and ordered workers to retake the urban space La Carpa had occupied. The municipality dispatched a bulldozer and reduced the space once again to a random pile of shit on an empty city lot. Alfredo Márquez, one of The Beasts most invested in La Carpa, offers his recollection of what the experience of La Carpa represented. He remembers Barrantes’s office essentially ignoring La Carpa after their initial willingness to support it. He then had a distinct feeling about its inevitable destruction as soon as del Castillo’s mayoral victory became known: “We didn’t have the least doubt they were going to destroy it” (Márquez 2009). Surely an experiment that has gone through these various stages—from initial support to declining interest to eventual cancellation—is not the same thing as an artistic provocation that sparks immediate public condemnation. In fact, for someone as involved as Márquez, there was something else at stake. He recalls that in one of the last concerts to save La Carpa, someone, presumably one of the musicians, stole an electric guitar the organizers had rented. Ultimately, this left him with the bill to replace it. In his mind, the real moral scandal here was the apparent absence of actual solidarity in the rock underground at the very moment it was most needed: We started doing an accounting of the things in the morning, and there was a guitar missing. And I was fed up. . . . I was tired of it, really fucking tired of it. Because I’m convinced that it had to be somebody from one of the 120 Interpretation #5

underground bands that played that night that took the guitar. Who else would have wanted it? So, some imbecile robbed something in an event that was totally self-­organized, meant to reaffirm a place that symbolized the survival of the movement. That was deplorable to me. And the fact that nobody else had realized that this imbecile took the guitar made it seem like some sort of horrible complicity. . . . For me, that’s where the story ended. (Márquez 2009)

The subtes, it turned out, were not just shitting on Peruvian society. Like punks everywhere, they were also shitting on each other. Suddenly, the generous statements about youthful solidarity that tv psychologists granted to the movement were undone by the subtes themselves. To be clear, the issue here is not a total absence of scandal per se. My interviews suggest that many individuals were forced to negotiate negative reactions at home when family members learned of their involvement in underground rock. The point is the domestic-­versus-­public scale of said scandals. What requires explanation is why there was a relative absence of mass media outrage amid the early appearance of underground rock in the Lima of 1985 and 1986. Without doubt various explanations are possible. Although the movement expanded to lower sectors of the middle mestizo class, we might recall that many of the early Lima punks were solidly middle and upper class. As a result, many had close ties with people working in the mass media, that is, those with the most power to help shape the public reaction to this new youth movement. In fact, persons directly identified with rock subterráneo were sometimes those writing the most widely circulated newspaper accounts of the movement. For example, the account of Rock in Rimac cited above was published by Oscar Malca, who was also friends with members of the bands. Similarly, Telma Rossi, one of the two psychological experts invited to give commentary for the Channel 9 news report, was also the mother of Támira Bassallo, bassist of Excomulgados and the postpunk band Salón Dada. Such an explanation is part of the picture. Ultimately, it misses a crucial point about the particular media moment in which Lima’s “creole punks” first appeared to symbolically poo-­poo public values by declaring Peru a society full of shit. I think about it like this. How could the shit Lima subtes threw at the Peruvian public—as provocative as it might have been at a different moment—compare to the much more outrageous shit that the average Peruvian citizen was already witness to in the mass media? How could 121 The Worth of Art

rock subterráneo outdo all of the other viscerally provocative images and outrageous stories circulating in the newspapers and on tv? How could punk compare to the real shit that was going down in Peru in the 1980s? By “real shit” I mean the dead dogs left hanging on lampposts, whose stink was as real as the image was symbolic. That shit was generated by the rotting carcass of a nameless canine announcing a Maoist revolution that would require mass death. By “real shit” I mean murdered journalists, mass graves of dead Indians, dismembered human bodies, and burning metal left over from car bombings. These were images that, however mediated and manipulated, suggested a central idea: that life in Peru was in reality about death. An ugly death. A violent death. An excessively grotesque and unpleasant death. An absurd but supposedly politically necessary death. And, really, what could be shittier than that? By “real shit” I mean the dirt that accumulates when a society is imploding, the force of an entire people finding themselves already immersed in filth, this visceral reality in which human life becomes politically reducible to shit. The Shining Path called it “the People’s War” and then killed people. The Peruvian state claimed it was a noble defense of democracy and destroyed every sign of it by killing people. What a bunch of shit.

Stage Two: The Work of Art Encaged in Ambiguous Provocation But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

Was it possible to make truly scandalous art in Peru’s society of shit? How could one cause the public irruption and social shock that punk seeks in a country whose grotesque entrails were already showing? How was it possible to get a concerted reaction from a state apparatus overwhelmingly preoccupied with trying to define and destroy the politically subversive element? It is true that simply becoming a subte represented a choice to become a subject of suspicion as the war intensified and state forces sought to root 122 Interpretation #5

out subversivos at any cost. Walking down the street with combat boots, congregating with other punks in spaces viewed as possible militant meeting places, being in a band with an inherently “suspicious” name like Guerrilla Urbana—for these and even more arbitrary reasons Lima punks found themselves questioned, detained, or abused at different moments.5 Yet, detentions based on minimal to no evidence, or simply vague police suspicions, were part of everyday reality for thousands of Peruvians. They were particularly common among the young mestizo university-­age population to which many Peruvian punks belonged. I want to suggest that in this particular context—amid widespread propaganda of an imminent Maoist revolution, daily media images of political death, and widespread state surveillance of private affairs—those involved in the underground art scene were compelled to try something different than punk’s typical filth-­and-­vulgar fury. They searched for a way to go beyond such profane assertions that Peru was simply a society full of shit. To provoke real scandal, to poke until they got a real political reaction, they tried something in a different register of provocation. Their mission was to craft a political aesthetic that was fundamentally ambiguous in the context of a war that demanded political ideologies be straightforwardly black and white. Here, art began to engage in the power of a position that was so unclear as to be intolerably provocative, rooted in an anarchist position that chose to refuse everything rather than affirm anything in particular. To fully understand the visual context, one must take account of the dominant register of political art during this late eighties period when Lima’s underground artists began crafting their dangerously ambiguous aesthetic. Pro–­Shining Path graffiti was ever present on the landscape. There were primitive revolutionary messages on everything from urban overpasses to university classroom walls, reflecting the multitude of sympathizers seeking to educate the public in basic Marxist principles and advertise the inevitability of a state overthrow. Figure 5.2 is one of my favorite examples, given the university setting, the profile of the anonymous student, and the total nonchalance he exhibits sitting under graffiti that would have warranted a military trial on apology for terrorism charges (see figure 5.2). Amateur images of Abimael Guzmán or Chairman Mao declaring revolution, anonymous peasants engaged in armed struggle, or communist ideologues educating the masses circulated in everything from clandestine fliers to banners hung behind political prisoners organizing demonstrations. Shining Path subversives also became infamous for more than the art of hanging 123 The Worth of Art

Figure 5.2 Shining Path graffiti at Universidad del Centro, Junin, 1992. Photo courtesy of Diaro Correo.

dead dogs on Lima lampposts. They routinely coordinated theatrical efforts to cause nighttime black outs, bombing electrical facilities and setting fire to large hammer-­and-­sickle designs on the hills that overlook Lima so everyone could figuratively conclude that Maoists would light the way only after plunging the country into darkness. In short, the aesthetic practices meant to convey the Shining Path’s revolutionary convictions were unmistakable and ubiquitous: on everyone’s mind, in everyone’s eye, in every imaginable space. The crux of the issue here then can be stated thus: Lima’s underground artists, precisely those with close association to the underground rock scene, developed an aesthetic that was simply not recognizably subversive, at least not at all on the same terms or visual registers as the Shining Path. Despite this, their art could be and in fact was interpreted as subversive propaganda by the state, a political enemy that subtes and the Shining Path shared. If underground art was to be otherwise political, just as punk rock proposes to be otherwise musical, it required provoking with other visual possibilities rather than copying from the Shining Path’s straightforward revolutionary realism. Ironically, the political consequences—detainment, torture, imprisonment, flight from the country—resulted much the same. The case worth contemplation is Taller nn (nn Workshop), a space cre124 Interpretation #5

ated in 1987 for the exploration of political aesthetics among a small group of underground artists. Several others came and went from Taller nn, but the truly committed consisted of Enrique Wong, Álex Ángeles, José Luis García, and Alfredo Márquez, former members of The Beasts. It was the demise of the more visible La Carpa del Teatro experiment that resulted in a retreat to more underground spaces, as well as some open questions about the benefits of collaboration in the first place. Yet, the ties between Lima’s avant-­garde artists and punk-­inspired musicians were never completely broken. A few bands used the workshop as a practice space and to organize some memorable shows (e.g., the last appearance of kaos in 1989). With the intensification of the war in the late eighties there was also a noticeable shift in the visual languages underground artists used to talk about it. Note, for example, the dramatic difference in artistic group names—Las Bestias versus Taller nn—despite the fact that there was direct overlap in the main actors. The term “beast” suggests quite a few playful possibilities alongside any darker connotations. Childhood fills us with stories of monsters that are comical or tender and not simply violent and ferocious. Plus, the word has ambivalent resonances in Peruvian Spanish, where que bestia can mean “how awful” but also “how awesome,” and where bestial means “sweet” or “cool.” By contrast, there simply is no humor, no lightness, and no discernable positivity in the act of naming a creative space Taller nn. “nn,” an abbreviation of the Latin nomen nescio, means “name unknown” and represents the symbolic equivalent of official designations given to corpses with no known identity. The nn artists extended their allusions to acts of nonidentification by choosing to represent all of the participants in their projects with a pseudonym. Here too crucial political ambiguities appear. Both the Marxist subversives (who took on alternate first names and added the obligatory “comrade” title) and the state’s military and paramilitary forces used aliases as a political tactic. In both cases, aliases represented an effort to disassociate legally accountable persons from the political actions they were engaged in well outside of the formal rule of law. Strikingly different, nn pseudonyms intentionally provoked with their cynical ambiguity, representing wordplay with nicknames or personalities. Thus, nn el-­lio was “nn the-­conflict,” nn acarajo was “nn gone-­to-­hell,” nn detuchino was “nn from-­your-­chinaman,” nn a-­c-­falo was “nn a-­ceph-­a-­lous, etc. There is nothing more illustrative of this aesthetics of political ambiguity embraced by Taller nn than the collective project they designed in May and 125 The Worth of Art

June of 1988 with the informal title La Carpeta Negra (The Black Folder; see plates 1–16). The Black Folder consists of photocopied images modified by silk-­screening techniques to insert the suggestive possibilities of bright neon colors as a contrast to the black-­and-­white dualism of the photocopy. The folder is divided into two series, with a middle image that is perhaps meant to represent a breaking point between the two. It also includes a text known as the “nn Manifesto” (plates 1–2) and an index with short descriptive paragraphs and source information (plate 16). The first series, known as Mito-­Muerto (Dead Myth), are iconic portraits of leftist luminaries, easily recognizable as central symbols within the war: a stately Mao Tse-­tung, a piercing José Carlos Mariátegui, a dead Edith Lagos, a wild-­eyed José María Arguedas, and an assassinated Che Guevara (plates 3–7). The images in this series all contain a barcode, a pop gesture toward mass consumerism. The associated number, “424 242,” is anything but arbitrary. This was the phone number that appeared on state-­funded commercials as the anonymous tip line citizens should call to report possible subversive activity, a crucial part of state intelligence strategy to create an environment of self-­surveillance among the citizenry. The techniques (silk screen on photocopy), color choices (Mariátegui’s blue face; Arguedas’s bright orange tuft of hair), and face accents (Mao’s red lips) clarify that we are operating within the realm of Warhol references. The queerness of The Factory as artistic-­cum-­alternative-­social space and the pop celebration of celebrity status are decisively present. But they appear as radically original here via a dramatically different representation of what celebrating “Maoism in the Andes” might mean. The seven images in the second series do not follow the same logic of popular iconicity evident in the first five (plates 9–15). Instead, we are mostly amid the masses. Most of these images declare “peru” in the same bold block font used in ministry of tourism advertising in the 1980s, part of a bold ironic gesture that led to naming the second series Peru Anti-­Export. Several of the images represent press photographs depicting graphic scenes of violence, death, and suffering. Three speak directly to milestone moments in the war that received widespread media coverage: the massacre of journalists in Uchurracay in 1983 (plate 12), the discovery of mass graves in Pucuyacu in 1984 (plate 11), and the executive-­ordered massacre of rioting political prisoners in 1986 (plate 13). The other images likely require the descriptive details given in the index for the average viewer to establish context. For example, there is an image 126 Interpretation #5

taken from a 1984 uprising of “common” prisoners in the famously unpleasant Lima prison facility named El Sexto (plate 10). The possible references are multiple and extend beyond what La Carpeta puts on display, representing not only direct juxtaposition with the image of an uprising of political militants in Lima prisons but the more oblique reference to the fact that Arguedas wrote a novel titled El Sexto about time he spent there as political prisoner during the 1930s Benavides dictatorship. The last two images are collages with multiple Warhol elements embedded in them. Peruvianizing Warlhol’s favorite subjects, Mao and Marilyn Monroe appear alongside a newly imagined José “Elvis” Mariátegui, José Carlos taking the place of the King in Warhol’s famous image of the rock-­n-­roll god with a gun. The sixth portrait, the one that I believe serves as the break point between the two series, is a close-­up like those in the first group (plate 8). Yet, the person depicted lacks any popular iconicity, devoid of that immediate face recognition that is crucial to the other images in the first series. In fact, what the viewer is witnessing is the brutalized corpse of Javier Arrasco Catpo, a relatively anonymous San Marcos University student killed by military guards in May 1988 during a march to denounce mass killings in Ayacucho Province. Without the descriptive information in the index, the tortured face would be unidentifiable to almost everyone. Furthermore, the image is distinct because it makes reference to political events that occurred in May 1988 while the artists were in the very act of producing La Carpeta. The image of Javier Arrasco therefore marks a particular kind of transition. It suggests simultaneously the contrast between the individuality of iconic visual recognition (series one) and the collective condition of nonidentification amid political warfare and mass society (series two)—without losing sight of the inherent ambiguity between the two. One never really “knows” Mao (much less Maoism) despite constantly being subjected to viewing his image. By contrast, one might become deeply affected by, indeed truly familiar with, an image of “yet another” nameless student revolutionary that sought to somehow make a difference and ended up dead instead. In short, rather than suggest that there is a singular logic that clearly divides the two series, I see La Carpeta instead as a gesture toward the radical disorderliness that underlies an apparent “social order.” La Carpeta Negra points toward a receding horizon of multiplying possibilities, a provocative playfulness with antinormativity and an anarchic refusal of any form of ideological abbreviation. nn refuses any easy identification with the quick political slogans of the Viva la Revolución sort. From within the severity of a 127 The Worth of Art

Peruvian reality inundated with violence, nn artists nonetheless construct a political space guided by principles similar to the ones that José Muñoz imagines queers and punk sharing, albeit from within the simpler joys of a mosh pit at a Germs show. Muñoz describes punk’s queerness as a mode of “‘being-­with’ in difference and discord,” and one that “defies social conventions and conformism and is innately heretical yet still desirous for the world” (Muñoz 2013, 96). Within this radically different context, one with less romanticism and radically differing consequences than the one Muñoz is concerned with, nn artists were suggesting all or part of the following about heresy, discord, and difference: There is fuzziness in the distinction between political and common crimes, and an overlap in the resistance and repression generated by the everyday political condition of imprisonment. It is impossible to separate real politics from everyday life or revolutionary ideologues from daily interventions. There are generative questions and inconsistent answers about whether violence is the answer, the problem, or both, and whether violence is necessary for historical regeneration or just another capricious moment in the human drive toward self-­destruction. It is a ridiculous task to divide the world into two camps of the recognizable iconic “individual” on one hand, and the unidentifiable mass of “everyone else” on the other. The “nn Manifesto,” as it’s called by the artists, says in words what the images ask of the eye. The text rejects the simple or rationally argued declarations of a political tract. It also does not resemble anything approaching political propaganda meant to incite one to take particular actions. Instead, it utters things in the language of poetry’s emotive moodiness, offering a series of ideas that are also interpretative uncertainties. In doing so, it implicitly launches an explicit critique of the supposed neutrality of journalist coverage that supposedly reports “just the facts.” The manifesto might also be read as a statement that mocks the moral high ground of human rights activists, civil society servants, or nongovernmental bureaucrats’ pathetic pleas for peace and rational justice in a context in which the parameters for action are already being determined through the strategic use of violence, abuses of power, and total arbitrariness. This is also not a document written in some sort of neohippie tone to suggest that peace is the simple answer to war. Instead, it contains a weird mix of aggression, provocation, humor, confusion, and satire. The dialectical opposites displayed in forty-­four couplets on page one (“the city and the country . . . the scientifically real and the magically marvelous 128 Interpretation #5

. . . destruction and genesis”) eventually devolve into illusions and allusions. Dialectics no longer explain everything when the pairs collapse into clichéd conundrums (“the chicken and the egg”), or when synonyms replace opposites (“autonomy and anarchy”), or when a certain kind of autobiography is smuggled in (“bestiary and rock-­n-­roll”). Page two of the manifesto continues this cascade of textual teasers. It suggests that significance will always come around again but that meaning is never constant. Symbolism comes in short spasmodic bursts; you better try not to miss them. Each segment, written exclusively in small letters, begins with a “because,” presumably because the title in capital letters suggests that an overarching question guides everything. The text starts with the question “why am i exposing my entrails to you?” Following this is one disparate answer after the next. Was this organized as an exquisite cadaver exercise in which each individual develops an intervention on the basis of having seen that of the preceding person? Did the group devise all of the answers together as a collective? Was it the work of a single, chemically altered stream of consciousness late at night? Who knows. In the sixteen answers to this one not entirely metaphorical question there is an entire multitude of possibilities. There is the indecipherable position on the problematic relation between pen and sword, “because it’s not the use of violence but education that guarantees the triumph of the revolution. but ‘writing in blood’ does come in.” There is an apparent affirmation of the Shining Path’s initial intentions, “because all paths lead to Chuschi,” a reference to the Shining Path’s burning of a voting station in this small Andean village on May 17, 1980, to announce initiation of the armed struggle. There is also punk and its eternal vacillation between self-­destructive nihilism and bootstrapped efforts of creative self-­affirmation, “because maybe we don’t believe in anything anymore; only in the miserableness of our dirty hands.” There’s room for humorous self-­deprecation, “because we are better fed (considerably better fed) than the rest of peruvians, avant-­garde, ha!” There is also space in the manifesto for ambiguity surrounding the single most dangerous thing in the war, indeed the most recognizable icon if also most invisible actor in the entire conflict: Abimael Guzmán, aka Presidente Gonzalo. In his analysis of La Carpeta Negra, Mirko Lauer (2012) calls attention to the absence of Guzmán in the visual series that includes other relevant Marxist icons. He suggests we consider the possibility that Mao stands in for him. Lauer goes further to claim that a Warholian rendition of Presidente Gonzalo would have simply been “too much for every party in the conflict,” 129 The Worth of Art

as if we are witness to some measure of self-­restraint or historical limits on nn’s artistic imagination. I disagree with Lauer unambiguously. Visual iconicity is hardly the only thing happening here. The manifesto includes two distinct mentions of Guzmán, first referenced as a superior (“chairman gonzalo”) and then as an equal (“comrade gonzalo”). In both cases, the ambiguity is enough to confirm what committed Shining Path members, those that in fact engaged in dialogue with nn artists periodically, commonly concluded upon seeing the art they produced. According to Márquez and Ángeles, Shining Path subversives that saw nn’s work thought it was just a sad reflection of their Yankee influences, bourgeois at best, and explicitly insulting to revolutionary aspirations at worst. There is certainly nothing farther from the aesthetics of Marxist apotheosis that surround Guzmán’s portrayal in almost any example of the Shining Path’s political art. This little black folder, so full of references to Warhol’s critique of consumer culture, fantasy colors, explicit gender bending, and the artistic beginnings of what became punk rock, has nothing in common with the Soviet realism and utter devotion to party leadership displayed in Shining Path materials. In the first mention of Guzmán, nn imagine him as someone unopposed to peppering Spanish with a global gringo vocabulary, “because the proletarian revolution winks its eye at us while the other inquires into us fixedly. chairman gonzalo . . . close to me!” The last phrase appears in English in an otherwise Spanish language text. I engage in a bit of postpunk conjecture here based on some inferences about the artistic actors and their musical preferences. In this instance, I suggest this is actually a song suggestion, one evoking the idea that President Gonzalo might find queer delight in one of The Cure’s unquestionable classics with that very same title, “Close to Me.” nn imagines Chairman Gonzalo thinking of his revolution and getting just as emotional as Robert Smith: “I’ve waited hours for this / I’ve made myself so sick.” Forget the Marilyn Monroe lipstick queer-­printed visually onto Chairman Mao’s manly Maoist face for a minute. I think nn wants us to visualize, via their global lyrical reference points, the Shining Path’s otherwise venerable patriarch as possibly just one more emo punk, sad from the illusory happiness of the revolution that never arrives. The later mention of Guzmán appears in an answer that includes a typographically difficult to decipher list of nn’s intellectual influences, “because the discourse of gramscialthusserbakuninmariáteguilennonbrechttzarahes130 Interpretation #5

searguedasgonzalezpradaartaudkafkawarholbetronmorrisonsartremarcusse and other big-­mouths that i haven’t read but they’ve told me about, excites us exceedingly, despite comrade gonzalo and the seminarian intolerance of some commissioners.” Maybe because run-­on words, like run-­on sentences, are hard to read, and because big-­mouths all sort of run together anyway, and because there’s reason to treat “comrade gonzalo” as just another run-­of-­the-­ mill comrade, and because surely he was separated out from the list for some other reason too, and because, ya know . . . Because of what? Because of nn’s total commitment to complete ambiguity. The name La Carpeta Negra is in part literal. Protecting, and symbolically concealing, the images is a black folder with the bold block letters “nn,” the group’s distinctive logo, printed in red on the front. The alignment between black, nihilism, and anarchism is intentional. Reflecting on it twenty plus years later, one can’t help but also read it as symbolic of Peru’s plunge into darkness, the clandestine conditions in which the folder was designed, and the artistic nowhere to which it was banished shortly after its production. Of the twenty or so copies printed, the majority were either disappeared, confiscated, or destroyed, not unlike so many other “victims” of the war. Only a handful of the originals exist, after having been hidden for years or sent abroad. None of the artists involved in its production has a copy.6 For his part, Álex Ángeles distinctly remembers the day in 1994 he burned his only personal copy immediately after he heard that fellow nn Alfredo Márquez had been arrested on charges of sympathy for terrorism. By 1989, Peru’s political and economic crisis was reaching its peak. The core group of nn was suffering from serious academic disenchantment and artistic disillusionment. Alfredo Márquez had dropped out of Ricardo Palma University’s architecture program. Editors at Lima’s literary and art journal Márgenes refused to print an nn piece that they perceived as too controversial. Yet, Márquez and Enrique Wong travelled to Cuba in 1989 as participants in the Havana Biennial, one of Latin America’s premiere art forums since it was founded in 1984. They carried a copy of La Carpeta Negra in one of their suitcases. It was at the biennial, in the context of a screen-­printing workshop, that they further developed their efforts to recontextualize Warhol’s Mao within the Shining Path’s radical proposal for Andean Maoism (see figure 5.3). In the 1989 version of Mao, the visual prominence of the barcode is gone. A 131 The Worth of Art

