‘I Am Proud to Be an Indian’: The Music of Andean Musicians in Europe as an Expression of Pan-Indianism

The Global Charango

“…16 The stereotype of a "wise Indian", re-presented in sound, lights, and visuals next to the merchandise table reverberates with European tropes seeded in its colonial past. Ethnomusicologist Jana Jetmarová's work based on field experiences with this more recent wave of street performers who, she asserts, are the main vendors of these new versions of "Andean" music offers an analytical framework with which to understand the turn of trend (Jetmarová 2013). Lynn Meisch's research on Otavalan street musicians and international sellers 14 Connecting and circulating between localities on the two continents.…”

“…Her fieldwork with Andean street performers chronicles recent trends in sort-of-Andean performances. The performers she studied presented merged and amplified musical and visual tropes of a pan-hemispheric Indian to draw the attention of an increasingly disinterested European public, post pan-Andean music "boom" (Jetmarová 2013). A short auto-ethnographic vignette is provided as a very recent illustration from July 2019, along with relevant narratives from some of my interlocutors in the field.…”

“…As pan-Andean music grew in popularity throughout the 1970s and 1980s, multitudes of new groups arrived in Europe from South America. Accounts date the peak of Andean music in central Europe to the 1980s through mid-1990s during which Andean music groups flooded pedestrian zones, squares and metros, clad customarily in bright ponchos and signatory ear flap hats now associated with left leaning politics, indigeneity, and rebellion (Mendívil 2015;Jetmarová 2013;Rios 2008). 48 Tarazona played his version in his feature set at the Encuentro Internacional de Charangos en Brussels, Belgium in November, 2018 which I attended during my field studies.…”