Dear Readers,
Since Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca's Empire in 1532 until June 28, 1821, Peru was one of the many Spanish colonies in America. Although many injustices were committed along those years, we can not abhor of 300 years of history that are part of our identity also.
The Spanish brought a very important cultural contribution and extended it through almost all the territory. Naturally, the main motives were economics and religious. Thus, on every Peruvian town we could find a catholic church with all the representative architecture of the colonial era. It is weird to find a modern church, especially on Puno department, where the baroque is shown on its mayor splendor.
Peru is a constant going back and forth in time, because from the colonial baroque we go back to the primal traditions of the Andean towns from Cusco, and later we take a look on Raqchi ruins, not to how they look during the Incas but now, rounded by charming people, and finally we stay in the middle of the road, with the traditional dances without time or origin, where everything blends, where all ritual is also a fight. and a game.
Regards,
Jose and Cynthia
To understand the Baroque movement in the churches of Puno, one has to diferentiate between European Baroque style and the universal baroque spirit. The Baroque trends lavished on the churches of the highland plains represented a great melting pot of the cultural and architectural needs of Augustines, Dominicans and Jesuits with the aesthetic feeling of the ancient Inca. Pucará and Tiahuanaco artists creating an entirely novel concept of Baroque architecture in the history of culture.But all these architectural styles cannot nor should not be piled together. Churches built in the mid sixteenth century, like those in Chucuito -both the Ascension, which was built for the Indians, as well as Santo Domingo which was reserved for whites -are extremely simple in conception, even when Spanish royal inspector Gari Diez de San Miguel found them "unnecessarily luxurious", as both undoubtedly obeyed the urgent need for massive-scale missionary work.
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Casa Ecológica, the Sierra family and the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales de Cusco, represent three different approaches to the restoration of Cusco's rich traditional culture within a modern concept of conservation.The extraordinary tourism-driven dynamism of Cusco today is sourse of legitimate concern but also of valuable initiatives to rescue and preserve local culture. Many of these initiatives arise not from the commercial imperatives of tourism but end up as part of a modern vision of local culture which attempts to connect to the rest of the world through the value of creation. Today Cusco has a number of bodies dedicated to the rediscovery of the textile traditions of the department, an effort every bit as important as the textiles themselves were in the time of the Incas. The first Spanish Chroniclers wrote that for the inhabitants of the empire their textiles had the same ritual and sacred importance as their precious metals. Thus, with the European invasion imminent, large quantities of beautiful Pieces made from alpaca and vicuña fiber were burned so that they would not fall into the hands of the foreigners.
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It is one thing to visit the archaeological complex at Raqchi but something quite different to spend a few days in the village of Raqchi with villagers who explain how they host guests and their every day experiences.For many years the people of Raqchi watched buses full of tourists as they arrived in the Main Square of their village; the visitors alighted, went to the ruins, took photographs and listened to their guides then left. Thus the visitors could see the Inca ruins while the locals saw their chances of development disappear. A year ago things started to change. A group if villagers made contact with the Cusco/ Puno Corridor Project and agreed upon a training program on matters of cultural identity. Then came training on ceramic restoration, and it should be said in passing that in Inca times ceramics were considered among the Empire's finest products because of the quality that volcanic sand gave to the clay. The next step was to build toilets for the tourists, having watched them in desperate need having come from Cusco or Puno without having stopped for relief on the way. The success of these toilets - which are excellent - conviced the inhabitants of Raqchi to provide further services for tourists and that was the start of the living tourism project which now astonishes locals and others alike.
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The Paucartambo feast tells a store whose main axis is the fight between the qhapaq qollas (dancers from Puno) and the chunchos (dancers from the jungle) to decide which one keeps the Madonna. In the same time, one by one appear the 16 groups of dancers, each one represented by an element of this story, from an ethnic group, an episode or a joke recreation of a great irreverence.Thus, the awqachileno (chilean enemy) is a republic dance that satirizes the outrages of the Chilean troops during the Pacific war. The contradance, originated probably in the Polish and French mazurkas, is an agricultural mestizo dance only for males danced with a rich and creativity vestry. The danzaq humanizes the billy goats, efficient in dishonor girls and in console windows.
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