Figure 5.3 “Viva el Maoísmo,” silk screen by Taller nn. Courtesy of Alfredo Márquez.

much smaller barcode is located in the bottom right margin with a number (00288—24953) that corresponds to the legal code instituted by the Alan García administration for a “Law on Justifying Terrorism.” This was in fact the same legislation under which Márquez was later tried and convicted in 1994. Concealed in the background of this Mao, but giving the impression of a Warholian soup can, is the replication of one photocopied image. Representing the complete opposite ideological spectrum from Campbell’s Soup, Márquez appropriated an image from the pro–­Shining Path newspaper El Nuevo Diario, a radical leftist periodical that circulated openly until it was shut down by the Fujimori government (see figure 5.4). The clandestine photo comes from a report published in 1988 about female political prisoners inside Canto Grande prison, the picture showing women militants 132 Interpretation #5

Figure 5.4 Clandestine photo of Shining Path prisoners, Canto Grande prison, El Diario, 1988.

posing in military formation, fists held high, under a banner that reads “Viva el Maoismo”—also the title Márquez and Wong gave to the work. I have only partial information on the personal fates of the various artists that came and went from the nn workshop, but what I do know is telling of the political stakes involved in their artistic provocations. My account is based largely on the core members that kept nn going, principally Márquez and Ángeles, and others with a more occasional presence in the workshop, such as Carlos Incháustegui, a former member of The Beasts. nn’s effort to express radical aesthetic ambiguity in this historical moment that demanded rigid ideological polarization proved costly. By the early nineties, the core group of nn artists became aware that they were all under state surveillance. Soon after, they dispersed to different, and mostly disagreeable, fates. The police capture of Abimael Gúzman in September 1992, along with other party leaders, proved absolutely decisive. After extensive detective work, the “central committee” leadership was found in an apartment above a dance studio in the Surco District of Lima. This key victory for the state impacted members of nn in very direct ways and foretold the political future of Peru in more general ones. Police also found Incháustegui in the apartment with Guzmán. Presumably acting as guardian of the safe house, Incháustegui was also the boyfriend of Maritza Garrido Lecca, the soon to be infamous 133 The Worth of Art

upper-­class dancer that had rented the space used to conceal Guzmán and other members of the Shining Path’s central committee.7 Soon after this dramatic capture, which became decisive in the defeat of the Shining Path’s chances for winning the war, the Lima news magazine Caretas published an article. It suggested that the discovery of a dancer and an artist in the hideout of the Shining Path’s top leadership was a crucial clue to finishing off the group’s urban-­based leadership, an explicit sign for the need to root out other subversive elements operating in Lima’s art, music, and performance circles. The article even included a photograph of members of Taller nn and portrayed Incháustegui as a “mentor” for this “demagogic cultural group” even though he was never centrally involved (Anonymous 1992, 21). The article also made mention of a 1991 police detention of Enrique Wong on suspicion of printing folletería terrorista (terrorist leaflets) in his father’s print shop. Those charges were eventually dropped amid a lack of evidence, and soon after Wong moved to Brazil, only to die a few years later in a traffic accident. For their part, Álex Ángeles and Alfredo Márquez were forced to accept that the risk of being detained had just increased exponentially with the appearance of a magazine article suggesting in no uncertain terms they were at the top of the state’s suspected terrorist list. It was not just a matter of guilt by association as a result of Inchaústegui’s capture. It was reflective of the steady intensification of Fujimori’s mano dura (hard-­line) approach to ending “terrorism” that entailed shutting down the leftist press, a massive increase in arbitrary imprisonments based on mock trials, granting further license to paramilitary groups such as the Grupo Colina to exterminate suspected militants, and the military takeover of universities thought to house radicalized youth.8 When I asked Ángeles a general question about how he made it through the 1990s, he answered with a straightforward, one-­word answer in the midst of an otherwise lengthy conversational interview (Ángeles 2012). “Badly,” he said. I didn’t push back too much. I saw the emotion bubbling up as he recalled in silence the difficulty involved in resigning himself to poverty, paranoia, and obscurity as a strategy to avoid something worse. Márquez engaged in a similar strategy of avoidance for a while, keeping a low profile and surviving on the generosity of friends. As the reader might recall from Interpretation #1, he was detained by police in early October 1994, just days after an academic conference at the Catholic university. He says he was strolling through Surquillo District with his girlfriend at the time, getting ready for a weekend outing, when two cars suddenly pulled up. Sev134 Interpretation #5

eral armed men in street clothes jumped out and forced his girlfriend into one car and him into the other. They drove him around for several hours, blindfolded, bludgeoned, and disoriented, before arriving at his workshop and forcing him inside. What continues is a snippet from our conversation about it: Alfredo: And, yeah, they pulled out stuff that was my work. Shane: Like what? Alfredo: Like the image of Mao with the lips painted red that I had done with nn in the Havana Biennial. I had a folder with about forty-­five copies. No? And they put them on the floor. I had other pieces too that I had done in Havana with the image of Vallejo and they put that on the floor too. . . . And books that showed any hint of . . . Marxism, anarchism. They put them all together. But at the same time they pulled out other things I had never seen before. Shane: Like what? Alfredo: Images of the Shining Path, Shining Path propaganda, papers, pamphlets. And then they laid out some packages that said “dynamite” and “ammonium nitrate” together with all these clippings. (Márquez 2009)

Here, I should declare I’m not invested in an investigative approach. I’m not that interested in the remaining suspicions and rumors that suggest that Márquez and other nn members were muy metido, somehow deeply complicit, with Shining Path actions. My interest is in Márquez’s description of this confrontation with Peru’s counterterrorist state forces and how it makes evident the state’s own political perceptions after the mainstream media helped construct him as a terrorist suspect. We are witness to a truly remarkable notion, in fact—one that deeply committed Shining Path followers would never share. The state assumes some sort of continuity, indeed this became the very basis for constructing legal evidence, between nn’s Warhol-­ inspired, punk-­inflected art and all that realist, Maoist-­inspired propaganda circulating to promote the Shining Path’s “terrorist” cause. From an aesthetic perspective alone, the differences could not be greater. Yet, from the state’s political perspective, everything points to “boom.” Both nn art works and Shining Path fliers “required” the repressive response by Peru’s paramilitarized and authoritarian state. Márquez’s kidnappers physically and psychologically forced him into a confession. He initially refused to sign, denying that the Shining Path materials or explosives were his. He says he decided to sign after the men escorted 135 The Worth of Art

his girlfriend into the workshop and began threatening to rape and torture her. The results from Márquez’s forced confession were an intense fifteen days of further torture, full of threats of harming his friends and family. Following this, Márquez spent a sweaty several months in a holding pen in the basement of the Palace of Justice, waiting for a space in the over-­capacity prisons. He also went through a trial with judges concealed behind one-­way mirrors and speaking through a pa with voices so distorted as to be unintelligible. And he received a sentence of twenty years in the Canto Grande detention facility. This was the typical setup for judicial “due process” of terrorism cases following Fujimori’s presidential coup in April 1992 with military support that disbanded Congress, discarded the constitution, and purged the judiciary of all opposing views. Márquez was released in 1998 thanks to a commission headed by Father Huber Lancier that began reviewing cases in which a clear lack of evidence was used to convict political prisoners during the Fujimori period. During the retrial that eventually freed him, Márquez was again asked about the same Mao art piece that was used to convict him in the first place: “The public defender interviewed me and asked me . . . if I was the one who put the red lips, Marilyn’s lips, on Mao. And they all laughed. No? And then the guy asks me if that wasn’t a sign of disrespect, and I answered, ‘Toward who? Marilyn?’ And they all shit themselves laughing” (Márquez 2009). It is only in the last few years that Taller nn’s work has resurfaced to become a topic of more academic conversations (see Lauer 2012; Mitrovic Pease 2015) and launch nn artists into mainstream art circles (cf. Interpretation #1). Yet, questions linger in the minds of many, since the “post” in “postconflict society” also means a society still wrestling with a traumatic past. What surfaces privately, and occasionally publicly, is a “we need to know” attitude with respect to what other kinds of activities, if any, nn members were involved in beyond their radically ambiguous art projects. The desire to reveal a truth that they are presumed to conceal—and perhaps even stage a public confession—is present even among nn’s own ranks. I was present at a public presentation in 2011 when Herbert Rodríguez, whose nn pseudonym is also listed on the Carpeta Negra project, effectively demanded a truth-­ and-­reconciliation–­style accounting from Márquez and other nn artists. But Rodríguez is hardly alone in his request for an “answer” about political involvement. It’s almost as if the rumors, remarks, and occasional confrontations pre­sent themselves in the form of a simple multiple choice question: 136 Interpretation #5

Dear nn, Circle one or more as necessary. Were you or were you not? A. a militant of some sort B. one of the Shining Path’s Maoist lackeys C. a bourgeois lefty artist with nothing else to do D. all, some, or none of the above

I’m clearly unmotivated by precise or public answers to such questions. I am interested instead in the dangerous politics the state perceived as evident— and in fact used as legal evidence—in nn works of art. In shedding the communal artistic mystique to become combatively political, nn’s work took on a new aura of extreme ambiguity in an era that demanded absolutist positions. This is the mystery of its political charge, the simultaneity of meaning and meaninglessness that nn’s work emits. The constant elision of political intentions. The refusal to be revealed or fully revelatory. To miss the point then is also to get it. At least, this is what I imagine nn mis/communicating to us about the nature of Peruvian reality in the moment they were struggling to express something about it. nn seduces us with the possibility of being both for and against the Shining Path, or either, and neither. Some will scowl and, invoking morality, continue to insist on the need for a truthful moment that leads to the promise of reconciliation. They will concede that one can respect the political ambiguity of artistic intent and still demand the truth of an individual’s political actions during an era known to have unleashed mass death on the Peruvian population. But how does one separate that search for “truth” from the state’s all-­inquiring impulses and repressive techniques to simply justify its own institutional concentration of power? I prefer to leave such all-­inquiring questions aside and think different thoughts. Who is to say all militant actions in the war belonged to Maoists and Marxists alone? Militancy belongs to no one. Who is to say that being actively against an all-­inquiring Other like the state makes one into an actor that pursues a revolution by any means necessary? Revolution belongs to everyone. “Any action of a political sort is of a radically individual and personal nature,” said someone.

137 The Worth of Art

Stage Three: The Dearth of Art and the Rage of Nostalgic Reproduction Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one important element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations Dearth: (n) Scarcity of anything, material or immaterial; scanty supply; practical deficiency, want or lack of a quality, etc. (v) To make dear in price; to cause or produce a scarcity of or in anything; to beggar.

During a March 2009 visit to Daniel F’s small two-­bedroom apartment in Miraflores, we talked about his history as a professional musician and front man of Leusemia. The two things are related but uncommonly so. It’s almost impossible to make a living on rock alone in Peru, one reason that it has been more a pasttime of the middle and upper classes than an ambition of the poor or popular classes. If there is one person that somehow managed to do it, it is Daniel F. This is thanks to the way he channeled his unquestionable charisma into the voice of a generation and then channeled that energy into Leusemia’s long-­term name recognition. Frequently known by the one-­letter abbreviation that stands for feo (ugly), F represents one of exceedingly few commercially successful “punk” icons from the eighties underground generation. I place quotes around “punk” because F also exhibits a distinct distaste for being constantly labeled “punk.” Of course, given some distinct Ramones influences, without something called punk the band Leusemia wouldn’t be what it is. I suspect it is more the idea of having to live with a label than the label itself that F finds troubling. There’s nothing punker than trying, even while failing, to resist the labels people constantly impose on you. Leusemia formed in 1983. They were presumed defunct in early 1986 when F announced he was leaving the band, shortly after a self-­titled lp made its debut and apparently sold out despite the domestic label Virrey’s reluctance to promote it because of its “morally questionable” content. The remaining members, bassist Leo Escoria, guitarist Raúl “Montaña” Montañez, and drummer Kimba Vilis (F’s brother), tried playing without him a couple of times but gave up. Soon afterward, Escoria departed for Europe and left 138 Interpretation #5

the Lima scene until he suddenly reemerged in 2012, still full of his signature nihilism and ready to publically resent F for reinventing Leusemia in the midnineties and surviving economically off the band’s reputation amid many other solo projects. Both Montaña and Kimba Vilis have played in multiple other bands, while coming and going from Leusemia’s various post­1995 configurations. After a few disputes over membership, money, musical direction, and name recognition, the only true constant in the band has been Daniel F. Given his lengthy trajectory—he’s now in his midfifties—F’s thoughts on the contemporary rock scene represent a particular generational standpoint. When I asked him about younger bands, his impulse was to lament the current state of musical affairs and jump back in time to the 1970s, when he says things were simply more creative: Everything seems so predictable. You already know how it’s going to start. You already know how it’s going to end. You already know what the singer is like, what his face looks like. You already know everything. The industry has already completely consumed music. It’s horrible. Finding something valuable within the production of music is something like an oasis, something very small. But outside of that, everything is the same. The records are the same. I come from the ’70s, where you put on a record and every song was different. (Valdivia 2009)

F is far from alone in this generational sentiment. In fact, declarations about an apparent absence of creativity in Peru’s contemporary rock scene abound, so long as we are talking about those representing the elder generation. For example, Raúl Montañez, an iconic guitarist who has played in many of Lima’s most memorable 1980s bands (Kola Rock, Leusemia, Voz Propia, Ataque Frontal), once spoke to me of rock’s present moment in terms of an almost unbearable monotony. It’s as if the newer bands are “all cut from the same cloth,” he said, despite constant assumptions that they are creating something novel (Montañez 2009). Miguel Angel Vidal, longtime vocalist of Voz Propia, the only underground band formed in the mideighties that survived with minimal interruptions, is both more and less generous to the younger rock generation. He sees the issue less as one attributable to a scarcity in the market of musical ideas. In fact, he reminded me that anyone with faith in rock, given its long-­term historical association with rebellious youth movements, must also maintain some faith in its ability to regenerate itself. Instead, he said the intergenera139 The Worth of Art

tional problem has to do with the fact that rock maturity brings with it experiences of temporal bewilderment, moments when one is engaged with young rock fans or musicians experiencing something as novel that his generation experienced as novel twenty or thirty years ago (Vidal 2009). A dialogue—full of both artistic paternalism and musical naïveté, real examples of rock redundancy and unquestionable experiences of old rock stubbornness—comes to define the way distinct generations of rockers interact with each other. This is why being punk in Lima is also a bit like getting caught in a game of intergenerational name calling. The older generation (e.g., those seen as original founders of the subte scene) belittles the younger rockers with terms such as chikipunks (“little punks”). The younger generation responds by calling the underground rock elders “dinosaurs” with all of the necessary ambivalence implied; it attributes to them the mythical status of rock monsters while also containing a hidden desire to see them go extinct already. Something politically specific is also at stake in these intergenerational conversations, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground. Because underground rock came into being amid a particular historical moment of utter political instability and mass violence, there persists a very singular idea that is the product of those particular historical associations that accompany the early generation subtes. That idea is this: even if underground rock was always more than the war, it was still the war that made that particular generation of underground rockers distinctly who they were. In short, growing up and going into the rock underground amid political violence plays a crucial part in authenticating claims to Peruvian punkness in the first place. One way to verify this is by paying attention to other voices—a chikipunk of sorts. At the age of twenty-­seven, Bruno, the guitarist of the band Morbo, is part of a bridge generation that came of age in the early part of the new century. Morbo started playing around 1999 and continues to do so occasionally in Lima’s underground show circuit. Alongside several other contemporary bands (Los Mortero, Cocaina, Suicidas, etc.), Morbo represents a band self-­ consciously cultivating an image as inheritor of Lima’s 1980s’ underground spirit. Bruno finds it a compelling challenge and impossible task at the same time. He remembers discovering rock in high school in the late 1990s when the first references he had were not Peruvian bands. His first memories are hearing about Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, and Korn. Bruno laughs at the fact that back then he’d never even heard of the Clash. 140 Interpretation #5

Sixteen images from Taller nn’s La Carpeta Negra. Courtesy of Alfredo Márquez.

p. 1

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But there was always a small group—he estimated it as maybe two in an average classroom of forty—that had this unexplainable awareness of the great bands from long ago. These too tended to be the foreign legends of punk, not just the Clash but the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, The Stooges, and so on. If you were lucky, he says, within that small group of two there was one who somehow knew that Peru had its own punk legends in the likes of Narcosis, Leusemia, Autopsia, and such. This is the moment that one’s eyes finally open to the possibility of a punk rock made in Peru rather than simply imported. The meager estimates are his, not mine, and they are indicative of punk rock’s general lack of popularity in Peru, and the condition of radical invisibility that Peruvian rock suffers even in the domestic context in which it is produced. His memory also serves to remind us of how Bruno and others like him, via small handfuls of “punks in the know” and the word of mouth they engage in, become invested in the specific historical trajectory of Lima’s rock underground. These moments of punk discovery also carry with them a curious burden. To feel as authentic as the original subtes, one is asked to imagine the impossible. One is expected to assume that rock subte’s original punkness resulted in significant part from growing up amid daily political violence, the gutting of the middle class during a devastating economic downturn, the political witch hunts of the state, and the Maoist scare tactics of the Shining Path. An ironic sensibility emerges, this sensation that it was somehow inherently more “punk” to grow up in a Peru engulfed in political violence, at least compared to the one now defined by political stability and a tremendous economic boom that has provided the middle class with a consumer comfort it has never before seen. What else explains the bizarre intergenerational resonances, resting on an assumed lack of creativity in Peru’s present punk moment? Miguel Angel Vidal of Voz Propia declares that the younger generation has “everything served to it” (Vidal 2009). Bruno laments the contemporary punk scene, while actively participating in it, with his own telling rhetorical question: “What is there to complain about now? Crime?” (Guerra 2010). The point is not really that Peruvian punks no longer have anything to complain about. It’s just that they have nothing that compares to the kind of utter societal chaos that Lima subtes were screaming about in the 1980s. Middle-­class comfort pre­sents a unique kind of boredom if you are a punk living in postconflict Peru, looking for somewhere or something to register your discontent. 141 The Worth of Art

Rage: (n) Violent anger, fury, usually manifested in looks, words, or action; an instance or fit of this; angry disposition. (n) As complement: a widespread, temporary fashion or enthusiasm.

