Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars: Huayno Music, Media Work, and Ethnic Imaginaries in Urban Peru.

Lara, Francisco D.

Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars: Huayno Music, Media Work, and Ethnic Imaginaries in Urban Peru. By Joshua Tucker. (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. [viii, 232 p. ISBN 9780226923956 (hardcover), $90; ISBN 9780226923963 (paperback), $30.] Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.

Joshua Tucker's Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars is a much-welcome addition to the growing literature on music and identity in contemporary Latin America. Drawing on extensive field research (2001-8), Tucker explores how the highland Peruvian genre of music known as huayno, specifically the stylistic variant associated with the city and department of Ayacucho, has implicated complex, dynamic, and historically-situated categories of ethnicity and class in its development, circulation, and consumption since the early twentieth century. His focus on radio broadcasting and radio DJs as agents negotiating the boundaries of tradition, modernity, class, and ethnicity in shaping and defining new markets and audiences illuminates more precisely the relationship between music and identity in Peru, as well as the role of media and media producers in the construction, mediation, and circulation of social categories. Timely and relevant, his approach, arguments, and conclusions will appeal to music, culture, and media scholars and students interested in the intersection of music, identity, and technology as well as in the issues of ethnicity and national identity in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin America.

Huayno presents a unique case study through which to understand the dynamics of identity construction in Peru. As a general term referencing various regional variants of music and dance originating in the Peruvian highlands and now heard throughout Peru, huayno demarcates a long-standing division in the national ethnic imaginary between the predominantly indigenous and mestizo (of mixed indigenous and European ancestry) highlands and the criollo (American of European descent) coastal region. Yet, as Tucker shows, the same discourses constituting the perceived divide between highland and coastal Peru likewise serve to differentiate the refined huayno of Ayacucho and its upwardly-mobile urban mestizo listening audience from other types of huayno and emergent popular music hybrids, such as chicha, commonly associated with the rural indigenous and proletariat populations. In attending to local discourses of Ayacuchano huayno in their convergence with broader discourses of identity and place in Peru, Tucker reveals how certain discursive tropes and practices, specifically at play in the commercial recording and radio broadcasting of the genre, reify existing social categories while mediating contemporary notions of a more cosmopolitan highland Andean identity. Gentleman Troubadours therefore also addresses the issue of globalization and presents a more nuanced perspective on the related notions of tradition and modernity as they relate to music and identity.

Tucker explores the topic and convincingly develops his arguments over the course of six concise yet thorough and well-written chapters, the final of which is an epilogue. Chapters 1 and 2 contextualize the study in terms of the major issues addressed, the theoretical framework employed, the primary arguments posited, and the current Peruvian soundscape within which Ayacuchano huayno is situ ated. Here, he calls for closer attention to the ways in which media circulation builds "communities of shared reference rather than shared substance" (p. 32) and shows how currently-operational social categories in Peru that index notions of class and ethnicity constituted during the colonial period are mapped onto the contemporary Peruvian music scene. Chapter 3 discusses Ayacuchano huayno specifically and addresses the ways in which the genre was consciously inscribed with a distinctly regional elite social status cultivated by a growing, upwardly-mobile highland mestizo middle-class listening audience through the work of the Ayacuchano Cultural Center during the early twentieth century. Of significance in this chapter is his discussion of huamanguinismo, a term that makes reference to the Spanish heritage and refined social values and aspirations of Ayacucho's urban mestizo middle class, and its implications for Ayacuchano huayno composition and interpretation. Chapters 4 and 5 present Tucker's analysis of the role of the recording industry and radio broadcasting, respectively, in the creation of new consumer audiences for contemporary Ayacuchano huayno, likewise distinguished in terms of their aspiring social status and cosmopolitan aesthetics. Tucker shows how media producers since the 1960s simultaneously drew upon existing social categories and contemporaneous notions of modernity in shaping the sound of the genre as well as in establishing and defining modern markets and audiences. In the process, contends Tucker, they also reified and redefined existing Peruvian class divisions and social categories. The epilogue updates Tucker's original research and conclusions based on recent developments and changes in Peru's popular music scene and national ethnic imaginary. Though recent trends suggest a positive upsurge in identification with chicha and huayno norteno among Peru's indigenous and working class populations, Tucker contends that recent trends nonetheless further solidify the long-held social categories and class divisions that similarly position Ayacuchano huayno relative to the nation's urban mestizo elite.

