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Marginal like you!: constructing citizenship through fusion music in the Peruvian traditional upper classes

Montero Diaz, RF

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Abstract

Lima is divided by intricate categorisations of class, race and ethnicity. The urban white upper classes have historically topped Lima’s socio-ethnic hierarchy and kept to their own. Contemporary studies on this stratum are scarce, but mostly describe them as racist, distant, without a culture of their own, hostile towards marginal communities and largely responsible for the conditions leading to Peru’s internal war (1980–2000).

In the aftermath of this conflict, and in an attempt to approach previously rejected individuals, Limeño upper-class musicians fused foreign genres and music associated with the marginal classes. The resulting fusions enabled a segment of the young white upper-class audiences – ‘the alternatives’ – to reshape their music taste, enhance their experience of the city and imagine and construct new citizenships.

Based on ethnographic case studies, this chapter focuses on experiences by ‘the alternatives’ of musical subversions of class identity through participation in the fusion scene. The chapter examines how their embodiment of marginality and rapprochement with previously rejected genres, performed by intercultural and interracial bands, is interpreted as an opportunity to construct a different upper-class citizenship with access to cultural and political participation beyond music contexts in a ‘more real’ and plural Lima.

Publication Date May 6, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Pages 62 -79
Book Title Citizenship in the Latin American Upper and Middle Classes: Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture and Politics
Chapter Number 4
ISBN 9780815353928
DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351134316-5

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