Nostalgia, we presume, is about a desire to go home. This particular idea of home is defined less in terms of a place than as an entry point into a dream space that magically transports us to another time. That time is a moment in the past when things seemed more familiar, a time worthy of recollection and distinct recognition, a moment when things were, in some basic sense, simply “better” than they are now. Nostalgia, then, is both a judgment on the present and a prejudice against it, a temporary condition of temporal estrangement based on longing for something that is objectively gone but still subjectively recoverable. What if that nostalgic dream space, that lost feeling of familiarity and longed for feeling of a desired return, leads one back to a moment defined by rage rather than good feelings? Or can rage be a good feeling? What kind of experiential vessel can transport one there? What, if anything, will be missing once arrived? Reunion shows of long-­defunct bands are all the rage in the last several years. Either the roughly twenty-­year cycle that connects coming-­of-­age to the onset of midlife crisis is more than a cliché, or the cliché is so powerful that it is impossible to avoid. G3 and Narcosis were among the first eighties bands to relive their former glory, despite the fact that their members are much more occupied with very distinct contemporary lives. Wicho García and Jorge Madueño of Narcosis went the route of more mainstream music, both with a little help from Peru’s pop music icon, Miki González.9 Cachorro, the original guitarist and founder of Narcosis, is so dysfunctional that he seems trapped in a perpetual adolescence, or, from a more clinical standpoint, simply overrun by long-­term alcoholism. His circumstances are sometimes so dire, and yet his personality so crucial to the band’s original trio, that when Narcosis plays reunion shows to earn a few bucks, Cachorro willingly stumbles around on stage with a muted electric guitar (meanwhile, another guitarist actually plays the riffs in the background). Gonzalo Farfán runs an independent label called Mundano Records. In addition to other musical projects, he still plays with Gabriel Bellido of G3 in a pop punk band called Inyectores—that is, when they are not tending to upper-­middle-­class occupations in commercial brand development and law, 142 Interpretation #5

respectively. Guillermo Figueroa of the original G3 trio is now a freelance photographer after having worked for El Comercio (the most mainstream of Peruvian newspapers). The guys from G3 insist that they do reunion shows at the insistence of others, due to a clearly desirous following. Based on a G3 show I caught in July 2012—by far the largest “underground” show I’ve seen, with an estimated eight hundred or so in attendance—I have to believe this is true. At one level, there are plenty of people in the crowd, reliving their own youthful moments, and in need of help from the bands that represent the soundtrack of past lives. At another, younger generations come to these shows to imagine what it’s like to be considered one of Lima’s most historic hard-­core bands. Almost thirty years later and with much better equipment, they sound amazing. Many other bands have followed suit in organizing reunion shows, including several without the mystery, or the name recognition, of Narcosis or G3. Kaos General, Curriculum Mortis, qepd Carreño, Lima 13, Cardenales, and the list just goes on and on. The success of nostalgic musical adventures of this sort is not guaranteed to produce the desired result every time. I was at a Kaos General show in downtown Lima in 2010 at the exceedingly grimy venue known, ironically, as Salón Imperial (Imperial Salon). The young eighteen-­year-­old punks stood at a distance from the stage with their hands crossed, apparently with no idea who Kaos General was and little ability to relate to this group of four guys in their forties with professional day jobs. Yet, at a prior show in Barranco, the more upper-­class district where the band typically played in the late 1980s, all their old buddies came out. I wasn’t there, but people said even Alejandro Peña was there; he was the original singer, but married life and a medical career make him hesitant to appear. Musical nostalgia depends in large part on who shows up, ready to be transported back in time, or, more to the point, where and for which public one organizes a show. The relative success or failure of reunions can also depend on how many shows are organized. If there is a lesson to be learned about revisiting the past too many times and in too quick a succession, it is found in the 2011–12 “Global Collapse” tour of Eutanasia. A group that lasted from 1986 to 1991, Eutanasia is one of those bands that provokes heated discussion everywhere you go. Some of their once diehard punk contemporaries now love to hate them; of course this is the result of hating to keep on loving them. For several years, the band held a distinct reputation for being outspoken defenders of a militantly anarcho-­punk position at the high point of the war. Their 1988 143 The Worth of Art

cassette Sentimiento de Agitación (Feelings of Agitation) inserted a powerful anarchist message into a political context that was polarized between militant left and state-­terrorist right positions. For the previous followers of and collaborators with Eutanasia, their purported commitment to anarcho-­punk radicalism was thrown into question when every member of the band left Peru in the early 1990s (three went to Germany, and one to Japan). None returned for close to two decades. There is a simplistic nationalist impulse in such accusations, of course, as if staying in Peru as the Shining Path’s revolutionary aims imploded and suffering the consequences of political persecution under authoritarian Fujimori is somehow a marker of true anarcho-­punk pride. Regardless, the degree of anarchist radicalism Eutanasia expressed in the late 1980s, combined with the knee-­ jerk distrust thrown at almost any Peruvian who “escapes” to live in the First World, explains why many of their generational peers interpreted emigration as some sort of abandonment of political principles. Rumors, mixed with anticipation and disbelief, circulated about Eutanasia’s return to the stage for at least two solid years prior to its actual happening. In the end, there was a bit of logistical collapse, or simply an overestimation of the band’s reputation, on the “Global Collapse” tour. The two dates programmed for shows outside of Peru resulted in cancellations due to the band’s inability to assure minimal coverage of travel costs from Colombian and Chilean organizers. Yet, they did play several dates in Lima and a couple of other Peruvian cities, thanks to their fearless tour manager Ernesto “The Mole” Heidersdorf. I wasn’t at the first show, but those who were described it as a truly emotional lapse back in time, a successful musical journey to the turn of the nineties. Hence, Martín Roldán, a product of the Eutanasia generation, published a short piece in maximum rocknroll about the first reunion show. The article begins with Roldán’s memories of the group’s last concert in 1991 before they left Peru. “Eutanasia had left a mark on many from that generation that grew up in the middle of blackouts and car bombs. Or maybe they were a pure expression of those tumultuous times,” he writes (Roldán 2012). This first return concert in late 2011 was at the Etnias Bar in downtown Lima, and Roldán describes a euphoric mosh pit of memories, full of old sweaty punks that knew the band’s early days and younger wide-­eyed punks for whom Eutanasia is merely legend. The experience was, in his words, “a reaffirmation of that which we felt when were adolescents,” the “we” here referring to Roldán’s own “car-­bomb generation” 144 Interpretation #5

Figure 5.5 Eutanasia reunion show, 2011. Photo by the author.

(Generación Cochebomba is in fact the title of Roldán’s diy novel set in the underground scene of the 1980s). As pesky punk ethnographer, I made it to a Eutanasia practice session and the third show on the tour, one held at El Averno in downtown Lima in late December 2011 (see figure 5.5). On and off stage, Nico, the guitarist, seemed to be having the time of his early forties life. “Auxilio,” the drummer, kept up an apparently permanent easygoing outlook on everything that was happening. By contrast, Kike and Pepe, vocalist and bassist respectively, projected less enthusiasm than a sense of perpetual annoyance: the hassle of band practice; the bother of fans, the press, and the nosy gringo anthropologist; the perception that they are “sellouts” because they left a Peru in ruins in exchange for a different life in Germany; the recurring rumors that old punk acquaintances were supposedly threatening to come to the shows and beat the crap out of them for said selling out. The tension created by contemporary reality, that burden of a present that always impedes a total transport to the nostalgic past, was visible on stage at times. The concert at El Averno ended abruptly when somebody scrambled 145 The Worth of Art

onto the small stage and unintentionally pushed Kike, who then went flying backward into Auxilio’s drum set. Unable to roll with it, or overcome his apparent rage, Kike demanded the band stop playing and called the show to a stop. An expressionless Pepe shrugged his shoulders and immediately took off his bass. This left the other bewildered bandmates with no option but to follow them off stage. There was a distinct sense of disbelief, quite palpable if you were in the crowd, at the idea of cancelling a punk show mid set because the singer got pissed when somebody got on stage and pushed him. It turned into rhetorical snickering among those around me. “And these were the radical punks!” someone snickered. Is the key to the enthusiasm for nostalgic reproduction in knowing how not to overdo it? How to avoid trying to do it for too long? Or too many times in a row? Is there a more particular danger when collective perceptions accumulate and start to judge one temporal moment as essentially incompatible with another? Or when one form of rage appears as not translatable into another? Perhaps the point of Eutanasia’s so-­so return is that the contemporary rage of nostalgic enthusiasm can seem inadequate when punk publics constantly judge it by the standards of a political rage that once seemed authentic and no longer appears so. The whole experience becomes a metatemporal comment on the difficulty, historically speaking, of communicating an authentic anarchist rage amid an essentially nostalgic punk fashion, and doing so in a Peru that is now defined more by a postconflict economic boom than by the visceral boom of daily car bombs. Neither new nor old punks know exactly what they should be complaining about in this new Peru with its relative social calm—perhaps just the comfort provided by a denial of the underlying contradictions that made the war possible in the first place. In August 2010 there was exactly one reunion show of Guerrilla Urbana (the band renamed Ataque Frontal in 1986). It was a small show, not well advertised, and therefore attended primarily by a small in crowd of forty-­ somethings that represent the same generation and old friends of the band. Most were there to see the specific reunion of José Eduardo Matute, the guitarist that kept Ataque Frontal going off and on over the years, and Silvio “Espátula” Ferroggiario, the second and most-­remembered vocalist. Espátula took over vocals when Pedro Cornejo stepped aside in 1985. He also moved to Miami in the late 1980s and has lived there ever since, making only periodic visits to Lima. Before the show there was a slew of ironic comments about the pair’s age (both almost fifty at the time) and the unlikelihood of their ability to produce 146 Interpretation #5

Figure 5.6 Guerrilla Urbana / Ataque Frontal reunion show, 2010. Photo by the author.

the speed and aggression necessary for Guerrilla’s thrashlike sound. Being punk and getting old is hard on the body, as the gringo ethnographer also in his forties, and occasionally still in the mosh pit, can attest. Then again, it was also common knowledge that the set list consisted of fifteen songs maximum, since that’s all they ever had. Most last less than two minutes. Luckily for the aging punks, the entire thing was guaranteed to be over in less than thirty minutes. Yet, by almost all accounts of those present, it was one of the most intense half hours they had lived through in a while. The mosh was flooded with men in their thirties and forties thrasing around like they were fifteen. It was, in a phrase, totally rad (see figure 5.6). This moment of brief reconnection to the past of Lima’s mideighties underground proved ideal in basic punk terms. Short, sweaty, furious, over. Just the right amount, with just the right ingredients. The experience was also possible via a series of important associations: Matute’s same hard-­core riffs, Espátula’s surprisingly still explosive voice, various layers of generational references that authenticated the two as pioneers of punk during Peru’s most difficult political period. Retrospectively, the whole thing resulted in some147 The Worth of Art

Figure 5.7 Guerrilla Urbana / Ataque Frontal show flier, 2010. Courtesy of Alfredo Márquez.

thing rather unique, not by design but by proximity to an unforeseeable tragedy. Matute died unexpectedly of a heart problem just a few months later, making this Guerrilla reunion show his last appearance on stage. The show flier, based on a design by visual artist Alfredo Márquez, was an old, often circulated photo of Espátula screaming into a mic while Matute hammers on his guitar in the background (see figure 5.7). The casual band shot stands out from a chaotic backdrop of red crisscrosses and a collage of difficult-­to-­decipher black-­and-­white photos. This visual chaos is then superimposed on an endlessly repeated series of mug-­shot-­style photographs buried in the background. One has to look and listen carefully—and perhaps have internalized a certain kind of generational experience—to become fully seduced by the nostalgic visual effect. Or simply set up a time to talk to Alfredo Márquez, since he is the only one with full knowledge of everything that went into the design. Guerrilla Urbana jumps out of an image set back in time, just like Espátula’s fifty-­year-­old voice bolted out of the mic and let his latent angry teenager 148 Interpretation #5

back out of the cage for a bit. The image asks of the viewer, like the show asked the audience members that night, to return to a previous moment and find that specific identification with a very precise kind of rage born of a different moment: amid the twisted metal and dismembered bodies produced by a car bomb on the Tarata walking mall in Lima’s most upper-­class district; amid a bombed communications tower lying twisted in the sand, right outside of Lima; amid a disfigured body of a man in the back of a pickup truck who was mistaken for a militant during the Colina Group’s raid on a house in Barrios Altos; amid a series of ordinary profile pictures, some the very masterminds behind the Colina Group, and some disappeared students from La Cantuta University.

150 Interpretation #5

interpretation #6 situations a series of x resulting in Space Requirements: 138 sq. ft.

Layout: An interspersing of short texts (“field notes”) and three-­ dimensional designs converted to digital images (“posters for your wall”).

Method: Designs combine photocopied historical sources, significant objects, and images or text that sixty plus participants from six different countries submitted in response to an open online call for contributions to the project.

Artists: Shane Greene (design); Shad Gross (photography)

Note: sl = Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path); mrta = Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement)

A. X was repeatedly asked to circulate sl pamphlets, fliers, et cetera, but never did. Sympathetic at times with the sentiments of sl, nothing seemed appealing in their dogmatic approach to Marxism.

152 Interpretation #6

B.

C. X (of the band X) left Peru in xxxx, fleeing to X for fear of political persecution. Hasn’t been back and still has charges pending under Peru’s terrorism laws. Was more of a metalhead but discovered punk after hearing the Spanish band Siniestro Total and going to a concert in Lima’s Campo de Marte at which Autopsia played. Remembers hearing one of their songs and thinking immediately “how cool that they speak to you about Peruvian reality.” Sees music as a means of uniting different social classes, but only up to a point. It brings people together in concerts, to exchange music, etc. but also demonstrates limits (e.g., punks from different classes might get together at shows but this does not mean “you invite me over to your house”). Feels like some that said they were “anarchist” were just “individualist” and from individualism it is easy to convert into conservative. “Their anarchism was an affirmation of their individualism and defense of their own personal interests.” The crucial thing about the subtes was their constant “search for consistency . . . in a country where no one is consistent.” When in the band X didn’t have that much theory—a little Marx, Freud, Sartre—but read more Marxist theory later at university X. The inclination was always anarchist, always identifying with “el rechazo al poder” (the rejection of power). Wanted the band to become a political project by “playing to the masses.” In Lima this meant looking for chances to play in shantytown areas rather than middle- and upper-­class districts where most rock bands played. This caused problems with other band members who did not radicalize. Became more active in student militancy at university X as a result. Discovered there were a few student bands that played at campus concerts with music inspired by the more political punk (e.g., the Clash). These bands had names that made direct reference to dates of significant sl actions like X and X; their members were part of sl student organizations. The reaction of most sl people was skepticism because of the rock thing. Three of those in these bands were imprisoned for eight to ten years in xxxx and supposedly regrouped to play shows inside prison. X thinks sl began to open itself ideologically at the turn of the nineties, reaching out more to urban middle-­class constituencies. There were also just fewer places to play and militancy was becoming a necessity. “At the time, if you got politicized in Peru and you radicalized . . . the contradictions were so sharp, speaking in Marxist terms, that it left you very little room to do anything other than active political militancy.” This didn’t mean the relation between being militant and being subte was equivalent. 154 Interpretation #6

Being in a hard-­core band, X had “reached a ceiling.” But for X becoming a subte “effectively served to sew the necessary seeds to create a space of political militancy.” X verified the existence of an organizational group called X (that X also mentioned). It was supposed to channel the subte’s rage into political militancy. Initial contacts at university X were more involved with the mrta, and in xxxx they offered X a trip to Nicaragua for “political field training” (during the Sandinista era). Never completely bought the idea of a society without oppression. Stated “I did not engage in militancy with the Shining Path” to clarify that militancy was engaged in independently. X, along with other subtes like X, thought they would easily be the first to go if sl actually won the war. “If the Shining Path had taken power, the first ones that they would repress, imprison, or kill would have been the anarchists and the intellectuals.” Regardless, taking action was a necessity of the situation: “You can’t forget this was a moment of war . . . so if you considered yourself a person with a certain ethic and certain coherence . . . you had to do something.” The memory that haunts X is seeing X, fellow subte, just a couple of days before being captured and assassinated by the military on the outskirts of Lima.

155 A Series of Situations Resulting in X

D.

E. X was part of the X scene, and tied to a gang known as X. Initially sympathized with sl politics and believed in the revolution. Became a firefighter in the early 1990s and was suddenly in the situation of having to see directly the effects of sl bombings in Lima. The most memorable was the Tarata car bomb in the wealthy district of Miraflores in 1992. Sitting in my Lima apartment, everyone drunk, it was X’s birthday. Most people leave and X gets emotional, almost starts crying, we’re listening to the band Eutanasia, a favorite. X remembers the call to the scene of the Tarata blast; getting tasked with debris cleanup; being responsible for peeling away fragmented body parts of a dead couple that were charred into the ceiling of a bombed-­ out apartment building overlooking the walking mall.

157 A Series of Situations Resulting in X

F.

G. According to several (X, X, X, and X), X was super young (teenager) and worked for X at X, selling cassettes, fanzines, books, et cetera. Got involved in SL’s cause. In 1989, 1990, or 1991 (no consensus on the year), participated in an action to create a blockade at the bridge X, during one of SL’s infamous armed strikes. Police arrived; X was caught. The body was found executed and disfigured in district X of Lima. News reports claimed it was the result of a confrontation with police. According to X, X’s corpse had no fingernails and various bullet wounds, indicating torture before execution. The body was also found far away from site of capture. Several subtes met at X shortly after the news of the death circulated; there was a confrontation with those active in sl. X says X was the one who was with X when the police arrived. Versions vary as to whether X escaped as X fell to police or was caught and successfully bribed way out of similar fate. Also, X says X (of the band X) was the one originally responsible for getting X involved in sl militancy in the first place, thus ultimately responsible for the torture and assassination. Unresolved accusations, loaded feelings, differing accounts, an innocent-­looking face. No disagreement about state terror.

159 A Series of Situations Resulting in X

H.

I. X says X was the informal name of a small group of anarchists, mostly from University X, and subtes from the scene that surrounded X. There was a pilgrimage to Arequipa to visit the grave of Manuel Gonzalez Prada, turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­century anarchist. “Authority implies abuse, obedience demonstrates abjection.” X says there was a certain ideological “convergence” between sl and radicalized anarcho-­subtes because both refused to negotiate with or appeal to the state (at least until Guzmán was captured and signed the peace accord in 1993 that divided sl ideologically). “But that did not necessarily make us friends.” The mrta negotiated with the state indirectly via various legal leftist or populist political parties (apra, udp, etc.) or political kidnapping tactics. In the early nineties, a group of radicalized subtes from the X scene began conversations with anarchist student groups at university X to debate organizational issues. The more “hard-­core” (double sense of word) types began producing small anarchist publications to debate the subte vs. subversive thing (e.g., resurrected La Protesta, an early twentieth-­century anarcho-­sindicalist pamphlet). Most of the subtes never wanted to put aside their “punkness” to work directly with working-­class unions or the armed groups. “They always opted for marginality, including self-­marginalization.” But they shared anarchist publications with unions and sometimes got access to union spaces for shows or debates. There was a lot of sectarianism between the anarchist, socialist, and union-­based perspectives. X was detained in xxxx for ripping down a political party flyer from a lamppost. When military personnel stopped X, they did a search and found a short manuscript about arbitrary detentions (ironically enough). Accused of possessing subversive propaganda, X was held for twenty days and tortured. Military searched the home but found no further materials. The more “incriminating” material X possessed at the time was buried in an empty lot that belonged to a family friend. Never loyal to sl, active in debating those who were on anarchist grounds, X did collaborate with them to design materials. “Aside from the fact that the enemies of my enemies are my friends . . . I collaborated with the only thing I know how to do which is to draw.” Back then, X thought subtes might become “a collective revolutionary subject.” Nowadays, doesn’t expect shit from anybody.

161 A Series of Situations Resulting in X

J.

K. X (of the band X) said sl actors repeatedly asked for medicines from the family pharmacy; sometimes X provided it.

163 A Series of Situations Resulting in X

L.

