Rock ‘n’ Roll in Peru’s Popular Quarters

Abstract

This chapter investigates various socio-artistic issues and meanings. In particular, it looks at those that pertain to the relationship between rock as a symbol of resistance and the contestatory subculture propagated since the early 1980s by marginalized, urban Peruvian bands such as Los del Pueblo and Los Mojarras. It is always difficult to conjecture about the cultural matrices of hegemony, its transformation, and its latest innovations; however, in the present case, one intuits that the avid bourgeois consumers of Anglo-Saxon cultural paradigms have tired of mere musical mimesis. For its part, the culture of the dispossessed—where the marginal and the instinctive have always been easily accessible alternatives to modernity’s Utopias—now appears to be an unbalanced system in which the adoption of ideological and resistant strategies¹ has made possible the appropriation and (de) construction of cultural artifacts once thought to be beyond marginalized performers’ capacities of aesthetic-musical absorption and interpretation.