Gentleman Troubadours contributes significantly to current academic discussions on music and identity in the Latin American Andes, specifically in terms of its problematization of mestizaje (denoting race mixture) and its emphasis on media and mediators as agents in the negotiation of identity. As Tucker notes, an overemphasis on the concept of mestizaje as a master narrative of race and race relations in previous scholarship tends to collapse the subtleties of identity construction into a binary opposition, pitting the ethnic category "mestizo" against that of "Indian." This is problematic, insofar as such labels insufficiently capture the dynamism and fluidity with which the socioeconomic categories indexed are experienced by those who may or may not necessarily self-identify as one or the other. Furthermore, the highland mestizo and coastal criollo divide that characterizes Peru's national ethnic imaginary complicates the mestizo/Indian dichotomy in that highland mestizos are likewise positioned in an inferior social status relative to the nation's coastal urban criollo elite. The tendency to approach and discuss music in terms of such labels, argues Tucker, often leads to static and essentializing representations of music and identity as well as to overly simplistic understandings of the notions of tradition and modernity. Indeed, in the case of the highland Peruvian huayno, this means a de facto association of the genre (in all its variants) with the category "Indian" and all the negative social and economic connotations the label entails. As Tucker shows, however, this is problematic in the case of Ayacuchano huayno, as its current association with a sophisticated and modern highland urban mestizo elite today blurs the social, economic, and aesthetic distinctions often made between rural and urban, indigenous and mestizo, highland and coastal, and traditional and modern Peru. For this reason Tucker eschews such representations in favor of a historically- and ethnographically-informed reading of local discourses and discursive practices as well as a focus on the creative agency of specific mediators who navigate contemporary sensibilities of modernity and Peru's national ethnic imaginary in the process of defining the ever-emergent genre and its market. In shifting the analytical lens in this way, Tucker offers scholars a more precise way of approaching and understanding the relationship between music and identity in contemporary Peru and, by extension, the greater Andes region.

That said, Tucker's emphasis on distribution and the role of media producers in defining and shaping new consumer audiences leaves the question of consumption and consumer agency unexplored and under-theorized. Building on Simon Frith's understanding of genres and markets as dialogic and mutually constitutive (Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], 88), Tucker concerns himself primarily with how emergent markets or publics are prefigured, produced, and conditioned by the media. As such, media producers are here foregrounded to such an extent that the market is left largely assumed and overgeneralized. Tucker acknowledges individual agency on the part of listening audiences only to the extent that it illustrates the complex relationship between music and identity (see p. 24). Yet, greater attention to the consumptive end of the equation would go a long way toward more fully explicating and validating his overall point and argument concerning the dynamic and complex ways in which music and meaning are discursively constituted, reconstituted, and transformed via circulatory paths mediated by specific agents situated in time and place. Such an omission is understandable, however, given the scope of this study as well as Tucker's desire to illuminate the under-examined aspect of media and specifically radio production in Latin American music scholarship. The question of analytical focus aside, Tucker's theoretical framework and analysis provides a significant model for approaching and understanding the relationship between music, media, and identity in the Andes region and beyond.

Engaging, compelling, and insightful, Gentleman Troubadours is a valuable study worthy of any library wishing to stay current in ethnomusicology as well as in the related areas of Latin American, cultural, and media studies. Its topic will appeal to students and aficionados of Latin American music, while its approach and findings will be of particular interest to scholars as well as graduate and upper-division undergraduate students. Though it may leave readers desiring greater discussion and analysis of the ways in which music production and consumption complementarily mediate the circulation of music and identity, it nonetheless illuminates the significant and under-examined role of radio and media producers in this process.

FRANCISCO D. LARA

University of Memphis