M. In August of 1991, X authored an anonymous thirty-­five-­page typewritten manuscript with the title X. Hereafter, it is referred to simply as Text X. The most sustained, detailed analysis of Lima’s subte scene written at the time, it provides critical reflection on how the subte’s anarcho-­ communist potential could become more politically actionable, and criticism of the methods used by Peru’s armed groups, primarily the Shining Path. Part manifesto, Text X offers an impassioned plea for underground rock to give rise to other forms of underground political action. The author made three copies of Text X and distributed them with the intention of inserting these ideas into existing political debates between student anarchists and a subset of radicalized subtes. One copy ended up in the hands of X, editor of punk ’zine X. Another went to X of the band X (police presumably confiscated this copy during a raid at a location where the band played). The author gave a third copy to a philosopher who prefers to remain in the condition of X. This analysis of Text X is based on a full transcription with no access to any of the original copies. Text X is worthy of sustained engagement for three vital reasons. First, it allows for an expanded analytical view on the praxis of X. It pre­sents a better sense of the ideological form, reflects on the political content, and makes evident the practical contradictions implicit in the actions of those actors who operated under the influence of X during the war. Second, Text X is significant because it represents an important divergence from the tropes used to shape the dominant narrative of the war. After reading Text X, the long familiar thesis of a civilian population entre dos fuegos as Degregori (1985) once put it—that is, innocently “caught in the crossfire” between the competing evils of the Shining Path’s power-­mad Maoism and the Peruvian state’s dirty, undemocratic misdeeds—no longer holds sway over the truth. Nor is this a matter of factoring in those political actors that played significant roles in organizing self-­protection or offering ideological resistance to the groups vying for state power—for example, peasant community patrols in the Andes or communal kitchens in poor Lima shantytowns. Scholars rightly understand these forms of political action as grassroots social movements, launched in part as a response to Peru’s radically unstable environment (cf. Starn 1999). But they do not represent alternative forms of militancy guided by revolutionary ideals. The point then is that by read165 A Series of Situations Resulting in X

ing Text X closely one realizes the war contains untold stories and alternative revolutionary scenarios and that the subtes are central in them. As a document that also proposes direct political actions, directed against the state, Text X stands at odds with the major revolutionary ideologies of the time: whether this is the Shining Path’s Andean Maoism or the mrta’s Guevara-­style guerrilla philosophy. In dialogue with Marxism’s class critique and the socialist drive toward collective organization, the heart of the proposal is a militant request for the full realization of anarchist praxis already existing in potentia in the subte movement. This call to action does not locate revolutionary ideology and practice in the will to state power that was so visible in the dogmatic Marxist positions of Peru’s armed groups, the Shining Path in particular. In sum, Text X proposes a stateless future rather than a state takeover and contains a compelling argument that free and autonomous association is directly tied to a nonspectacular daily praxis that punks already specialize in: diy. Third, Text X was clearly intended as a utopian political tract and is imbued with all of the requisite revolutionary fervor. As becomes clear from the alternative anarcho-­communist utopia the author imagines—a society without a state in which the art of urban punks is as central as the land of rural Indians or the labor of proletarians—it is simply unlike any other political document produced during the war. The ideas in Text X are utterly unique within the forty-­year history of thought about punk’s political dimensions. For that matter, Latin Americanists should consider it an absolute rarity within the dominant narratives of “Cold War Latin America” since they routinely presume a basic dichotomy between Marxists on the left and repressive state regimes on the right and accounts of militant anarchism are virtually unheard of. The anonymity of its author, the limited copies, and the clandestine nature of its circulation among a small sector of “hard-­core” subtes (again, in the double sense) make clear how much was at risk in writing, possessing, or discussing such a document. As evidence for this, Peruvian journalist Alamo Perez flashed a confiscated copy of Text X, with no explanation, before television viewers’ eyes during a 1996 investigative report about suspected infiltration of Shining Path “terrorists” in Lima’s underground rock scene (see Pérez Luna 1996). It is this apparent “danger” presented to the sacredness of the state that also makes Text X in need of a serious reading. X produced it at an extremely precise historical juncture. The text appeared at the climax of the war during 166 Interpretation #6

a brief period when state power—and therefore the very future of Peru—was most clearly in question. August 1991 was only a few months after the Shining Path’s threat to take the state was declared politically viable. It was also just a few months before the authoritarian tactics of the Fujimori government, and steady police intelligence, delivered the decisive blows that led to the dissolution of militant action in the country. By the beginning of the nineties, in the minds of many there was no clear winner in the struggle to determine which violent party would possess the state’s “legitimate” monopoly over the use of force. In fact, Shining Path ideologues thought they had conquered enough ground to declare the communists militarily capable of delivering on the revolution they had promised just a decade earlier. In early 1991, Guzmán released a statement saying his Communist Party of Peru militants had achieved “strategic equilibrium” with state forces. This was understood as an essential political milestone that would tip the balance in their favor and lead to an eventual overthrow. Whether or not Shining Path militants ever really reached such a momentous point in “objective” military terms is debated, but only in retrospect. No one denies that there was a distinct ethos of radical political uncertainty when Guzmán released the statement. Some Peruvians hoped and many more feared that a Shining Path victory was a realistic possibility as an outcome to the conflict. This is corroborated by the mass emigration at the turn of the nineties and by President Fujimori’s insistence that the “terrorists” would be defeated only through mano dura (“hard-­handed”) tactics, a simple political euphemism for dramatically ramping up the state’s own terror tactics. Things turned out differently. In April of 1992, President Fujimori led a historic autogolpe, an ironically labeled “self-­coup” that destroyed all remaining pretenses of democracy. The executive decision to dissolve Congress with the aid of the military was the most obvious display of state authoritarianism. The maneuver also led to an intensification of state terror on all counts: expanded efforts to detain, try, and imprison suspected subversives on minimal or false evidence in blinded military tribunals; systemic corruption of judicial and media officials thanks to the handiwork of Fujimori’s intelligence advisor, Vladimiro Montesinos; granting even freer rein to Grupo Colina, an executive-­approved death squad charged with liquidating the subversive element. Guzmán’s sudden capture in September 1992 of course was not the direct result of all of this. He was found with other leaders of Shining Path’s “central committee” in a small apartment above a dance studio, located in 167 A Series of Situations Resulting in X

Lima’s Surco District, after months of steady surveillance work by an antiterrorist detective unit identified the residence as his hideout. This proved the decisive turning point. The cult of personality that surrounded Presidente Gonzalo—also vital to a militant cause propelled forward by total commitment to “Gonzalo Thought”—proved fragile. The Shining Path’s power seemed suddenly illusory in the famous press shots released after Guzman’s arrest in which he appears wearing prison stripes and literally being forced to stand inside a cage (not a cell) like an animal. Along with other imprisoned leaders of Shining Path’s central committee, Guzmán signed a peace accord in 1993 that divided the Maoists still engaged in the struggle. Disaffection from the cause and marginalization of a small proviolence faction in the Peruvian jungle resulted. The vast majority of Peruvians—excluding the recent Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights (movadef), a widely vilified organization that seeks to free political prisoners and vindicate Gonzalo Thought—were soon on their way to “remembering” the war. The 2003 presentation of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s voluminous “Final Report” to various government officials effectively marked the symbolic moment at which the war was considered officially “over” such that Peru became a “postconflict” society. Placing Text X in dialogue with other works on punk only reinforces its distinctiveness. It is exceptionally different from almost any cultural studies perspectives that might guide scholars on matters of subculture, urban youth, and political possibilities. Newer accounts of subculture are almost invariably concerned with identity politics, “revolution” rarely appears as part of the vocabulary, and political violence is unlikely to form part of the context. As discussed elsewhere, the more canonical approaches hinge on two crucial assumptions: that subcultures do not propose revolutionary solutions and that this is the case because they represent primarily symbolic and stylistic interventions (cf. Interpretation #2). Text X starts from exactly the opposite assumptions: that underground punks have their own revolutionary potential and it involves precisely the quotidian ways they materially remake the world around them. Accounts that explore punk’s connections to 1960s Situationism or early twentieth-­century Dadaism are more optimistic about its political potential (G. Marcus 1989; Savage 2002). Here, the problem is settling for that same old story of punk as just another manifestation of an artistic avant-­garde that emerges, always quite predictably, from “modern” Europe or the United 168 Interpretation #6

States, revealing a familiar blindness to other parts of the world. One does find more parallels between Text X and David Graeber’s work on the punk ethos of contemporary direct action movements where a theorization of anarchist praxis is also more explicit (Graeber 2009). Yet, in Graeber’s work the assumed object of critique is almost always post–­Cold War corporate globalization. As a result, his version of punk anarchist linkages points to a very different historical moment, one defined by the triumph of neoliberal reasoning following disaffection from the old left’s revolutionary dreams, struggles, and failed experiments. Provocative as it is, Graeber’s work tends to assume a historical shift in which contemporary anarchism replaces Marxist dogma in everything from Occupy to Mexican Zapatismo. In fact, he often identifies the Zapatista movement of the midnineties as the starting point for contemporary counterglobalization struggles, likely the most important symbol of post–­“Cold War Latin America.” Obviously, this is not at all the historical moment to which a Maoist insurgency such as the Shining Path, and therefore Peru’s Cold War conflict, corresponds. Therefore, the anarcho-­ punk radicalism infused in the subte movement, and explicitly theorized in Text X during this historical moment, represents an important precursor to what Graeber says about the revolutionary potential of contemporary anarchist movements and their counter-­globalization context. Text X is not the only analysis of the subte’s political possibilities written during the war—just the vastly more significant one. The only point of comparison is a short article by Mónica Feria (1988) published in the lefty intellectual journal Márgenes several years before she became a high-­profile political figure. Feria was detained on charges of affiliation with Shining Path propagandists in 1992 and fled Peru upon release. She is now a well-­known international human rights lawyer. Her 1988 article is a brief reflection on the place of subtes in the larger political panorama of Peruvian youth during the eighties. Quoting lyrics from bands such as Narcosis, Sociedad de Mierda, and Autopsia, Feria refutes the idea that the subte movement is simply a collective expression of youthful desperation, some sort of Lima variant of a Sex Pistols’ “no future.” “In its origins, there is an intention to subvert the order,” she writes. Citing historic shows from 1985, when subtes took Lima “by assault,” she adds, “the aggressivity, harshness, and smell of rupture was made evident” in the movement (Feria 1988, 160). Ultimately, Feria sees the subte’s anger as part of a broader ethos of youthful protest and Maoist insurgency within a context of absolute state repression. Citing multiple cases of young people killed by police or military during 169 A Series of Situations Resulting in X

public marches, she concludes that “‘desperation’ is not the sign of our times but rather a robust force that vindicates violence and persists in believing in revolution” (Feria 1988, 165). Feria is never unambiguously pro–Shining Path but does clearly advocate for militancy. Denouncing those who might dismiss the Shining Path struggle as a matter of youthful adventurism, she says, “Affirming that young people enrolling today in sl ‘don’t have anything to lose’ suggests that no one that has something to preserve could be there” (Feria 1988, 164–65). Feria’s article does issue warnings about how subtes might not reach their political potential, identifying the principle dangers as absorption by commercial interests or an inability to get past contradictions internal to the movement: for example, the race and class tensions among Lima punks (see Interpretation #3). Here, there is some overlap with the self-­critique of rock subte offered in Text X. At one point, the author of Text X wonders what political action is possible from a movement “whose social basis is the middle class” and possesses no inherent connection to the “consciousness of the oppressed” (X 1991, 11). X also warns that subtes run the risk of turning into a bunch of “mantenidos,” that is, financing leisure activities via family inheritances and social connections. Because of their middle- to upper-­class backgrounds, X argues many subtes are positioned to eventually solidify their privileges within the system of family connections and personal favors that structures Peruvian society (and X was not entirely wrong about this outcome). The author also explicitly conceptualizes Text X as an extension of Guy Debord’s Situationism. Despite the punk critique of rock star complexes, X argues that subtes are in danger of seduction by the very object of their critique. Accordingly, the author cites the Sex Pistols’ initially provocative proposal, followed by their infamous rise and fall as just another media spectacle, as the paradigmatic case in point. Lost in loose connections, Feria never poses the more direct question of exactly what political relation a Lima subte has to a committed Maoist militant. Instead, she assumes they both reflect a generalized youthful antipathy toward the status quo. She also demonstrates no awareness that the subte might in fact be operating on the basis of a distinct proposal for political praxis, both in terms of what militant practice might mean and how a revolutionary future is imagined. This is precisely the most important intervention that the author of Text X makes. X’s stated aim in Text X is to contribute to the building of an anarcho-­ communist movement, starting with the premise that subtes constitute 170 Interpretation #6

its core. “It’s clear that the principle objective of working with the subte movement is integration into an anarcho-­communist revolutionary organization with a view toward participation in the struggle and revolutionary self-­management” (X 1991, 29). Characterizing revolutionary struggle as principally a matter of “self-­management” (autogestión), a term that loses some of its meaning when translated into English, goes directly to the point about the centrality of punk in this account. Emphasized throughout the document, autogestión is the less literal way (compared to hazlo-­tu-­mismo) to translate the practical ideal of do-­it-­yourself (diy). This is of course the term Anglo punks appropriated from the humdrum material but “crafty” context of amateur house repair. Yet, in this case X views diy as something more than a subcultural means of everyday expressive ingenuity and artistic democratization via Benjaminian-­inspired practices of appropriating the means of mechanical reproduction in order to unleash one’s creative self-­ expression. Expanding it well beyond its primarily musical and artistic reference points in punk subculture, the author of Text X positions diy as the very core of anarchist praxis and also the key to a broader array of direct political actions. X relates diy to everything from a proposal for an egalitarian pedagogy of revolutionary study groups to a rationale for engaging in property destruction and theft (to the benefit of the anarcho-­communist movement). diy also constitutes the essential grounds on which subtes should consider forging alliances with Lima’s ambulatory vendors since they too are doing-­ it-­themselves in order to get by in the informal street economy. Regardless, the artistic and musical dimensions of expressive culture remain central in X’s vision of revolutionary diy. For example, X states, “As musicians and subtes we must also correctly orient our action on the terrain we claim to know: that of alternative culture” (X 1991, 20). The choice of “alternative culture” over “subculture” throughout the manuscript is indicative of the degree of autonomous creativity X identifies in the subte scene. At a critical juncture in the text X writes, “We can’t speak of revolution if this does not possess a ludic character but we also can’t speak of pleasure if we are still tied to the current structures of domination and repression” (X 1991, 24–25). Overall, the proposal X imagines is one between real dedication and radical spontaneity: a punk that demonstrates the punctuality required to participate in a revolutionary study group on Tuesdays but does not let go of the crass desire to get drunk, play furiously, and fuck with whoever is willing on Thursdays. I say “fuck whoever” on purpose. It is given short shrift at the 171 A Series of Situations Resulting in X

very end of the text. Yet, X does reason that the subte’s anarcho-­communism aligns with resistance to gender- and sex-­based forms of domination. X advocates for an antimonogamist stance, citing Raoul Vaneigen and the drive to destroy the conflation of “love,” “property,” and “body,” and claims allegiance with a feminist politics that seeks the “abolition of machismo.” The complex relation between serious politics and spontaneous pleasures is crucial. X suggests that one of the subte’s ostensible revolutionary weaknesses is actually the very basis of anarchist strength. The common perception that the subtes are nothing more than self-­marginalizing misfits—too undisciplined to be politically coherent or too involved in petty acts of symbolic provocation to contemplate other forms of political action—overlooks the inherent potential of the nonconformist contrarianism that guides them. It is precisely in the action of being a misfit that they develop a critical perspective on systemic problems: “Trying to see things optimistically, we could say that it is precisely this lack of coherence and disbelief toward everything that seems rational, ordered, and systematic . . . that impedes underground youth, as punks, from being totally assimilated by the system and maintains them in a situation of marginality that condemns them, definitively, to being black sheep in aeternum” (X 1991, 5). In effect, X positions this broad ideal of revolutionary diy praxis, or if you will this black sheep politics, directly against the centralization of authority that both the institutions of state and the intentions to occupy the state necessarily assume. The basic argument is that autogestión revolucionaria is the fundamental basis for all forms of free political association and autonomous social organization as well as a practical means to engage in unalienated forms of cultural expression and acts of genuinely pleasurable spontaneity. Given the political environment, Text X also offers analysis of the competing revolutionary ideologies, and models of militancy, operative at the time. X sketches out considerable differences with respect to the Shining Path’s state-­oriented agenda and political strategy. The resulting critique, already implied in the proposition of revolutionary diy, points toward an anarchist refusal of the Shining Path’s highly hierarchal organization, both the “central committee” and “party” structure and the dependency on “Presidente Gonzalo” as the singular ideologue. In fact, X argues that an anarcho-­ communist movement should avoid giving itself a formal name. This is in part self-­protective, that is, to avoid calling attention to their clandestine political activities. Yet, ideologically, it represents a refusal of the statelike inten172 Interpretation #6

tion of institutionalization that accompanies the act of constituting an organization with a proper name that might also become monopolized by one or more “leaders.” X writes, “Let it be clear that the use of words like ‘anarchist’ and ‘communist’ in this essay have the characteristics of an adjective—we are anarchists and communists due to our antiauthoritarian and communal action—and not the sense of a noun, or label (like, for example, ‘the Communist Party’)” (X 1991, 31). Text X also contains various proposals for direct action. The author argues that a more effective way to expand anarcho-­communist praxis is via the formation of revolutionary study groups organized with a series of clandestine protocols to avoid state detection (e.g., no meeting in public spaces, members sworn to secrecy). X sees the formation of these study groups as a fundamental step to deepen commitment, become conscious of the dangers of revolutionary dogma, and orient further political action. The proposed reading list ranges from anthropological theories of human evolution and world history to classics in Marxist and anarchist thought. Though the exact pedagogy is to be determined by each autonomous group, X imagines a necessary and ongoing process of “self-­evaluation” to act as a check on the individual-­group dynamic. Notably, the proposal for these underground study groups, presumed to be the basis for militant cells, is to organize according to Lima’s urban districts. Organizing according to spatial proximity, rather than within the given structures of the subte scene (e.g., at shows or other punk hangouts), is intended to counteract the endogamous nature of the punk scene. The aspiration was that district-­to-­district organizing would begin bringing in other urban actors who may not share the same taste for underground rock as the subtes do. These different groups should also begin to take specific forms of direct action, prominently including the production of anarcho-­communist political materials. In hopes of building a revolutionary movement that begins with subtes but expands beyond them, X says political materials could be distributed to high school students and teachers, to voters going to the polls, and even to “subaltern” members of the police. They must also look for the means to finance activities and where necessary engage in forms of “expropriation.” As part of a long tradition of anarchist thought stretching back to Goldman and Proudhon, state and private property is understood as already representing a form of robbery. Any action intended to further the anarcho-­ 173 A Series of Situations Resulting in X

communist movement therefore justifies expropriation of this illegitimately claimed property. Citing a refusal of Shining Path strategies (e.g., car bombs in public spaces; spectacular destruction of infrastructure that state or private interests simply replace), X argues against forms of destruction that result in “terrorist spectacles” and rely on fear as political strategy. X believes this brings more cost than any possible benefit to the cause. “Actions of an expropriating nature should be executed only when there is absolute certainty of success and with as minimal cost as possible, but never in the opposite scenario” (X 1991, 50). All of the above proposals for action fall under what X terms “clandestine activity” for obvious political reasons. At the time X is writing this, all such actions—the revolutionary study group, the production of militant “propaganda,” any act of expropriation tied to political intent—were prosecutable under the state’s “apology for terrorism” legislation. The consequences were torture and imprisonment at best, and extrajudicial execution or disappearance at worst. Crucially, X links this “clandestine activity” to a different category of direct action termed “semilegal activity,” and this is where the punkness of anarcho-­communist politics becomes the clearest. X refers to the world of underground music, art, and fanzines that Lima’s subtes constituted at the time. The term “semilegal” has the sense of not being explicitly prohibited by the state under “apology for terrorism” legislative logics. A reference to the subte’s self-­marginalized “black sheep” nature, these various unofficial activities represent a form of social existence and cultural expression existing at the periphery of alienated capitalist markets and repressive state law. They therefore embody a real “alternative” to them: Etymologically, the term [“subterráneo”] means “under the ground.” Taking into account the arena in which the most characteristic expression of “subterráneo” is found (that is, the musical arena), the term in question refers to the unknown, the set apart, the clandestine with respect to the known, the trendy, and the “superficial.” By extension, “subterráneo” also refers to and encompasses that which . . . rejects the patterns that govern official and legal “culture” and “art,” that which repudiates the “values” that are found implicit in them. And, by criticizing them, it seeks to develop through different means within a distinct context, in fact claiming to be an alternative with respect to what is commonly called “commercial art” (that is, the “art” found in stores and spaces at the “surface,” the “showcase culture” that is characteristic of a “complacent, 174 Interpretation #6

conformist, reactionary and domesticated society” that “does not understand us and must be destroyed”). So, this “alternative” proposal emerges and manifests with its own distinct characteristics. (X 1991, 4–5)

The author of Text X is keenly aware of the contests between hegemony and counterhegemony that are implicit in the contrast between “mainstream” culture and “subculture.” For reasons made evident in the above quote, X states a preference for calling underground rock an “alternative culture.” The subte’s actions are positioned “under” and “against” something by virtue of being subterranean. But the subte is also “for” something else, for the production of an alternate mode of individual and social existence that the everyday praxis of anarcho-­communism promises to deliver without need or ambitions of seizing the state. The full political potential of their “semilegal activity” is found in the subtes’ possible connections to Lima’s culture of market informality. Subtes also value direct forms of street exchange, less mediated by the highly hierarchal forms of social and economic engagement of formal capitalist markets. This is why subtes produce diy music directly to cassette and sell unauthorized copies at street vendor markets. Subtes also spontaneously organize shows at miscellaneous neighborhood venues without appealing to the logic of dependency implied in gaining access to official “club” (much less stadium) circuits. Subtes design fanzines at home and simply circulate them hand to hand in cheap photocopy format without need or care for monopolized distribution networks of mainstream press. Et cetera. The key point for X is that each one of these activities already points to moments of actual overlap with other potential allies outside the subte scene, representing the possibility for expanding anarcho-­communist praxis rather than remaining punkly endogamous. The punk fanzine can craft a direct dialogue with the anarcho-­communist’s political pamphlets. In fact, one finds several articles about the subte scene in early to midnineties publications (such as La Protesta, Avanzemos, Basta Ya) intended to make the anarchist position heard. Subtes that organized shows at labor union headquarters (several bands did this, particularly those associated with the X scene), instead of bar or club venues, could realize this as an opportunity to strategize with working-­class leadership and not just make use of the space. Those selling underground rock cassettes in street markets are in a position to forge direct alliances with the multitude of poor migrant Andean street vendors also working in Lima’s informal economy. 175 A Series of Situations Resulting in X

In each case, the author of Text X sees subtes already taking these actions but not realizing their full potential. The subte’s lack of acknowledgment of class and race privileges, as well as some deep commitments to machismo and an urban bias, presented various obstacles. The subtes could cultivate awareness of such privileges and prejudices in order to understand that the “leisure” of a punk show contrasts to the “labor” of trying to organize factory workers. The subtes could move beyond juvenile rigidities in terms of how punks define acceptable forms of cultural expression (e.g., the subte convinced that “salsa sucks” and therefore identifies no common ground with salseros). The subtes might move past drunken conversations in which the term “anarchist” becomes a simplified libertarian synonym for “do whatever you want” abstracted from actual social relations and real social structures. Ultimately, X’s call to integrate “clandestine” with “semilegal” activities and build an anarcho-­communist movement is born from a deep reflection made possible by a collective political situation and the individual intelligence of the mind at work to understand it. Despite the limitations identified, X sees the subte as more than just a fucked-­up misfit screaming about how fucked up everything is. The point is that the subte as fucked-­up misfit already produces these diy situations as possible solutions within the revolutionary praxis of an anarchist everyday.

