Peruvian Cumbia at the Theoretical Limits of Techno-Utopian Hybridity

This essay analyzes the transformation of Peruvian chicha, an adaptation of Colombian cumbia, from an unassuming working-class music into a central feature in new nationalist discourses that seek to overcome older elitist and racist models of national identification from transnational perspectives. As part of this discussion, the chapter considers the work of intellectual cosmopolitans who appeal to notions of electronic experimentation, psychedelic playfulness, and musical agency, thus resignifying chicha as an aesthetic solution for the intellectual shortcomings of an earlier era. Chicha musicians become retrospective theorists of international hybridity and nationalist mestizaje whose experimentalism challenges the limits of previous identity discourses, providing aesthetic utopian alternatives.