Politically Conscious Rap in the Peruvian Protests of 2022 and 2023

Renzo Aroni Sulca

We Bear Witness With Our Song: Peru’s Testimonial Song Tradition

Jonathan Ritter

Two decades after Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the publication of its final report, Peruvians continue to struggle over how the political violence that devastated their country in the 1980s and 90s should be remembered. Recent events, including controversies over the legacy of former President Alberto Fujimori as well as ongoing debates over the legitimacy and accuracy of public commemorations of the conflict’s victims, reinforce the consensus view that truth commissions mark the beginning, rather than the end, of processes of historical reflection, revision, and reconciliation. In this paper, I consider various musical interventions into these processes and debates in Peru, focusing in particular on the long history of canciones testimoniales, testimonial songs, that have borne the experiences of diverse actors in the country's armed internal conflict. I argue that such songs played an active role in how the violence was interpreted, experienced, and at times even incited, and explore how testimonial music continues to play a key role in mediating and transmitting traumatic memories of the war to the postmemory generation--those born or raised after the conflict whose lives are nonetheless shaped and haunted by it. 

Renzo Aroni. Born in Lima and raised in the Peruvian highland region of Ayacucho, Renzo Aroni is an historian of modern Latin America. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis, in 2020, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities from 2020-2023. He has an M.A. in Anthropology, with a focus on Ethnomusicology, from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City. Dr. Aroni is currently an Assistant Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and has accepted a tenure-track position at New York University (starting in January 2025). Dr. Aroni’s research experience and current interests include social movements and revolutions, Indigenous politics, music, and language revitalization, and the politics of memory in Latin America. Aroni’s book manuscript-in-progress examines Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980–1992) between Maoist Shining Path insurgents and government forces from a micro-dynamic of wartime violence and resistance in the Andean village of Huamanquiquia (Ayacucho). Drawing on his own experience amid the conflict, Aroni’s project brings together original archival research with multi-sited ethnographic study and oral histories primarily in Quechua with both Indigenous and guerrilla militants. As he completes this work, Aroni is also developing a new project on rap in Quechua. Aroni is also a founding member of Kuskalla Abya Yala, an organization dedicated to the revitalization of Indigenous languages, and of their tri-lingual (Quechua, Spanish, English) podcast, Kuskalla.

Jonathan Ritter is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Chair of the Department of Music at the University of California, Riverside. He received his MA and PhD in ethnomusicology from UCLA, and his BA summa cum laude, in American Indian Studies from the University of Minnesota. He has conducted field research with Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples throughout the Americas, including extended work in Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Peru.  He is co-editor, with J. Martin Daughtry, of Music in the Post-9/11 World (Routledge, 2007), and author of A Work in Progress: Autonomy on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast (IICD, 2016, 2^nd ed.). He also recently guest edited a special issue on "Music, Politics, and Social Movements in Latin America" (2023) for the journal Latin American Perspectives. His ongoing book projectt, We Bear Witness With Our Song: The Politics of Music and Violence in the Peruvian Andes, draws on more than two decades of research in Peru on that country’s testimonial song movement that emerged during the armed internal conflict that accompanied the Shining Path guerrilla insurgency. Ritter is also a Contributing Editor to the Handbook of Latin American Studies, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Latin American Perspectives, Popular Music and Society, and Ñawpa Pacha: A Journal of Andean Studies.