176 Interpretation #6

N.

O. X and X were part of what most call the “gang” X. But X says it was just a “group of friends.” There had been a large fight with another group that sometimes showed up at club X. So X and X planned to take Molotov cocktails with them one night in case things got ugly again. X carried the primitive explosives in a backpack and hid it outside. The other group never showed up. When X went to retrieve the bag, police stopped X with the “suspicious” backpack and forced X to open it. Never had anything to do with sl, and X always hated what they stand for anyway. According to X, X, and others, members of X’s family were involved in sl, had propaganda hidden in the house, et cetera. After X’s detention police questioned family members and searched the house, discovering (or planting?) political material. Rather than implicating those family members involved, the family allowed X to take the fall (by self-­admission “I think I was the black sheep”). Forced to do time among sl militants, X spent X number of years in prison until finally released for being wrongly tried as a terrorist.

178 Interpretation #6

P.

Q. According to X and X, an actor nicknamed X got involved in the mrta, via the political party Patria Libre. Later went to jail, got out X years later, and converted to evangelical Christianity.

180 Interpretation #6

R.

S. X was imprisoned with a life sentence, later converted to X years, and eventually released in xxxx upon full completion of term. High-­profile media coverage of capture. I met X in prison after bribing my way in with ten soles. We got drunk on crappy cane liquor thanks to a system of personal favors with guards. X seemed well respected by other political prisoners and was remarkably open about relations with sl leadership. Thinks sl is in need of a critical reflection on the balance of good versus bad in political strategies. No dramatic signs of repentance for involvement though for strategic legal reasons felt compelled to act repentant to try to get an early release. X recognizes sl as an organization propelled by hard-­line ideological mandates that became unhinged at a certain point. Too rigid and unable to account for the radical cultural differences of native Andeans. Struggled unsuccessfully to get sl leaders to see art and music, underground rock in particular, as an avenue for expanding to Lima’s rebellious middle-­class youth. But the leadership dismissed rock as a foreign, alienated, and capitalist form. “Yankee go home.” Says the collective known as X was a “militant cell,” meaning the members were involved in more than just debates with sl and started taking their own militant actions (car bombs). Cited X of X as involved in such actions and I was too nervous to ask for further details about when and where exactly because I’m not sure I want to know. X recounts that when first captured, was left in handcuffs for months and subjected to repeated lengthy torture sessions. Strung up by the arms, electric shock to genitals, beaten with a stick on the soles of the feet. Says you learn to try pissing and shitting yourself as quickly as possible to try to make the torturer think you have lost control over your body in hopes the torture stops. Spent X years in prison X (freezing conditions), locked in a tiny cell with dirt floor, let out half hour per day, played games of verbal chess with prisoners in adjacent cells. Finally got a lighter regimen and a few goodies (e.g., secret Facebook account) when transferred to X penal facility in Lima. Claims that X (of the band X) was involved in an effort to radicalize subtes and promote militancy via an organization called X; the primary mission was to place revolutionary content in lyrical and artistic messages.

182 Interpretation #6

T.

U. X talked about several cases, including own. Primarily a frequenter of the X scene, but periodically played in bands with X, briefly had a band called X. Claimed the reputation gained as an sl “recruiter” among subtes was mostly a myth, invented after imprisonment. On a visit to X, where X lives in exile, we talked in more detail. Said involvement with sl started via a “gateway” organizational group called X. Caught in xxxx during an sl armed strike and spent X years in prison (first prison X, then prison X). Says was present in the May 1992 sl prison uprising at prison X. However, X, who also claims to have been present, says this and everything else X says is just a lie to exaggerate a self-­image as “militant.” After release, went to X, and lives in the same squat property as X. Thinks sl gets more respect outside Peru than inside.

184 Interpretation #6

V.

W. X says fellow bandmate X (both played in the band X) got involved in sl activities in X on the outskirts of Lima. X started inviting the band members to polladas (food fund-­raising activity). In xxxx, X participated in an unsuccessful action to take a police station in X and got shot when trying to escape the scene on a bus.

186 Interpretation #6

X.

interpretation #7 s nk pancake u p h it w n hot revolutio dialogue) n e k n u r d (a “Did those punks laugh and fart while others killed and died?” joked Mikhail. José Carlos had started into a story about how Lima’s underground punks had lots of weird wartime entanglements back in the eighties. The two men sat at a small wooden table just inside the cagelike entrance of the Queirolo Tavern, the one at the corner of Quilca and Camaná Streets and only a few drunken paces from the historic Plaza San Martín. It was July. Lima’s dankness was entering peak phase. José Carlos rubbed his upper thigh a bit, trying to get the blood going. “You ever get that when it gets cold?” he asked. Mikhail nodded, glancing down at his leg, and there was a brief moment of mutual recognition. “But I wouldn’t call this cold!” snipped Mikhail. A solid buzz had come on after a couple hours of alcohol-­induced chitchat and intellectual camaraderie. It was Mikhail’s first time in Lima. He had this look of intense curiosity on his face when José Carlos mentioned there used to be a punk venue called the Peña Huascaran just across the street from the tavern where they were on their way to being wasted. José Carlos launched into another one of his long anecdotes: “You know what? There’s this one old video of a show at the Peña Huascaran in ’89 with a bunch of underground bands playing, Eutanasia, Voz Propia, Cesar N. with Combustible. Just full of bizarre juxtapositions, that video. At one point, the camera guy wanders into the hallway and catches these Shining Path sympathizers hanging something on the wall. You get a short glimpse of this poster, ya know, it says something about punk’s ‘false anarchism’ and alludes to the Shining Path as the ‘real alternative.’ Then a hand swats the camera away! At another point, he is interviewing band members and asking them what they think about revolution. I remember that skinny kid Kike, the singer of the band Eutanasia, joking with him, ‘The Hot Revolution is coming! The Hot Revolution is coming!’ And then the guy behind

Figure 7.1 Drawing of Bakhtin and Mariátegui at Quierolo Tavern, 2015. Courtesy of Miguel Det.

the camera asks him who’s gonna deliver the revolution and Kike suddenly gets this pissed look on his face and says, ‘You know who they are, asshole.’” “Wait! What is a Hot Revolution?” asked Mikhail. “Ah, it’s a traditional pastry, and there’s this well-­known street seller who walks around Lima and has this really distinctive call, ‘Hoooooooot Reeeeeeevooooluuuuuution!’ to announce what he’s selling,” said José Carlos. “Anyway, that was a long time ago, back when the war was crippling Lima. So much for the real alternative!” To counter Marx, Mikhail thought, Peruvian history surely wasn’t merely a matter of first tragedy and then farce. There had to be some sort of punk parody amid all the societal destruction, some real subterranean faith in a creative renewal despite the grotesque reality of all that bodily death. Mikhail didn’t like to cite himself, at least not so directly. So he pointed out that others had thought about punk as a modern manifestation of gro189 Hot Revolution with Punk Pancakes

tesque realism, that idea he had had back when he was reading Rabelais and trying to hammer out the thesis. He suddenly recalled this Peter Jones (2002) article that argued that punk contains all of the necessary elements: the carnivalesque humor, the grotesque body, and billingsgate aplenty. He particularly liked Jones’s point about how mosh pits, stage diving, and other routine punk antics break down the analogous dichotomies of performer/audience :: producer/consumer :: active/passive, all of those mass culture hierarchies that structure what the sixties Situationists called the “spectacle society.” But he wanted to drive the point home. “In the end, I think the carnival was a lot like a really good punk show,” Mikhail said. Pausing a bit to adjust his chair, he continued, “It marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions” (Bakhtin 1984, 10). Punk laughter is also universal in nature. He was sure of it. “I mean, when punks laugh,” chuckled Mikhail, “it’s directed at the whole world, at history, at all societies, at ideology!” (Bakhtin 1984, 84). It would be a fatal mistake to reduce punk to a matter of identity politics, class logics, or a random assortment of anomic individualists. “Just think about it!” he said. “When these merry misfits band together—at shows, on street corners, in a garage—they constitute a gelatinous multitude, erecting spaces of radical egalitarianism and turning the world upside down just like the common folk always have.” Mikhail made José Carlos remember the infamous incident in June 1977 when the Sex Pistols performed “God Save the Queen” from a chartered boat on the River Thames. Floating past Westminster Pier and the House of Parliament and singing “She ain’t no human being,” the whole stunt was meant to mock Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee river procession. It ended when police vessels forced them to dock and arrested the group’s manager, Malcolm McLaren. “How carnivalesque was that!” Mikhail declared. Barely a year later, the Sex Pistols ended the tour that dissolved the band with a final show consisting of only one song. Just before walking off stage, Johnny Rotten laughed into the microphone, “Ahahaha . . . ever get the feelin’ you been cheat’d?” The joke was on everybody—including him. “Whoever claims they are too obsessed with their own authenticity needs to account for the fact that punks mock themselves in the very act of making fun of everybody else,” argued Mikhail. “I mean, just think about all those marvelous Dead Milkmen songs!” Mikhail was trying to convince José Carlos that punks do more than just exemplify the grotesque. With their bodies, they explode all temporal horizons. The dialogical possibilities abound, he thought. “Seriously, what I mean 190 Interpretation #7

is that a dialogue of languages is a dialogue of social forces perceived not only in their static co-­existence, but also as a dialogue of different times, epochs and days, a dialogue that is forever dying, living, being born” said Mikhail (Bakhtin 1981, 365). He listed everything he could think of: punks that sport savage Mohawks in civic plazas; punks that pierce their primitive parts with top-­notch surgical steel; punks that crank loud electric guitars but wear medieval-­looking s&m gear on stage; punks that keep out the Cold War with military surplus combat boots; punks that fashion themselves filthy by donning plastic trash bags, neotribal tattoos, and utilitarian safety pins. “Punk bodies refuse to belong to a single chronological moment!” he exclaimed. Regardless, Mikhail figured the emphasis was still basically concentrated on the bodily substratum: sex, drugs, and rock-­n-­roll to offend the lofty-­ headed classic and the high-­minded modern. “There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags!” exclaimed Mikhail (Bakhtin 1984, 25). Almost as an afterthought, or maybe just stating the obvious, he added, “And certainly we all agree that punks are experts in abusive language. They fucking love that shit!” José Carlos finally got a chance to interrupt. “I follow you. But why do you talk about Europe so much? I mean, I’ve been there and they’ve got their share of interesting ideas, the whole socialism thing. But when I talk about Peruvian reality I don’t mean some sort of simple-­minded ‘national’ point of view, even though unfortunately some of these idiots are taking it that way. The point is that Peruvian reality is more than a context, or a nation, to which universal ideas can be applied. It’s an interpretative approach from which one summons universal ideas and out of which revolutionary faith emerges.” He was getting riled up, so he kept going before Mikhail could start back up again. “I mean, just as an example,” José Carlos implored, “we certainly do not want socialism in Latin America to be a copy or imitation. It should be a heroic creation. We have to give life to Indo-­American socialism with our own reality, in our own language” (Mariátegui 2011, 130). If they were going to think through Peruvian punk, he wanted Mikhail to grasp the simultaneity of its universal import and the specific reality that shaped being a Lima subte in the 1980s. José Carlos felt the need to clarify something about the subte spirit: “Showing themselves to be more attuned to their own people and their own history than the Peruvians of yesterday. But this is not a consequence of their spirit being closed in or confined within our borders. It is precisely the contrary. . . . Little by little humanity’s desire 191 Hot Revolution with Punk Pancakes

for renovation is taking charge of its new men. And an urgent, diffuse aspiration to understand Peruvian reality is born of this desire for renovation” (Mariategui 2011, 65). José Carlos thought the subtes were grappling with the universal desire for human renewal in the very act of coming to terms with the radically distorted political-­economic reality that Peruvians faced in the 1980s. These two things, the universal and the particular, are so deeply and dialectically connected, he thought. “I mean, seriously, trying to separate them out—or what’s worse, subordinate one to the other—is just such an incredible waste of everybody’s time. Pure theory is such bullshit, all ideas are grounded in something, somewhere.” As to the particulars, José Carlos had in mind the war with the Shining Path, which he figured Mikhail didn’t know much about. He remarked on how ossified their revolutionary ideology became—the fetish of absolute polarization, the overemphasis on spectacular forms of political violence as a necessary path toward social purification. “I mean, Abimael started with some reasonable intentions, given how fucked up this country is, and then just went ideologically berzerk. He started acting like a revolutionary struggle is some sort of naturalized geological formation or something, that his revolution was everybody else’s final destiny.” The beer feeling was coming on strong and the Queirolo was getting crowded. It left José Carlos almost shouting, “The illusion of the final struggle is both a very ancient and very modern illusion. Every two, three, or more centuries this illusion reappears with a different name” (Mariátegui 2011, 391). He suddenly burst out laughing, “And Shining Path! They totally got that name from me! Fourth Sword of Marxism my ass!” Mikhail poked José Carlos in the side so he would shut up and listen for a second. “I’m still waiting for the bit about punks farting.” “Oh yeah, right.” José Carlos knew that the subtes, like punks in general, are no strangers to talking about the activities of the anal cavity, or any other open-­ended orifice or penetrating protuberance that makes them feel connected to the world instead of hermetically sealed off from it. Such points of connection are a counter to the boundedness of the lonely bourgeois self, after all. There was that Lima band called Society of Shit. And some of Leuzemia’s best songs had titles like “Diarrea” and “Astaculo.” “That last one is probably translatable as ‘Gone to Shit.’ It’s a profanation of Lima’s pretension to being the so-­called City of Kings, and a great follow-­up to this book you might like called Lima the Horrible by Sebastián Salazar Bondy.” 192 Interpretation #7

But José Carlos thought that the more remarkable dimensions of the subte grotesque lay elsewhere. He assumed Mikhail had minimal awareness about Peru’s public imagination in the 1980s, so overrun with news of political violence, especially in the Andes, and an authoritarian state. “I know this is going to sound politically uncool or whatever. But, honestly man, there were just dead Indians everywhere.” He told Mikhail how the subtes wrote a lot of songs about Ayacucho. Some of them were in a hyperserious and ultrapolitical tone, like Kaoz’s “Ayacucho: Center of Oppression.” But others were really more of the parodic variety. Thinking on it for a second, José Carlos took the last sip of beer in his glass and tossed the little bit of backwash under the table. Raising the Pilsen bottle to his mouth like it was a mic, he started imitating Rafael Hurtado, the wiry guy that sang the lead in Eructo Maldonado, a late 1980s comic punk band: “Come and live over here! One shouldn’t live over there! There’s sun all year round. Hurry up and reserve your spot. Wonderful biweekly payments. And transportation to everywhere. Don’t delay too much. Come live in Ayacucho!” “So, yeah, the subtes were experts at poo-­pooing everything. And this is going to be hard to grasp for someone who doesn’t master Spanish, but they also had their own peculiar means of self-­parody.” He explained that Peruvian punks not only called themselves “subterráneos,” the term adopted with the connotations of the English word “underground.” “They also started calling themselves ‘pancakes’ . . . and still do!” “Freaky! How did they go from punk to pancake? I mean, I don’t know English that well either but it sounds like . . .” He trailed off for a second to think through the intrigue. Taking another quick shot of Paramonga vodka with a disgusted look on his face, Mikhail continued, “. . . the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own horizon within someone else’s horizon” (Bakhtin 1981, 365). “Well, this is suppositional since nobody knows who first made the analogy or how it caught on . . .” explained José Carlos. “But I’m pretty sure they went from ‘pancake’ to ‘punk.’ The thing is, Spanish doesn’t have that long versus short vowel thing that the gringos have. We like to keep our vowels so people can figure them out.” He had just introduced basic linguistics into the drunken dialogue about punk’s dialogical becoming. Unlike in other places—“like in Mexico” he interjected—where Spanish speakers pronounce punk with the Spanish u, in Peru punks opt for the Spanish a. “It sounds like 193 Hot Revolution with Punk Pancakes

panc when they say it because the short u in the English pronunciation is as close to the Spanish a as anything else, you know, phonetically speaking.” Mikhail was surely facing his own linguistic horizons but thought there must be more to this than just phonetics because “double-­voicededness in prose is prefigured in language itself . . . in language as a social phenomenon that is becoming in history” (Bakhtin 1981, 326). Still a little confused, he asked, “But what the hell does ‘pancake’ have to do with anything?” José Carlos slammed his glass on the table. “Nothing. And everything!” He talked about how “pancake,” pronounced “panqueque,” was obviously also a gringo loan word and how the first syllable is the same as “panc.” “So, it probably got started with this simple phonetic similitude.” He raised his hands and made the quotation gesture with his fingers, “I guess that’s where the whole coming to know their own horizons with the gringo’s horizons comes in. Then they must have realized the comic relief provided by an analogy that is so absurd that it makes perfect sense. Punks love to make sense out of nothing. Right? Just, ya know, bizarre juxtapositions, the whole aesthetics of the collage thing.” José Carlos also thought to himself that there is a crucial difference in the tone. When Peruvian punks talk about being subtes it’s usually a serious matter, but when they call each other pancakes they’re inevitably cracking jokes. “I’m not kidding, Mijailito,” José Carlos jested. “To be a revolutionary or a reformer is, from this point of view, a consequence of being more or less imaginative” (Mariátegui 2011, 399). He reached for the wallet inside his jacket pocket, extracted a piece of paper with two photocopied images on it, and laid it on the table. “And these punks had some serious imagination!” Mikhail was sitting back in his chair, playing with his beard. He leaned in for a better look and joked, “Is that supposed to be you as a circus performer?” “Ha, don’t tell anybody I carry these around, seems a little too self-­ referential or something. But when I saw them I laughed so hard I couldn’t resist having a copy of and for myself.” José Carlos explained that there was a Lima artist named Herbert Rodríguez, this guy who thought to parody the iconic Peruvian Marxist as a 1980s punk right in the middle of the Shining Path’s revolutionary decade. He recounted how Rodríguez came out of a late 1970s bohemian art scene, but when the underground rock phenomenon hit, he became active designing stages, doing fanzines, and mentoring younger artists. 194 Interpretation #7

Figure 7.2 Herbert Rodríguez, “Mariátegui panqueque #1,” 1985. Courtesy of Herbert Rodríguez.

