An American in Lima

Who is Peruvian? Who is Andean?
 
Can a Peruvian dancer who’s made a new life in New York City return after 15 years to her remote hometown in the Andes to reclaim her heritage?
Can a young American of mixed Peruvian and Puerto Rican heritage find her “inner Andina” (as I like to call it) by studying folkloric dance techniques in towns throughout [...]

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“…like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two”

Rereading yesterday’s post on writers and Lima’s weather, I became curious about Herman Melville’s riff on Lima as “the strangest, saddest city thou can’st see.” 
When did Melville visit Lima? What prompted him to go into spasms of melancholy?
A quick Google search revealed that the quote doesn’t belong to [...]

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The more I learn about the handmade clothing worn by traditional people in the Andes, the more impressed I become.
The outfit above isn’t a museum piece, although it displays like one in the “Perú Hecho a Mano” boutique at Saga Falabella, in Lima’s Jockey Plaza mall. It is a very elaborate version of the typical [...]

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These colorful knit hats with earflaps, known as ch’ullos (CHEW-yohs), are worn by men in traditional Andean villages. You don’t usually find many high-quality ch’ullos in Lima, but this past Monday I found a virtual forest of them on the third floor of Saga Falabella department store, in Jockey Plaza, where the hats are being [...]

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 Just back from the annual pilgrimage of Qoyllur Rit’i, which takes place just below a 17,000-foot-high glacier (actually, three glacial tongues) in the southern Andes, about 80 miles south of Cusco. Since pre-Inca times, Qolqepunku Glacier has been revered as a sacred site associated with nearby Mount Ausangate, the tallest mountain in the region, considered by [...]

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Peruvian artist Alberto Casari’s 15-year retrospective (”Alberto Casari & PPPP, 1993 -2008″) , showing at the downstairs ICPNA gallery through May 18 (see gallery listing below), teases the limits of what’s considered Art in conservative Lima. The wide-ranging exhibit showcases, among other objects, a chair impossible to sit on, blank canvases “painted” with ocean water, [...]

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