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Elementary school students serenade Susana Baca in this former sugar cane-milling town where both she and Peru's slave trade are rooted.One girl recites a paean to Baca, and five other children tap a complex rhythm on boxes known as cajones, a legacy of Africans brought in chains to harvest sugar cane in this fertile river valley. The library of the humble school is being dedicated to the 67-year-old diva, herself living proof of Afro-Peruvians' enduring struggle.
Photo: Photo: Getty/Text: AP
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The gracious, elegant Baca is not just Peru's best-known musician but also the Andean country's first black Cabinet minister.She accepted the offer to join President Ollanta Humala's government in July, and says she's determined to end the discrimination that has long made second-class citizens not just of blacks but also of Peru's indigenous.
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Baca has been Peru's de facto ambassador to the rest of the world for more than two decades, a musical anthropologist and a chanteuse who seduces audiences with her velvet voice and barefoot dancing."I am the symbol of inclusion," said Baca in her Lima home. "I don't hate the people who segregated us, who punished us, who hurt us. I just don't want anyone else in our country to go through what I did."
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Her thin experience in cultural bureaucracy has drawn concern from some arts promoters, academics and stewards of Peru's archaeological riches, of which she is now curator-in-chief. They worry she lacks the pugilistic chops for a job fraught with bureaucratic and political confrontation.Baca is known among world music fans for her soulful, inventively phrased interpretations of centuries-old rhythms, lyrics and dances. Her earthiness distances her from Peru's widely discredited political class.
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A recentIpsos Apoyo poll showed Baca to be Peru's most popular Cabinet minister, with a 62 percent approval rating.To be sure, endearment is Baca's style, and she's already begun employing it to try to boost the $30 million annual budget of a ministry that is just eight months old. She's a slight woman careful not just with her words but also her enunciation.
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"I am the beggar minister" is how she put it to Peru's finance minister, Baca was quoted by a Lima newspaper as saying. "I don't even have leather for my tambourine."Baca grew up in Lima's seaside Chorrillos neighborhood but her clan hails from Canete, where black field workers today earn little more than $5 a day picking cotton and corn.Thanks to the perseverance of Baca's mother, who raised three children cooking and washing clothes for Lima's wealthy, she's among the estimated 2 percent of Afro-Peruvians with a post-secondary education.
Photo: Photo: Getty/Text: AP
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The lot of Latin America's blacks has improved little since Baca, as a girl of five or six, earned her first tips dancing at band concerts on Chorrillos' promenade.Most of the region's 155 million descendants of African slaves are jobless or eke out a living by working in the informal sector, according to organizers of the first U.N.-sponsored Summit of Afro-Descendants held in Honduras last month.The estimated 100,000 African slaves brought to Peru toiled in sugar plantations and silver mines, with some becoming urban artisans. At one point, they and their descendants were more than 40 percent of Lima's population.Blacks now amount to less than a tenth of Peru's 29 million people. Yet socially, they've barely advanced in the 157 years since emancipation.
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They "have always lived in misery because they never had access to property," said prominent Afro-Peruvian academic Jose Campos, a dean at the National Education University from which both he and Baca graduated.Leftist dictator Gen. Juan Velasco expropriated large tracts from rich landholders in the late 1960s but his land redistribution benefited not blacks but Andeans. Many blacks migrated to cities, often in the continued employ of their white "patrones."Baca didn't know fame until middle age, when former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne introduced her internationally in the mid 1990s through his Luaka Bop label. Success came, she said, "little by little with great sacrifice."Her family was musical; some of her cousins eventually would go on to formed the well-known Peru Negro troupe. Baca's father played the guitar, her mother danced. Yet she was barred from choral and dance troupes in both primary and secondary school."I said, 'You've got to choose me because I'm the "bailarin
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The experiment ended in 2000.But that hasn't stop Baca from continuing to extend her reach and musical collaborations.Her latest album, 'Afrodiaspora,' blends African-influenced styles from across the Americas, including New Orleans and Mexico.Rene Perez of the Puerto Rican hip-hop band Calle 13, among other musicians, perform on the album, and Baca sings on the chorus for Calle 13's hit "Latinoamerica." On Saturday night Sept. 10, she joined the hip-hop group on stage in Peru's highlands city of Cuzco to perform the song.The next night, the barefoot minister was swirling and dipping in Lima's La Reserva park in a flowing white dress and shawl. Her five-person band joined a multi-artist benefit that gathered warm clothing for the needy in Peru's frigid highlands.Baca turns her attentions to the political stage as head of Peru's youngest ministry."It is still a ministry in diapers," awaiting shape and vision, said Santiago Alfaro, a Catholic University sociologist.Baca is
Photo: Photo: Getty/Text: AP
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Elementary school students serenade Susana Baca in this former sugar cane-milling town where both she and Peru's slave trade are rooted.One girl recites a paean to Baca, and five other children tap a complex rhythm on boxes known as cajones, a legacy of Africans brought in chains to harvest sugar cane in this fertile river valley. The library of the humble school is being dedicated to the 67-year-old diva, herself living proof of Afro-Peruvians' enduring struggle.
Photo: Photo: Getty/Text: AP