“There’s this gringo who comes around, shows up randomly in the Queirolo and at shows sometimes, says he’s writing a book or something, and he says Rodríguez calls these portraits ‘Mariátegui Pancake’ when he’s not making dumb jokes about the cia.” José Carlos was tilting his head, his glasses sliding down the nose a bit, and pointing Mikhail to the more cartoonish of the two images. “Anyway, this gringo always quotes Rodríguez as saying they represent ‘a ludic and transgressive response, emerging from a consciousness of the absurdity of an everyday reality that was charged with contradictions, inertia, 195 Hot Revolution with Punk Pancakes

Figure 7.3 Herbert Rodríguez, “Mariátegui panqueque #2,” 1985. Courtesy of Herbert Rodríguez.

and lies.’ So, apparently Rodríguez wanted to subvert the dogmatism that was driving a lot of the political action on both sides during the war. Once you stare at it for a while, it even shifts your interpretative framework, changes all theoretical possibilities of what Peruvian reality might be.” Mikhail pointed at the buttons on José Carlos’ chest in one of the images. “Plus, that Micky Marx pin is fabulous!” “I know, so rad,” said José Carlos. Conjuring up a quick mental image of Shining Path fliers with Guzmán hovering above the militant masses with sacred Marxist text in hand, he declared, “Another frequent attitude of intel196 Interpretation #7

lectuals who entertain themselves by denigrating Marxist bibliography is to self-­interestedly exaggerate the determinism of Marx and his school” (Mariátegui 2011, 207). Mikhail raised a finger and tapped it on the table. “That totally reminds me of something! But wait a second. I really have to piss. Where’s the toilet in this place?” José Carlos pointed Mikhail all the way to the back of the Queirolo, and Mikhail started shuffling through the crowd. José Carlos waved over the squatty little man in the uniform shirt that looked like it could be worn in a dentist’s office. “Maestro, bring me a country ham sandwich with everything.” The waiter nodded and responded with his old man face full of total disinterest, “Nothing for the Russian?” “Yea, better make it two sandwiches, so he can try the spice.” At least ten minutes went by; it felt like a long time for a pee break. José Carlos realized he’d neglected to mention about the bathroom logistics, the swinging doors and space so tiny even the ablest man would feel pinned in. Finally he saw Mikhail hopping his way back through the maze of tables. A couple of people scooted their chairs in so he could pass and he plopped back down. “Hey, sorry I forget to warn you about . . .” Mikhail cut him off. “Ah, no worries, I figured it out. There’s a guy sitting in the back, guess he works here. He must see you in here all the time because he jumped up and helped with the door. It’s funny, there’s graffiti in there about one of the bands you were talking about.” “Oh yeah, the punks come here to get wasted cause on the weekends there’s underground shows at this place around the corner. But what were you saying about remembering something?” Bladder relieved, but feeling a bit dizzy, Mikhail asked for a recount, “Shit, what were we talking about again?” “Just how entrenched the ideological positions became in the war and how much the Shining Path started to distort the revolutionary impulse,” answered José Carlos, “because ideas that are perfect, absolute, abstract, indifferent to the facts, to changing and moving reality, do not work; ideas that are germinal, concrete, dialectic, workable, rich in potential, and capable of movement do” (Mariátegui 2011, 12). “You don’t have to tell me about Marxists taking themselves too seriously. I had to go live in the middle of fucking nowhere,” said Mikhail. 197 Hot Revolution with Punk Pancakes

“Yeah,” José Carlos interjected, “Marxism, wherever it has shown itself to be revolutionary—that is, where it has been Marxist—has never obeyed a passive and rigid determinism” (Mariátegui 2011, 208). “That sounds right to me,” agreed Mikhail, “and it makes me think back to something I really didn’t like about that guy’s article on the punk grotesque I was telling you about.” The waiter came up and tossed down two small plates, the diced onion and hot peppers spilling out of the bread a bit. José Carlos gestured forward, “So you can try an authentic Peruvian sandwich.” Mikhail picked his up and took a bite, sneering, “Are ham sandwiches authentically Peruvian?” “As far as anybody knows,” laughed José Carlos. Mikhail went on to explain that Jones (2002) completely buys into the whole punk nihilist paradigm. “No future bla bla bla,” he mocked. As if that was punk’s first and last word, as if it represents an obstacle to the argument about punk being part of the grotesque, which is never just about death but also about renewal, the dialogical becoming of history. Another bite of sandwich, a quick comment—“I like the spicy pepper but this bread seems a little stale”—and then Mikhail continued the analysis. “Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place” (Bakhtin 1984, 21). Punks do dig degrading things, thought José Carlos, including themselves. “So, basically, you mean there’s a danger of making punk out to be more nihilistic than it really is, failing to contend with all the creative potency it unleashes within its very acts of degradation,” he said. “And not just this guy,” said Mikhail. “Pretty much everybody seems to get this wrong. I mean, punk has had a lengthy metadialogue going on about death and rebirth since forever! Crass said ‘Punk is dead’ in 1978, mostly because of the commercial success and media frenzy surrounding the Sex Pistols. Just a couple of years later The Exploited punched back with ‘Punk’s not dead.’ And punk has been dying and being reborn ever since.” “That totally makes me think of this piece of graffiti at the punk venue around the corner I mentioned,” said José Carlos. 198 Interpretation #7

“What does it say?” “What if we just go check it out? I assume you can make it a couple of blocks on those things.” “Oh yeah, long since mastered.” José Carlos motioned to the waiter and pushed a couple of bills into his hand. Unfastening his wheel lock, he asked for assistance. “Maestro, you mind helping with the door again?” “Not a problem at all for you, sir,” said the waiter. His apathetic countenance was juxtaposed with some form of deeply engrained social deference, expressed more through words than gestures. The politeness struck Mikhail as feigned. He turned around and hopped up the two steps that lead out the tavern door. Quilca Street was dark and there were precious few pedestrians. Looking up at the misty drizzle made things glow a bit, the heavy humidity backlit by the faint yellow light of street lamps. “That way, to the left,” said José Carlos. He ceded the narrow cement sidewalk to Mikhail and pushed himself off the curb, rolling himself down the pavement parallel to his companion. Other than serving as home for a couple of awkwardly parked cars, Quilca was completely empty of traffic. All vehicles heading east toward the Plaza San Martín are routed via a parallel avenue that Limeños call La Colmena. “Oh, I was going to ask out of curiosity because I heard so many different versions. Did they ever give you the degree?” inquired José Carlos. “Not really the one I needed to get a decent wage. Free thought, yeah bullshit. Most intellectuals I know are just a bunch of snotty hypocrites, acting like they are masters of a secret guild. Obscurantists, the whole lot of them!” Mikhail shouted, banging his crutches on the ground. “Well, I am self-­taught!” countered José Carlos (Mariátegui 1930). “I once enrolled in letters in Lima, but only with interest in taking an erudite Augustine’s Latin course. And in Europe I freely attended some courses but without ever deciding to lose my extracollegiate, and perhaps even anticollegiate, status.” They turned onto Cailloma Street and it was almost pitch-­black. Most of the street lamps were either not working or so dim as to give the impression that it was a long, solitary walk toward the traffic visible on La Colmena, only one block away. On the right were a bunch of one-­story buildings with faded pastel walls and doors firmly closed—except there was one spot that looked 199 Hot Revolution with Punk Pancakes

Figure 7.4 Drawing of Bakhtin and Mariátegui strolling down Cailloma Street, 2015. Courtesy of Miguel Det.

like a dingy, nondescript restaurant of some sort. An old woman was standing in an open doorway, apparently in command of a room full of empty tables. On the opposite side of the street were several multistoried buildings, some as high as eight levels. One had a bright orange three-­story façade, a bunch of country flags, and a generic “hostel” sign. A girl in a miniskirt, maybe seventeen or eighteen, was standing to the side of the entrance next to a parking garage. “Her outfit is her advertisng, no?” asked Mikhail rhetorically. “Yeah, lots of street whores around here. This place we’re going, the punks call it the Imperial Salon. It’s just up there, past where she’s standing,” said José Carlos, gesturing with his head toward a much taller edifice. This one had a grimy green exterior and a black metal gate in front with no sign of activity. “Funny history this building. Back in the seventies it was the Santa Elisa Cooperative, one of the largest savings and loans in Latin America, a total financial beacon of downtown Lima. It had something like 200,000 members and even an auditorium on the first floor. That’s where the underground punks have shows now—but usually on the weekends, not tonight. During the war, after the massive financial crisis hit in the late eighties, thanks to President García, the bank crumbled. Massive debts into the millions due to liquidated workers, bad loans, and unpaid municipal taxes drove it completely bankrupt. Building’s been vacant ever since, but it’s also become a home for Lima’s lumpenproletariat, mostly prostitutes, junkies, street sellers, and petty thieves. They say there’s even a few desperate families with children and everything in there. I’ve never been to the upper floors, obviously, but the punks say it’s crawling with rats and street people with nowhere else to go.” “Good place for a punk club then,” commented Mikhail. The metal gate was open and they entered a little patio space through the large front door of the building. Mikhail leaned against the door while José Carlos passed. The outside gate’s pretense to producing a safe space was negated by the building’s almost hollow and shadowy interior: high ceilings, several support columns of unpainted concrete, and only a bare minimum of white fluorescent lighting. The danger seemed way more likely to be waiting somewhere on the inside. They moved past a large plastic curtain, hung from the ceiling to partition the room, and there was the stage. Waist-­high and with a low ceiling, it was 201 Hot Revolution with Punk Pancakes

Figure 7.5 Graffiti at Salón Imperial punk club, 2010. Photo by author.

empty except for a few abandoned cables. At the back of the stage was a large mural, the faded blues, grays, and greens not much of a contrast to the drab white paint covering the walls and ceiling. “Isn’t that the famous landscape shot of Machu Picchu?” said Mikhail. “It makes a pretty surreal backdrop when these little punkers, sixteen and seventeen years old, get up there and start jumping around with their Marshall amps and knock-­off Fenders,” answered José Carlos. “But the graffiti I was talking about is on the wall of the bathroom, over there.” They made their way toward the darkened corner and into the clammy toilet. It was lit with a single bulb, dangling precariously from a wire strung from the patchy ceiling. The walls were white except for a strip of blue tile, who knows how many layers of grime, and some exposed pipes. The long, narrow floor urinal reeked with unflushed pools of piss. Gesturing to the phrase spray-­painted on the wall, José Carlos said, “There you have it. Punk will never die!” “Aha! This means that within the metadialogue, there’s yet another dialogue, one that is not just about how punk periodically dies in order to be 202 Interpretation #7

reborn. Apparently, punks have faith in renewal because they refuse to ever die permanently!” responded Mikhail. José Carlos thought the phrase said more about a certain kind of revolutionary impulse: “The contemporary man has a need for faith. And the only faith that can occupy his deepest self is a combative faith. The times of living sweetly will not return until who knows when. The prebellicose good life only generated skepticism and nihilism. And from the crisis of skepticism and nihilism is born the rough, the serious, the urgent need for a faith and a myth that moves men to live dangerously” (Mariategui 1925). “Oh, so I guess the punk revolution is the one where we laugh and fart until we find our faith to live dangerously,” chuckled Mikhail. Giggling a bit, and tapping his accomplice on the stomach, José Carlos said, “Oh no, comrade! If it happens in Peru first, the punk revolution will be a hot one. Served with pancakes!”

203 Hot Revolution with Punk Pancakes

ps!

I got no metaphorical codas and sell no megaconclusions. There’s just this urgent postscript about other possible interpretations of underground rock, framed by different aesthetics and other pesky everyday revolutions. Above all, I want to encourage all musical connoisseurs, and any interested viewers, to explore a companion website designed specifically to provide the audio that no book can contain and the colorful visuals that no academic publisher can afford. To crank up the soundtrack and distort the picture offered here, please visit www.punkandrevolution.com. I also confess I’m a little obsessed with the relation of form and content and get excited by the many thinkable voices, and funkier aesthetics, that scholarly writers might employ to give life to complex thought—if only they would. They often don’t because such things don’t “count” within the game of scholarly prestige, peer review, and institutional career advancement (we do still inhabit a medieval institution, after all). Because of that, I wanted Punk and Revolution to become something more than just another academic monograph. In reality, the book is the final outcome of an ongoing series of interpretations around issues of voice, genre, aesthetic, authorship, media, and audience. There’s a tad of Mariátegui here too since his original essays appeared in other periodicals before he reworked them into Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality: principally Amauta, the leftist journal Mariátegui launched in 1926, and Mundial, an early twentieth-­century emblem of cosmopolitan journalism in Lima. Anticipating the book, I did several things working across various media and formats, and involving multiple collaborators. For example, I recorded my own CDs in Lima with some great rock-­n-­roll collaborators, including the occasional cover song of subte bands I really dig. I contributed to the San Francisco punk ’zine maximum rocknroll to publish a short three-­part series about the history of Peruvian punk. Fragments appear in the book, but anyone interested can find the full series on the website.

I released various other piy (publish-­it-­yourself ) arte/facts in Spanish-­ language formats on symbolic dates. On June 14, 2014, Mariátegui’s birthday, I printed one hundred numbered copies of a new Amauta, replacing his original “El Problema de la Tierra” with my “El Problema de la Sub-­Tierra” (see figure C.1), and placed them in Lima bookstores and markets that specialize in subculture stuff. On December 9, 2014, date of the “Battle of Ayacucho” that proved decisive to Peruvian Independence, I circulated a digital version of my “El Problema del Pituco” in substitution of Mariátegui’s original essay about the problem of the Indian that appeared in the 1924 centennial celebration issue of Mundial (see figure C.2). The graphic design assistance of Shad Gross, a PhD student at Indiana University and punk from Ohio, was crucial to both projects. On April 16, 2015, the day of Mariátegui’s death, I announced that there was a graphic short-­story version of “Revolución Caliente y Panqueques Punks” available in Lima bookstores. This last project involved collaboration with subte artist Miguel Det, who morphed the drunken dialogue between Bakhtin and Mariátegui with his quirky comic imagination. The drawings that appear in Interpretation #7 are from our joint venture. On June 20, 2016, my Bloomington-­based band, El Cuervo Sucio (Naughty Raven), released a music video montage to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the 1986 prison massacres, based on our cover version of Voz Propia’s post-­ punk classic “Hacia las Cárceles.” Jennifer Boles, an iu History PhD and filmmaker, directed the video. All of these alternate versions are available for free on the website to anyone interested. Finally, I want to say a last word about the surprisingly large turnout for Interpretation #6, and to thank all of the distinct individuals represented in it via their own spontaneous interpretations. In this project, Shad Gross again proved a total asset, full of photo technique and beer-­friendly attitude. The design represents a potential exhibit or, if that’s too high culture for ya, just some notes and posters to hang on your bedroom wall. Most of all, in this project I really wanted to reject the aloofness of sole authorship (even though my name is the only one on the cover). I thought one way to subvert the familiar spectacle of individual scholarly “genius” might be by calling on the imaginations of friends and strangers with shared sensibilities. This then inspired me to roll around on my floor, shuffling around bunches of prints and oodles of photocopies till I thought I saw interesting situations emerge. The illustrations included here in Interpretation #6, forced into black and 206 PS!

Figure C.1 Cover of Amauta “First Dose” version of Interpretation #2. Author’s design with Shad Gross.

Figure C.2 Cover of Mundial ’zine version of Interpretation #3. Author’s design with Shad Gross.

white due to publishing circumstance, are viewable in full color on the website—and if anybody wants to arrange a full-­scale exhibit, just let me know. In response to an open online call for participation in this project (and some serendipitous online press attention), I received dozens of spontaneous hand-­drawn images, digital designs, and heartfelt, handwritten texts. More than sixty individuals across six different countries lent creative hands and submitted something to the X project. Many of them I know, quite a few I do not. The experiment proved the perfect size for a really good punk show, contributing to some sort of mosh-­pit effect, and it pushed back against geopolitical blocks, slipped under cultural borders, and stands somewhere in the middle of the digital-­analog and digital-­print divides. Not all of the collaborations are represented equally in the designs, a result of decisions I ultimately made. But every single individual is in fact present alongside the various collectivities being invoked. A full display of each of the collaborators’ original images or text that I used to design the images in Interpretation #6 can also be accessed on the companion website. Check ’em out. I leave you with a list of everyone who collaborated in “A Series of Situations Resulting in X” and from where.

Peru: Leo Escoria, Letícia Larín, Ignacio Briceño Gagliardi, Isela Suárez, Carlos Andrés Incháustegui Dégola, Gavriela Tenorio, Nadya Padilla, Raúl Avion García, Victoria Guerrero Peirano, Cesar N, Miguel Det, Julio Durán, Alexis Lakov, Silvana Tello Guzman, Richard Nossar Gastañeta, Roberto Jarkor Barba, Herbert Rodríguez, Ricardo Barandiarán, Raschid Rabi, Claudia Alva (alias Blue), Jorge Juárez Li, Karen Bernedo, Alfredo Márquez, John Salas, Iván Vildoso, Carlos Draconia Huiza, Luis Humberto, Gonzalo Maíz, Jorge Luis Ochoa, Rodolfo Ybarra, Yerson Guarniz, Andrés Santillán Morales, Giampier Arellano, Karol Torres Cuadra, Alicia del Pilar Quevedo Canales, and Iván Santos Paredes

USA: Dorota Biczel, Giancarlo Huapaya Cárdenas, Sydney Silverstein, Christiana Ochoa, Rodrigo Chocano, Jon Carter, Cristian Medina, Samik Greene, Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Denisa Jashari, Gaëlle Le Calvez, Matt Van Hoose, Olga Rodríguez Ulloa, Roosbelinda Cárdenas, Alfio 209 PS!

Saitta, Mariella Arredondo, Asiri Saitta, Jennifer Boles, Irasema Rivera, Ben Reed, Zeb Tortorici, Dalia Davoudi, Allison Posner, and Elizabeth Geballe

Spain: Carmen Muriana and Tatiana Sentamans

Canada: Fabiola Bazo

Germany: No Name

Colombia: Juan Sebastián Rojas

210 PS!

notes

Interpretation #1. Risks of Underground Rock Production 1. In the more technical Marxist sense, overproduction has to do with a correlation of historical tendencies that inevitably lead toward repeated crises: the historical drive toward technological efficiency in commodity production, the increasing disproportion of dead (i.e., mechanized) to living (i.e., human) labor, and the related tendency for profit rates to fall. 2. See the definition of “overproduce” at http://oxforddictionaries.com /definition/english/overproduce?q=overproduce, accessed December 28, 2014. 3. The pursuit of artistic virtuosity, also one of punk’s objects of critique, is clearly not exactly the same as aesthetic overproduction, in particular because of its heavy association with the language of high (rather than popular or mass) culture. But it is not entirely distinct either, since the “cultivation” of artistic skill and talent involves a dedication to further aesthetic elaborations (and often enough presumes other forms of institutionalization, e.g., conservatories, art school, etc.). 4. See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=punk+as+fuck, accessed December 28, 2014. 5. For the uninitiated, the incident referred to here is the famous news headline from late 1976 that followed the Sex Pistols’ live interview appearance on Bill Grundy’s show and had the double effect of scandalizing an entire nation and announcing the existence of “punk rock” to most of an unaware world. 6. Other early cassettes released soon after First Dose include the compilation titled Volume I, with songs by Leusemia, Zcuela Crrada, Guerrilla Urbana, and Autopsia; a full-­length cassette by Autopsia titled Sistema y Poder; and Volume 2, which included thirteen newer bands. Dozens of others followed in subsequent years. 7. After seeing song titles like “Astalculo” (Gone to Shit), Virrey reluctantly printed the lp, placed a moralizing consumer’s warning on the back (“The titles and lyrics in this lp might harm your moral or religious background”), and refused to promote the album. 8. The emotional reaction to Narcosis in Medellín was enormous. An underestimation of the venue size resulted in a mass of punks being refused entry, at which point an angry punk mob took over a public park and clashed with police, producing one fatality and dozens of injuries (see Monroy Giraldo n.d.).

