← Back to Countries

Peru

Hollywood's marketed 'Inca princess'

Yma Sumac

Yma Sumac was born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo and arrived in 1950s America billed, inaccurately, as an Inca princess descended from the last emperor Atahualpa. That was a Hollywood fabrication, and her label never bothered correcting it because it sold records. The voice was real. Some contemporaries, and even Guinness World Records, credited her with a range of four or five octaves, and she could jump from a low growl to a piercing high note inside one phrase. Marketed as the "Queen of Exotica," she became one of the biggest stars of the 1950s lounge-music boom, and by 1958 she was performing that range on camera in the Peruvian film Música de siempre.

Punk, a decade before punk existed

Los Saicos

Los Saicos formed in 1964 in Lima's Lince district: Erwin Flores, Rolando Carpio, César Castrillón and Pancho Guevara. What they played was so far ahead of its time that critics had no name for it yet. It was fast, screamed, distorted and openly anarchic, at a moment when rock elsewhere was still mostly polite. Decades later, writers at the Washington Post and the Guardian credited them as one of the first true punk bands anywhere in the world, roughly ten years before the Ramones or the Sex Pistols. It took the wider world almost half a century to notice.

A healer's songs from the Amazon

Maestra Olivia

Olivia Arévalo was a Shipibo-Conibo onanya, a traditional healer, from the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon. She was part of the last generation of elders carrying a centuries-old repertoire of icaros, the sacred songs Shipibo healers sing or whistle during plant-medicine ceremonies to call in healing and guide the ritual, sometimes with a leaf-rattle called a chakapa. The icaros she recorded for the album Onáyabaon Bewá — Messages from Mother Earth are ritual practice first. According to Shipibo tradition they are passed down through inherited lineage and through years spent learning directly from the plants themselves. Alongside her work as a healer and tradition-bearer, she spent much of her later life advocating for indigenous land and cultural rights.

The Collection