9. Here’s a short list of other eighties Peruvian punk band albums originally produced on demo cassette and now released on limited edition vinyl: G3 Un Nuevo Enemigo lp; kaos ep; María T-­Ta y el Empujón Brutal ep; Ellos Aun Viven ep; Pánico ep; Volumen I lp; Autopsia Sistema y Poder ep; Descontrol lp; Eutanasia Sentimiento de Agitación lp. In most cases, small independent labels in the United States put the records out and a small percentage of them (sometimes as little as 10 percent) are usually shipped to Lima to be sold by the band members as compensation. Even those exceptionally rare cases of early Peruvian punk released originally on vinyl have followed similar global routes via recent reeditions. A 2008 reedition of Leusemia’s 1985 lp (the main example of eighties punk vinyl produced domestically by Peru’s now defunct Virrey label) was rereleased on vinyl by the independent label Lengua Armada, which was run out of San Francisco by Martín Sorrondeguy of Los Crudos / Limp Wrist. Ataque Frontal’s 1987 ep, originally released on vinyl by the French label New Wave on the basis of a cassette recorded in Lima, was reedited and released in 2005 by a small US label named Burrito Records. Interpretation #2. El Problema de la Sub-­Tierra 1. A Peruvian Marxist would state the problem only slightly differently. See Mariátegui 1971, 22. 2. In two well-­known essays, Stuart Hall (1986; 1992) makes clear several things about that which became named cultural studies, following the creation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham in the mid-­1960s. One of cultural studies’ core missions was to talk about “the things that Marx did not talk about,” which in his estimation were precisely notions of “culture, ideology, language, the symbolic” (1992, 280). Much of this was done through an initial accounting for the impact of Gramsci and Althusser on traditional Marxist thought—and in the context of the “New Left” moment. But Hall’s efforts also meant to stress this “without guarantees,” his famous formulation intended to highlight the contingent rather than necessary nature of history. As a result, and as is evident from Hall’s (1986) essay on ideology, this entailed an attempt to critically rethink the presumed “determinateness” that Marx attributed to the productive apparatus, reducing ideology (again, presumably, given Marx’s lack of systematic attention to the nature of ideology), consciousness and so on to epiphenomena. Thus, Hall adjusts Marx’s famous statement from The Critique of Political Economy of the material base determining the superstructure “in the last instance.” Hall (1986, 43) argues that there is only “determination by the economic in the first instance”—pointing toward a model of mutual determination and the idea that ideological effects of a material system also produce effects on that system. My point can eventually be summed up with the idea that, when it came time to account for the productive materiality of subcultures, cultural studies hovered pre-

212 Notes to Interpretation #1

cisely at the ideological level of “culture,” resulting in an “impoverished philosophical” portrayal of subcultural practices and politics. 3. The literature on the problem of history as it relates to ritual and colonial temporalities is vast, rooted primarily in the fields of anthropology and religion. Fabian’s (1983) classic Time and the Other is a place to start. 4. Hence, one of the more recent, and more interesting, attempts to think through the problem of subcultures comes from Sarah Thornton (1996), in a study rooted primarily in 1990s “club” and “rave” scenes. Her approach is much more ethnographic and has a better account of gender relations than most classic subcultural studies. She develops the idea of “subcultural capital” (i.e., straight Bourdieu) in order to theorize an underground means of “distinction” from the mainstream. All good. But I can’t quite get past being disappointed in her missing the opportunity to develop this further into a theory of “bad taste”—but maybe that’s just the punk in me. 5. The classic culture industry critique is Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1979) depiction of mass culture as mass deception, a modernized form of alienation from cultural production. By now it represents a long-­standing, and lefty popularized, mass suspicion of all forms of corporate-­produced culture. That’s fine. But this tendency to condemn all highly commercialized forms of cultural expression with catchphrases like “the conquest of cool” (see Frank 1997) also leads one to believe that underground, or antimainstream, forms of cultural expression are simply impossible to sustain, doomed to corporate absorption. The continuing existence of diy punk scenes all over the world would suggest otherwise, even when particular labels, particular bands, particular figures, etc., do go from being largely underground to being highly commercially visible. 6. The main precedent to Hebdige’s popularization of the notion of “style” comes from John Clarke, who theorized it in the context of Hall and Jefferson’s Resistance through Rituals. Inspired largely by Levi-­Strauss’s notion of the bricoleur, he sees style primarily as a means of symbolic subversion made possible through a “reordering and recontextualization of objects to communicate fresh meanings, within a total system of significances” (Clarke 2006, 149). While he discusses this in terms of the “generation of style,” there is a notable retreat to the la-­la land of structuralist semiosis at the direct cost of engaging more directly with the social and material means of production that go into the creation of subcultural styles. By the end of the piece it is clear that Clark has reduced it to an issue of intervening semiotically and thus to another political failure of subcultures, since the “subversion of commodities took place purely at the point of consumption” (2006, 160). Dick Hebdige, who takes up the question of style, conserves the denial of stylistic materiality but “opens” it semiotically, seeing punk as a kind of chaotic disordering of signs/commodities, revealing of course the fact that he was writing on the brink of the poststructuralist turn. My point is this: One need not nec-

213 Notes to Interpretation #2

essarily run an independent label that materially produces and socially distributes musical expression to underground consumers. One need not necessarily produce and distribute, materially, a fanzine expressing art, ideas, and sharing opinions outside the circuit of commercial news media or socially and materially organize gigs for collective cultural expression with minimal to no profit, perhaps even in a basement instead of a commercial “club” venue. But these are all things the punk underground did and continues to do. One could also go to Walmart, buy a crappy T-­shirt made in the Philippines by poor exploited brown workers, and then choose to write “I am punk and this shirt was made by poor brown people” on it with a permanent marker. The multiple hidden forms of commodified and neocolonial exploitation will not be abolished, but they will in some manner be revealed. More fundamentally, you will have intervened materially, thus intervening into consciousness, in the cycle of mass capitalist production/consumption—in addition to simply “reordering signs/commodities” into a subcultural style. 7. Here I would be even more critical of the move to declare a completely postsubcultural moment than Hall and Jefferson (2006) appear to be in their new introduction to the reedition of Resistance through Rituals. Of course entire volumes are now dedicated to this concept, with an array of diverse people and voices (see Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003). In general terms, it suffers from the same irresolvable dilemma that other ostensibly new and temporalized intellectual paradigms face—post this and post that—and into which the postsubcultural miniparadigm locates its project. Why these positions are proclaimed with the prophetic fervor of new historical stages, despite necessary attempts to locate continuities with the past, is always perplexing. What is the goal other than staking a simple declaratory claim on newness, novelty, rupture—all things heavily associated with the coloniality of power and Enlightenment thought? What is the purpose if the connections with the past are always in need of restating as central? Can’t we all agree on at least a few basic things? That the logic of capital is globally expansive (since at least Marx). That the projects of colonization are both old and ongoing (stretching back centuries). That modernity is alterable, fragmentable in form, but far from over. That it is stupid to claim radical newness. 8. Green Day sucks Dookie. Interpretation #3. El Problema del Pituco 1. “Cholo” was often used more or less interchangeably with misio (from miseria, meaning “miserably poor”) in the context of the conflict I discuss here. Yet, in both cases (“misio” and “cholo”) the principle function was to mark a contrast to pituco. If I focus primarily on the term “cholo,” I do so in part to avoid the irritation of hyphenated phrasing (cholo-­misio). But I also want to emphasize that the term “cholo,” like the term “pituco,” implies a much broader intermixture of race,

214 Notes to Interpretation #2

class, and space, in effect encompassing the primarily socioeconomic connotation of “misio.” 2. Originally a 1970s fusion of Andean and Caribbean music, chicha came to symbolize Peru’s national transformation from a rural to an urbanized nation in the late twentieth century and thus the emergence of an entire “chicha culture”: the result of successive generations of Andean migrants arriving en masse to reshape the urban dynamics of the coastal capital not just socially and economically but also culturally. 3. Yes, I mean self-­ascribed code names for identities known only to a small in crowd as opposed to widely used nicknames ascribed by others and more commonly known. 4. As ethnographic tidbit, I often noticed in interviews or casual conversation with the so-­called pitu-­punks and pitu-­metalheads that they were comfortable displaying their English abilities despite my own concerted (or presumptuous) attempt to engage in Spanish-­language conversation. Here’s a great example of a conversation between Alejandro Ugarte de Solar (drummer for the crossover thrash band Curriculum Mortis, considered to be highly pituco), Manolo Garfías (mostly a member of the Barranco hard-­core scene), and myself with code switching left intact. It also serves to confirm the highly relative nature of pituco since in their minds G3 were middle class relative to the clearly wealthier backgrounds of the guys in Curriculum Mortis, including Ugarte. Ugarte: “Mira a G3, G3 les decían pitu-­metal pero no tenían nada.” Manolo: “Los G3 no tenían mucha plata.” Ugarte: “Ellos eran [pause] . . . they were, they were middle class.” Shane: “Ya, middle class. Pero los pitumetals si tenían plata?” 5. In an interview Guillermo says, “The border was Javier Prado up to Lince . . . crossing that border, you were pitu-­punk” (Figueroa, 2009). Julio Durán is from Breña, an urban neighborhood close to the historical district of downtown Lima and much more working- to lower-­middle class. Guillermo (like others) points out multiple contradictions in the conflict, since in the late 1980s, amid a massive economic crisis that liquidated middle-­class incomes, his family relocated from Miraflores, a wealthy residential district, to downtown Lima (i.e., the “bad” side of Javier Prado) in large part for economic reasons. He finds it particularly ironic, since he was often considered “more pituco” than his band mates because of his lighter complexion and hair color. 6. I went looking for Chovi, whose real name is Juan Caballero, in Buenos Aires in March 2010 (he became something of a refugee in the early 1990s), thanks to his longtime friend Chiki, who I know from Lima. Chovi is sometimes remembered as a leader of sorts for Bandera Negra. He positioned Bandera Negra as a response to the Shining Path’s “infiltration” of the underground scene and as a group that engaged in a couple of occasions in “direct action” (e.g., he cited the intent to vandalize the Miraflores New Wave nightclub as one of several examples). He’s also

215 Notes to Interpretation #3

quick to recognize that their attitude was full of “chaos, liquor, alcohol, and drugs,” and that to a large part they were motivated by simple social resentment toward those they saw as punks of privilege (Caballero, 2010). 7. Mariátegui’s definition of “gamonalismo” points to a more social and cultural understanding of power than one that is crudely materialist: “The term gamonalismo designates more than just a social and economic category: that of the latifundistas or large landowners. It signifies a whole phenomenon. Gamonalismo is represented not only by the gamonales but by a long hierarchy of officials, intermediaries, agents, parasites, etc. The literate Indian who enters the service of gamonalismo turns into an exploiter of his own race. The central factor of the phenomenon is the hegemony of the semifeudal landed estate in the policy and mechanism of the government” (Mariátegui 1971, 30). Re: Interpretation #4. The Tongue Is a Fire 1. In a 1987 interview, T-­ta noted that her stage name was inspired by the famous Venezuelan singer Maria “Conchita” Alonso. “Conchita” is short for Concepción but also carries the double meaning of “pussy” (see Vélez 1987). 2. “Manjar” refers to a traditional caramel-­like ingredient in various pastries. 3. “Mandinga” refers to Peruvians of African descent and has explicit connotations to the period of slavery, since “Mandinga” also refers to an ethnic group in various parts of Western Africa that was targeted for the slave trade. Although I concentrate on T-­ta’s problem with race below, clearly this is where it begins to emerge. 4. The paper was first run by Luis Arce Borja, who took refuge in Europe after the infamous “interview of the century,” a secret interview with Guzmán that El Diario published in 1988. The next figurehead of El Diario was Janeth Talavera; she was captured in 1989 and died in 1992 when the military stormed the Castro Castro prison and squashed political prisoners’ resistance to a government plan to relocate prisoners to another penal facility (see Gargurevich 2000). 5. Thanks to Daniel Rosenblatt for the consult. 6. Linguists say that Quechua has three vowels to the five in Spanish, assuming you ascribe to the worldview that divides human expression into consonants and vowels. There are, in fact, entire studies of vowel variation showing how social stigma relates to the regional Quechua-­inflected variations in Spanish in the Andean context (see O’Rourke 2010). 7. Special thanks to several experts and native speakers ( John McDowell, Bruce Mannheim, Zoila Mendoza, Marisol de la Cadena, Analucía Riveros, and, indirectly, Cesar Riveros Somocurcio), none of whom could think of any particular Andean interest in the tongue, certainly nothing as pronounced as the visible “thirst” of the Aztec gods (said Analucía) or as pre-­Columbian porno as the coastal Moche (venture I). 216 Notes to Interpretation #3

8. An Ayacucho-­based band (Uchpa), formed in the nineties, was one of the first musical outfits that made its mark by playing bluesy rock while singing in Quechua, not coincidentally as part of a slow but rising multicultural tide across Latin America. No longer a total novelty, the dialogue between rock and runa simi is still relatively uncommon. Interpretation #5. The Worth of Art This is the chorus to the song “Vivo en una Ciudad Muerta” (I Live in a Dead City). I use this epigraph as more than an indicator of the legendary hard-­core band that wrote it, Guerrilla Urbana, and whose return to the stage in 2010 I analyze later in this chapter. The song is also indicative of the ethos of the banal everydayness of violent death in mid-­eighties Peru, and thus my point of departure in rethinking the relation between punk, media, and public reactions to “underground rock” at different historical moments. 1. It would be difficult to construct a complete list of every Peruvian punk song that references the war, so I won’t bother. It is worth noting that these range widely. There are the straightforward hard-­core approaches such as Kaos’s “Ayacucho: Centro de Opresión” (Ayacucho: Center of Oppression), and more cynical punk songs like Eructo Maldonado’s “Vengan a Vivir en Ayacucho!” (Come Live in Ayacucho!). There are also more metaphorical postpunk examples, such as Voz Propia’s “Hacia Las Carceles” (Toward the Prisons, about the 1986 prison massacres) or Delirios Crónicos’ “Bingo” (about “winning” a lucky number to go to Ayacucho and/or a reference to the random number of deaths constantly appearing in the news). 2. The live television interview of the Sex Pistols on the Bill Grundy show in late 1976 was in effect what announced “punk rock” to mainstream British society and, due to the band’s scandalous use of “rude words” on live tv, provoked a massive moral outrage resulting in major headlines that condemned punks as nothing but “filth and fury” and sparked the cancellation of shows and radio censorship while also catapulting the band to rock stardom. In the United States, there are multiple instances of public scandal resulting from punk’s media appearances. One important landmark is also the obscenity trial in the mid-­1980s that resulted from the Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist album and Jello Biafra’s infamous appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show to debate Tipper Gore of the Parents Music Resource Center. Along with the obscenity concerns over rap groups (e.g., 2 Live Crew), eighties hard-­core punk prompted the legislation that now obliges record companies to place warning stickers on music products with possibly offensive content. 3. Escoria’s full comments from the report can be found on YouTube. http:// www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SYWMtmp_Otg#at =24, accessed April 30, 2016. 4. The full commentary of Baltazar Caravedo and Rossi can be found on You‑ 217 Notes to Interpretation #5

Tube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SYWMtmp _Otg#at=24, accessed April 30, 2016. 5. For example, the band originally named Guerrilla Urbana, formed in 1984, changed its name to Ataque Frontal in 1986, after police questioned guitarist José Eduardo Matute about the band’s possible “guerrilla” affiliations. 6. Anticipating La Carpeta Negra’s likely disappearance, and possibly that of his own body, Márquez thought to send a copy to Peru’s premier art critic, Gustavo Buntinx, who then sent it to a contact at the University of Texas. A US anthropologist married to a Peruvian who knew some of the nn artists also holds a copy in the United States. One or two other copies sold for less than production costs at the time and, after being hidden, resurfaced years later in the hands of Lima art collectors (cf. Lauer 2012). 7. For the unaware, the 2002 movie The Dancer Upstairs is based on the story of Guzmán’s capture in the apartment above Garrido Lecca’s dance studio. 8. The Colina Group, a clandestine investigative and military operation that operated with complicity during the early Fujimori regime, eventually became well known for some of the war’s most atrocious human rights abuses, particularly a 1991 massacre of people at a party in Lima’s Barrios Altos neighborhood and the disappearance of a professor and several students from Cantuta, Lima’s pedagogical university. 9. Miki González is probably Peru’s best-­known pop rock star, who also ultimately couldn’t resist the urge to appropriate Afro-­Peruvian rhythms once they became essential to Peru’s world music fame in the 1990s following the global popularity of Susana Baca.

218 Notes to Interpretation #5

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index

Adolph, Patsy, 119 Adorno, Theodor, 14, 213n5 aesthetic overproduction, Peruvian punk and, 11–12 agency: body and, 94–103; texts and images relating to, 170–87 Age of Extremes, The (Hobsbawm), 75 aliases, political use of, 125–26 Alonso, Maria “Conchita,” 216n1 Alternative Tentacles record label, 17 Althusser, Louis, 212n2 Amauta journal, 74–75, 205–13 American Popular Revolutionary Party (apra), 120, 161–87 anarchist politics: punk aesthetic and, 143–50; sexuality and, 86–94; texts and images relating to, 161–87 Anarkia (band), 8, 24 Andeanization: race and class and, 104– 11; spatial divisions in Lima and, 63– 72; subte resistance and, 23–35; urban migration and, 2–5, 75–82 Andrade, Alberto, 64 Andrade, Raúl, 66–67 Ángeles, Álex, 32–34, 40–41, 125, 130– 34 anger, gender coding of, 87–94 Anglo popular music: Peruvian punk and, 5, 7, 10, 17–23; as political protest, 114 Anti (band), 66 anti-tuco punk, 59–63, 66–72 Arce Borja, Luis, 216n4

Argentine punk, influence of, 21–23 Arguedas, José María, 73, 104, 109–11, 126 Arrasco Catpo, Javier, 127 Artaud, Antonin, 109 art criticism, punk culture and, 40–41 artistic creativity: nostalgic reproduction and death of, 138–50; as provocation, 122–37; underproduction during “long decade,” 113–22 Asco (Yuck) fanzine, 66–67 Ataque Frontal (band), 68, 146–47, 218n5 authenticity, in punk culture, 37–44 Autopsia (band), 8, 19, 24, 55, 117, 141, 154, 169 “Ayacucho: Center of Oppression” (kaos), 31–35 “Ayacucho—Death’s Corner” (band), 114–15 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 3, 13; imaginary dialogue with Mariátegui, 189–203 Balaguer, Alejandro, 95–97 Bellido, Juan Gabriel “El Gordo,” 53, 55, 65, 142–43 Bandera Negra (Black Flag) gang, 65–66, 70, 215n6 banners, as political protest, 114–22 Barbie, Klaus, 22 Barrantes Lingán, Alfonso, 120 Bassallo, Támira (performer), 83, 102, 108–11, 121

basurización, 105–6 Bazo, Fabiola, 90–91 Bazofia (band), 68 Bedoya, Jaime, 101 Bellido, Gabriel, 65, 142–43 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 14, 16, 138 Black Flag (band), 17 body, agency and, 94–103 Brazilian punk, influence of, 21–23 Brown, Jayna, 88 Buntinx, Gustavo, 218n6 Cachorro (Narcosis founder), 142 Cafferata Marazzi, Gerónimo, 101–3 Cameron, Deborah, 87, 94 Canto Grande prison, 132–33, 136 Capital (Marx), 4 capitalism, Peruvian land reform and, 74–83 Caravedo, Baltazar (Dr.), 119 Caretas magazine, 95, 98, 134 Carmona, Julio, 29 cassette culture: digitization of music and, 37–44; Peruvian punk underproduction and, 17–23; political resistance and, 24–25; subcultural theory and, 48–51 celebrity images, artistic collectives’ use of, 126–37 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 45–51, 212n2 Chasqui (student newspaper), 28–29 chicha culture, evolution of, 2, 215n2 chikipunk movement, 140–50 Chisholm, Dianne, 95 cholo identity: drawing of, 60–61; gender and, 106–11; Peruvian culture and history and, 76–82; punk music of, 56–63, 214n1; spatial divisions in Lima and, 63–72 Chovi ( Juan Caballero) (gang member), 70–71, 215n6 226 Index

Clark, John, 213n6 Clash (band), 88, 140–41, 154 class: colonial caste system and, 73–82; feminism and, 104–11; multimedia artistic production and, 115–22; Peruvian punk and, 56–57, 121–22; pituco punk and, 58–63, 72–82; spatial divisions in Lima and, 63–72 “Close to Me” (Cure), 130 Col Corazón (Cabbage Heart) (band), 83, 108–11 Colina Group, 149–50, 167–87, 218n8 Colombia, punk music in, 35–36, 49–51 colonialism: coloniality of power, 104–11; indigenous cultures in Latin America and, 73–82; language and linguistics and, 104–11 Combustible (band), 66 Comité Autogestionario de la Carpa (Committee for the Tent’s Self-­ Management) (caca), 120 Communist Party of Peru, 1, 3, 14–16, 28–35, 75–82 “Computo Feminista Mujer Joven” (Feminist Calculations of a Young Woman) (Ovulo), 91 Cornejo, Pedro, 146 counterpublics, punk and, 13–14 cover art, subte collaboration on, 113–14 Crass (band), 7 creativity, overproduction and, 12–16 creole elite: land exploitation by, 74; Mariátegui as member of, 77–82; punk production and, 117–22 Critique of Political Economy, The (Marx), 212n2 cultural studies: mechanical aspects of production and, 11–16; subcultures and, 45–51, 213n4 “The ‘Cunning-Lingua’ of Desire” (Chisholm), 94 Cure, The (band), 130

Curriculum Mortis (band), 65, 68, 215n4 Dadaism, 10, 168 Dancer Upstairs, The (film), 218n7 Dead Kennedys (band), 17, 217n2 Debord, Guy, 4, 170 de Cleyre, Voltairine, 87 Degregori, Carlos Iván, 76, 165 de las Casas, Fray Bartolomé, 73–82 Del Pueblo (band), 108 democratization: economic crises and, 113; punk aesthetic and, 40–44 · de placer (Pleasure Point) fanzine, 91, 100 Desayunados (band), 66 Descontrol (band), 53 des-hechos theme, artistic production and use of, 115–17 digital technology, music distribution and, 36–44 dirt, in punk aesthetic, 114–22 Dischord record label, 17 do-it-yourself ethos: punk diffusion and, 16–23, 170–72; subcultures and, 213n5 DR Hardcore (band), 68 Du Bois, W. E. B., 74 Durán, Julio, 63, 215n5 economic growth: hyperinflation and crises in 1980s and, 112–13; political stability and, 40–41; punk aesthetic and, 59 educational institutions, evolution in Peru of, 76–82 Eielson, Jorge Eduardo, 109 El Acto (Parálisis Permanente), 21 “El Amor Es Gratis” (Love Is Free) (María T-ta), 92–93 El Chato Victor, 66 El Comercio newspaper, 143 227 Index

El Cuervo Sucio (Naughty Raven) (band), 206 El Diario Marka newspaper, 95 El Diario newspaper, 95, 216n4 El Hueco (The Hole) (club), 65–67, 70 El Museo de Arte de Lima, 41 El Nuevo Diario (Shining Path newspaper), 132–33 El Sexto (Arguedas), 127 El Sexto prison uprising, 127 Empujón Brutal (Brutal Push) (band), 83, 90, 106 Eructo Maldonado, 117 Escoria, Leo, 114, 119, 138–39 Espantapajaros (Scarecrow) fanzine, 67–68 Euro-American avant garde: Peruvian punk and, 5, 7, 10; punk aesthetic and, 168–69 Eutanasia (band), 62–63, 65, 66–67, 70, 143–46 Excomulgados (Excommunicated) (band), 24, 58, 121 Exploited, The (band), 7 Fallen, Mary, 94 fanzines, 16–23, 67–72, 91; subte collaboration on, 113–14; texts and images from, 165–87 Farfán, Gonzalo, 53, 55, 142–43 feminist movement: body and agency in, 94–103; in Peru, 87–94; race and class and, 104–11; women punk performers and, 84 Feria, Mónica, 169–70 Ferrogiaro, Silvio “Spátula,” 68, 146– 50 Feudales (band), 117 Figueroa, Guillermo, 53, 55, 63, 70, 143, 215n5 Flema (band), 25

fliers: folletería terrorista (terrorist leaflets), 134; gender politics in, 89–90; Peruvian punk use of, 9, 16–23, 26, 31, 43–44, 67–68; subte production of, 113–22; texts and images of, 151–87 folkloric music, 28, 108–9 Frith, Simon, 11 Fuerza Positiva (band), 65 Fugazi (band), 17 Fujimori, Alberto, 15, 34, 39, 95, 134, 136, 167–87 G3 (band), 31, 53, 55, 60, 63, 65–66, 68–70, 117, 142–43 gamonalismo, 74, 216n7 García, Alan, 53, 112–13, 120, 132 García, José Luis, 32, 125 García, Luis “Wicho,” 19–21, 142 Garrido Lecca, Maritza, 133–34 Geertz, Clifford, 110–11 gender equity. See also feminist cultural studies: punk and, 8, 84–111; sexual violence and, 105–6; Shining Path and limits of, 89–94 Generación Cochebomba (Roldán), 145 Genocidio (band), 66 Germany, punk subculture in, 66–67 globalization: anarcho-punk subculture and, 66–67; digitization of music and, 36–44; Peruvian punk and, 8–16, 21–23 global North, punk production in, 17– 23 global South, punk diffusion in, 17– 23 Gobineau, Arthur Comte de, 73 Goldman, Emma, 3, 87–88, 91; 172– 73 González, Miki, 142, 218n9 “Gonzalo Thought,” 168 Graeber, David, 169 228 Index

graffiti, ambiguous provocation in, 123– 37, 202 Gramsci, Antonio, 45, 212n2 Gross, Shad, 206 group warfare, Peruvian punk and, 67– 72 Grundy, Bill, 16, 118, 217n2 Guerrilla Urbana (band), 8, 19, 24, 68, 112, 119, 146–48, 217, 218n5 Guevara, Che, 126 Guzmán, Abimael (Presidente Gonazlo), 14–16, 89, 113, 123–24, 129–37, 167– 84 Hadez (band), 65, 68 Hagen, Nina, 91 Hall, Stuart, 10, 212n2, 213n6, 214n7 hardcore music, Peruvian punk and, 67–68 Havana Biennial, 131 Hebdige, Dick, 7–8, 47–51, 213n6 Heidersdorf, Ernesto “The Mole,” 144 Higa, Jaime, 115 Hobsbawm, Eric, 75 homosexuality, Shining Path prohibition on, 89 Horkheimer, Max, 14, 213n5 Incas, as revolutionary symbol, 30 Incendiar la Ciudad (Durán), 63 Incháustegui, Carlos, 133–34 independent record labels, in punk, 16– 23 indigenista intellectual movement, 73– 82, 104–5 indigenous culture: language and linguistics in, 104–11; Mariátegui’s analysis of, 72–82; pituco punk and, 58–63; political resistance and, 29–30; spatial divisions in Lima and, 63–72 Instituto Tepoztlán (Mexico), 84

Internet, Peruvian punk distribution and, 38–44 Interpretations of punk and revolution, overview of, 1–5 “Intro/La Peste” (Intro/Pestilence), 21–23 I.R.A. (band), 36 “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (Stooges), 21 Javier Prado avenue, 63–72, 215n5 Jefferson, Tony, 10, 213n6, 214n7 Jello Biafra, 217n2 Kaos General (band), 53–54, 65–68, 117, 125, 143 kaos/kaoz (band), 31–35, 40, 44, 53–54 “Katatay” (Arguedas), 109–10 Kloaka poetry collective, 98 Kolera (Anger) fanzine, 58–63 Korn (band), 140 La Carpa del Teatro (Tent Theater), 116–22 La Carpeta Negra (The Black Folder), 40–41, 126–37, 218n6 La Casa Hardcore (The Hardcore House) (club), 65–68 “La Desbarrancada” (María T-ta), 91– 92 Lagos, Edith, 126 Lama Marrufo, Jaime de, 108–9 La Nave de los Prófugos (The Ship of Fugitives) street stand, 18–23 Lancier, Father Huber, 136 land reform, in Peru, 74–82 language and linguistics: etymology concerning, 86–94; gender politics and, 85–103; Peruvian punk and role of, 58–63, 215n4; race and class and, 104–11; role of tongue in, 86–94 La República newspaper, 26, 118 229 Index

Las Bestias (The Beasts) artists collective, 25–28, 31, 115–22, 125, 133 Latin America, indigenous cultures in, 73–82 “Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounter,” 90 Lauer, Mirko, 129–30 Le Bon, Gustave, 73 Lengua Armada record label, 49 Leusemia (band), 8, 19, 24, 28, 117, 119, 138–41 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 213n6 López, Miguel, 40–41 Los Crudos (band), 36 Los Saicos (band), 8 Los Violadores (band), 21 Lwin, Annabella, 88 Madueño, Jorge “Spiky Hair,” 19, 142 Magia club, 52–57 Malca, Oscar, 113, 121 Mandinga ethnic group, 216n3 Manifiesto Contrasexual (Preciado), 84 Manuel, Peter, 17 Maoist movement in Peru, 27–35, 44, 113. See also Shining Path; artistic collectives’ images of, 126–37 Maori culture, 99 Mao Tse-Tung: punk images of, 123– 24, 126–37; Warhol’s pop image of, 40–41 maqueta cassettes, 18 Márgenes art journal, 131, 169 María “Pussy,” 85 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 1, 3–5, 126–27; heroically creative Marxism of, 11, 29–30; imaginary dialogue with Bakhtin, 189–203; on indigenous cultures, 72–82 market informality in Lima: cassette technology and, 18–23; subcultural theory and, 175–87

Márquez, Alfredo, 25–26, 28–30, 32– 34, 40–44, 120–21, 125, 130–37, 148–50, 218n6 Marxism: cultural aspects of, 45, 212n2; indigenous politics and, 77–82; Mariátegui’s analysis of, 74–82; in Peru, 1–5, 44; punk aesthetic and, 29–30, 127–37, 154–87; subcultural theory and, 47–51 masculinity, punk linked to, 88–94, 99–103 mass culture, punk and, 14–16 Matos Mar, José, 77 Matute, José Eduardo, 68, 146–48 Maximum Rocknroll, 36, 144 media coverage of punk, 114–15, 118– 22; state political violence and, 123– 37 182–187 mestizaje: colonial caste system and, 73–82; Peruvian punk and, 56–57 Mexico, punk music in, 35–36, 49–51, 71–72 Millán, Armando, 67 Minor Threat (band), 17, 55 misio, 214n1 Mito-Muerto (Dead Myth), 126–37 Monroe, Marilyn, 127, 130 Monroe doctrine, 101 Montañez, Raúl “Montaña,” 138–39 Montesinos, Vladimiro, 167–87 Morbo (band), 38, 140–41 Morton, Samuel, 73 Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights (movadef), 168 Movimento Feminista Flora Tristan, 91 Movimento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (mrta), 5, 161, 180–87 Movimiento Femenino Popular (Popular Feminine Movement), 90 mp3 technology, Peruvian punk distribution and, 36–44 Mundial journal, 205–13 230 Index

Muñoz, José, 128 Museo de la Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero (Buenos Aires), 41 Narcosis (band), 8, 19–22, 24, 117–18; contemporary legacy of, 35–44, 141– 42, 169; limited edition LP of, 38– 39; subcultural theory and, 48–51 nationalism, pituco punk and, 62–63 National Society of Fisheries (Sociedad Nacional de Pesquería), 21–22 National University of San Marcos, underground concerts at, 24–27 Nazi war criminals, 22 New Left movement, 212n2 Nguyen, Mimi Thi, 104 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Mariátegui’s dialogue with, 3 nihilism, punk’s embrace of, 13–16, 59– 63 Nirvana (band), 140 “NN Manifesto,” 126–37 nostalgic reproduction, punk aesthetic and, 138–50 Notes on the Peruvian Underground: Part II (Greene), 81 Nugent, Guillermo, 77 Nyong’o, Tavia, 98–99, 101 Of Poor Quality (Morbo), 38 Oiga magazine, 98 Olho Seco (band), 21 Ortiz, Fernando, 10 Other: in punk aesthetic, 59–63, 70– 72; race and class and linguistics of, 104–11 Oxford English Dictionary, 11–12 Pánico (band), 25 Parálisis Permanente (band), 21 paro armado (Shining Path armed strikes), 91

patriarchy, in Peruvian culture, 89–94 Patria Roja (communist party), 28 Peña, Alejandro, 67–68 Perez, Alamo, 166 Peru Anti-Export (“The Black Folder”), 126–37 Peruvian reality, 1; in artistic multimedia collaborations, 113–14, 124– 37; future of punk in, 35–44; Mariátegui’s analysis of, 75–82; punk and, 1–5, 7, 17–23, 30–35; race and class and, 104–11; texts and images of, 151–87; women performers and, 83–84 photocopier, text and visual art distribution and, 19–23 pirated music: cassette technology and, 18–23; MP3 technology and, 36 pituco punk, 56–62, 214n1; race and class divisions and, 72–82; spatial divisions in Lima and, 63–72 police violence: on Peruvian punk venues, 66–67; against underground performers, 118–22; against women, 101–3 politics: feminist movement and, 90– 94; nostalgic reproduction and, 140–50; punk aesthetic and, 117–22; queer critique of, 99–103; subcultural theory and, 48–51; subte challenge to, 23–35; texts and images of punk and, 154–87 Poly Styrene (performer), 88 postpornography discourse: feminism and, 95–103; punk aesthetic and, 84–85 poststructuralism, punk and, 7–8 Prada, Manuel Gonzalez, 161 Preciado, Paul B. (formerly Beatriz), 84 Primera Dosis (First Dose) (Narcosis), 19–21, 24, 35–37, 48–51; cassette cover for, 20 231 Index

print technology, text and visual art distribution and, 18–23 prison massacres, punk depictions of, 53–54, 126–37 “The Problem of the Indian” (Mariátegui), 72–82 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 172 public discourse, punk’s irruptive voice in, 13–16 Pucayacu massacre, 26–35, 53; images of, 27, 31, 33, 127 “Púdrete Pituco” (Sociedad de Mierda), 60–61 pueblos jovenes (young towns), 64–65 punk. See also rock subterráneo (underground rock): ambiguous provocation in, 123–37; contemporary production of, 138–50; as criticism, 45–51; cultural studies of, 45–51; dialogue concerning, 188–203; evolution in Lima of, 1–5, 7–8, 57–58, 112–13; feminism and, 88–94; future challenges in Peru for, 35–44; multimedia production and aesthetic of, 113–22; obscenity legislation and, 217n2; public reaction in Peru to, 116–22; queer culture and, 84–85, 89–94, 98–103; race and class divisions in, 56–63; texts and images on influence of, 151–87; women performers in, 83–111 Pussy Riot (band), 16 Quechua language: etymology of, 216n6; race and class politics of, 104–11 queer movement: artistic collaboratives and, 126–37; body and agency in, 95–103; punk aesthetic and, 84–85, 89–94, 98–103 “Quiero Ser tu Perro” (Narcosis), 21 Quijano, Aníbal, 76–77

race: feminism and, 104–11; multimedia artistic production and, 115–22; Peruvian punk and, 56–57; pituco punk and, 58–63, 72–82; spatial divisions in Lima and, 63–72 Rage Against the Machine (band), 140 Ramones (band), 21, 141 rape. See sexual violence “Ratas Callejeras” (Street Rats) (Eutanasia), 62–63 Reagan, Ronald, 99, 101 recycled music, cassette technology and, 18–23 Red Conceptualismos del Sur collective, 40–41 refusal, as political weapon, 51 Reina Sofia Museum, 40 “Represión” (Narcosis), 36 Resistance through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson), 213n6, 214n7 “Revolución Caliente y Panqueques Punks,” 206–13 revolution in Peru, urban migration and, 1–5 riot grrrl movement, 104 risk of music: economic growth and stability and, 40–41; Peruvian punk and, 11–16; subte challenge to Peruvian culture and politics, 23–35 Rock in Rimac, 118–22 rock music, Peruvian punk and, 8–10 rock-n-roll, Peruvian punk and, 11 rock subterráneo (underground rock), 4–5; challenge to state political violence from, 23–35; contemporary challenges for, 35–44; evolution of, 16–23, 52; political divisions in, 55–58; as political protest, 114–22; punk aesthetic distinguished from, 67–68; undercutting and under­ production in, 8–16

232 Index

“Rock Subterráneo Vuelve Atacar Lima” (Underground Rock Attacks Lima Again) (banner), 114–22 Rodrigo D: No Futuro (film), 36 Rodríguez, Herbert, 41–42, 114–17, 119, 136–37, 195–96 Roldán, Martin, 53, 144–45 Roncal, Patricia. See T-ta, María ­( performer) Rossi, Banchero, 21–23 Rossi, Telma, 119, 121 Rotten, Johnny, 190–91 “Rot You Pituco” (Sociedad de Mierda), 58 Ruiz Rosas, Dalmacia, 98, 113 runa simi, Quechua concept of, 108–11, 217n8 Sabogal, José, 73 Salón Dadá (band), 83, 108–11, 121 San Marcos’ Revolutionary Student Front, 28 Santisteban, Rocío Silva, 105–6 Santivañez, Roger, 113 Santos, Iván “Zurriburri,” 25, 27–29, 83, 90 self-marginalization in Peruvian punk, 8, 161–87 semiotics, Peruvian punk and, 37–38, 47–51 “Se Necesita Muchucha” (Empujón Brutal (Brutal Push) (band)), 106 Sentido Común (band), 65, 68 Sentimiento de Agitación (Feelings of Agitation), 144 Sepulcro (band), 31, 65 Seres Van (Beings Go) (band), 25, 91, 108 Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality (Mariátegui), 3, 205–9 Seven Seconds (band), 55

Sex Pistols (band), 7, 16, 21, 59, 118, 141, 169, 190, 217n2 sexual identity, punk aesthetics and, 84 sexuality, Peruvian feminist movement and, 87–94, 97–103 sexual violence: in Peru, 89–90; race and gender and, 105–11 Shining Path, 1, 5, 50–51; aesthetic practices of, 113–14, 123–24; economic stability and, 40–44; feminist agency in, 88–94, 132–33; graffiti in support of, 123–24; infiltration of underground by, 215n6; Maoist ideology of, 27–35, 44, 113, 115, 131–32; newspapers of, 95; origins of, 76; Peruvian reality and ideology of, 75–82; political violence and, 52–57, 122; propaganda posters for, 15, 89; punk aesthetic and, 14–16, 129–37; subcultural theory and, 50–51; subte resistance and, 23–35; texts and images of, 154–87 sicaris (Andean flute players), 28, 108–9 Simmons, Gene, 99 Siniestro Total (band), 21, 154 Situationism, 10, 12, 168 “Slam o Bronca?” drawing, 70 Smith, Robert, 130 socialist realism, subte and, 16 Sociedad de Mierda (band), 24, 58–63, 78–80, 115, 169 Sorrondeguy, Martín, 36, 49 source materials for punk, 2–5 Spain, culture influence in Peru of, 21– 23, 40–41, 73 spatial divisions: multimedia artistic production and, 115–22; Peruvian punk and, 56–57; pituco punk and, 63–72 sst record label, 17 state political violence: against artistic

233 Index

collaboratives, 113–22, 133–37; economic and political crises of 1980s and, 112–13; feminist movement and, 91–94; “long decade” in Peru and, 113–14; Peruvian punk and, 49–51, 52–57; Shining Path and, 52–57; subte challenge to, 23–35; against subtes, 122–37; texts and images relating to, 154–87; Truth and Reconciliation Commission report on, 105 Stooges, The (band), 21 style, culture and, 46–51, 213n6 subalterity, race and class in Peru and, 104–11 subcultural theory: critique of, 45–51, 213n4; texts and images relating to, 170–87 subte (subcultural urban identity), 10, 15–16; ambiguous provocation and, 122–37; cassette culture and, 17–23; challenge to Peruvian political structure of, 23–35; contemporary perspectives on, 139–50; cultural production and, 213n4; digitization of punk as challenge to, 38–44; feminist movement and, 91–103; gender politics and, 84–94; global influences on, 21–22; “long decade” in Peru and, 113–14; multimedia aesthetic of, 113–22; politics of, 45–51; punk identification with, 67–72; race and class in Peru and, 95–111; student resistance to, 27–35; subcultural theory and, 45–51; texts and images relating to, 154–87 subversive aesthetics, Peruvian punk and, 10–16 subversivos (Marxist militants), 24–25, 29–30, 49–51, 123–37; texts and images of, 161–87

“Sucio Policía” (Narcosis), 36, 118 Suicidal Tendencies (band), 72 “switch point” in queer culture and punk aesthetic, 98–103 System and Power (Autopsia), 24 Talavera, Janeth, 216n4 Taller nn (Workshop of the Unidentified), 31–35, 40–41, 124–37 Támira Bassallo (performer), 83, 102, 108–11, 121 Távara, Alfredo, 25, 28–29, 34–35 television coverage of punk, 114–15, 118–22 Thatcher, Maggie, 101 Thornton, Sarah, 213n4 “Thrashcore” flier, 68–70 Toledo, Alejandro, 38–39 tongue: agency and use of, 94–111; sexuality and use of, 93–94; significance in punk of, 85–111 Torres Rotondo, Carlos, 57 transnationalism, punk and, 8 transubculturation, Peruvian punk and, 10 trap of fuckedoverism, 50–51 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 38–39, 105, 168 T-ta María (performer), 83–111 Turner, Terrence, 86 Uchpa (band), 217n8 Uchurracay, massacre of journalists in, 126 Ultimos Recursos fanzine, 62–63, 71 underfucking the system, 48–51 underground production: ambiguous provocation in, 123–37; cassette culture and, 17–23; contemporary examples of, 140–50; digitization and, 36–44; evolution of, 57–58; “long

234 Index

decade” in Peru and, 113–14; multimedia artistic collaboration and, 114–22; nostalgic reproduction and, 139–50; Peruvian punk and, 8–16; politics of, 45–51; subcultural theory and, 45–51; underground concerts, 24–35; women performers and, 83 underproduction: do-it-yourself ethos in, 16–23; in Peruvian punk, 11–16, 35–44; subcultural theory and, 48–51 United Kingdom: punk aesthetic in, 59–62; “white riot” of British punk in, 88 “Un Llamado a Algunos Doctores” (A Call to Some Doctors) (Arguedas), 105 urban migration: chicha culture and, 215n2; depeasantization and, 75–82; political and economic chaos of, 112–13; punk aesthetic and, 1–5, 58–63; spatial divisions and, 63–72 Valcárcel, Luis, 77 Vaneigen, Raoul, 172 Vasconcelos, José, 73 Velasco, Juan (General), 22 Vial, Fernando “Puppy” (Cachorro), 19, 21, 142 Vich, Victor, 77 Vidal, Miguel Angel, 139–41 Vilca Carranza, Juan, 22 Vilis, Kimba, 138 vinyl revival, Peruvian punk and, 36– 44 Virrey record label, 138 “Vivo en una Ciudad Muerta” (I Live in a Dead City) (Guerrilla Urbana), 217 “The Voice of Luis Banchero Rossi” (Narcosis), 21–22

Volume I (compilation cassette), 24 Volume II (compilation cassette), 60– 61 Voz Propia (band), 53, 139, 141

women militants, Peruvian punk and, 88–94, 132–33 Wong, Enrique, 32, 34, 125, 131, 134 Working Hot, 94

Warhol, Andy, 40–41, 126–27, 129–31 Warner, Michael, 13–14 Warpath (band), 70 “What Fatherland Is This?” (Sociedad de Mierda), 115 “whitestraightboy punk,” 8

“Ya No Formo Parte de Esto” (I’m No Longer Part of This) (Ataque Frontal), 68

235 Index

Zapatista movement, 169 Zcuela Crrada (band), 19, 24, 119