[News] Susana Baca - Peru's First Black Minister

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Peru's First Black Minister: Barefoot Singer

By FRANK BAJAK, Associated Press – Sep 15, 2011
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gAe0PY76_lxnEX5ahJHyOIktx0aA?docId=367f2d25a19340f48d751d04faf53555 


SAN LUIS DE CANETE, Peru (AP) ­ Elementary school 
students serenade Susana Baca in this former 
sugar cane-milling town where both she and Peru's slave trade are rooted.

One girl recites a paean to Baca, and five other 
children tap a complex rhythm on boxes known as 
cajones, a legacy of Africans brought in chains 
to harvest sugar cane in this fertile river 
valley. The library of the humble school is being 
dedicated to the 67-year-old diva, herself living 
proof of Afro-Peruvians' enduring struggle.

The gracious, elegant Baca is not just Peru's 
best-known musician but also the Andean country's first black Cabinet minister.

She accepted the offer to join President Ollanta 
Humala's government in July, and says she's 
determined to end the discrimination that has 
long made second-class citizens not just of 
blacks but also of Peru's indigenous.

Baca has been Peru's de facto ambassador to the 
rest of the world for more than two decades, a 
musical anthropologist and a chanteuse who 
seduces audiences with her velvet voice and barefoot dancing.

"I am the symbol of inclusion," said Baca in her 
Lima home. "I don't hate the people who 
segregated us, who punished us, who hurt us. I 
just don't want anyone else in our country to go through what I did."

Her thin experience in cultural bureaucracy has 
drawn concern from some arts promoters, academics 
and stewards of Peru's archaeological riches, of 
which she is now curator-in-chief. They worry she 
lacks the pugilistic chops for a job fraught with 
bureaucratic and political confrontation.

Baca is known among world music fans for her 
soulful, inventively phrased interpretations of 
centuries-old rhythms, lyrics and dances. Her 
earthiness distances her from Peru's widely discredited political class.

A recent Ipsos Apoyo poll showed Baca to be 
Peru's most popular Cabinet minister, with a 62 percent approval rating.

To be sure, endearment is Baca's style, and she's 
already begun employing it to try to boost the 
$30 million annual budget of a ministry that is 
just eight months old. She's a slight woman 
careful not just with her words but also her enunciation.

"I am the beggar minister" is how she put it to 
Peru's finance minister, Baca was quoted by a 
Lima newspaper as saying. "I don't even have leather for my tambourine."

___

Baca grew up in Lima's seaside Chorrillos 
neighborhood but her clan hails from Canete, 
where black field workers today earn little more 
than $5 a day picking cotton and corn.

Thanks to the perseverance of Baca's mother, who 
raised three children cooking and washing clothes 
for Lima's wealthy, she's among the estimated 2 
percent of Afro-Peruvians with a post-secondary education.

The lot of Latin America's blacks has improved 
little since Baca, as a girl of five or six, 
earned her first tips dancing at band concerts on Chorrillos' promenade.

Most of the region's 155 million descendants of 
African slaves are jobless or eke out a living by 
working in the informal sector, according to 
organizers of the first U.N.-sponsored Summit of 
Afro-Descendants held in Honduras last month.

The estimated 100,000 African slaves brought to 
Peru toiled in sugar plantations and silver 
mines, with some becoming urban artisans. At one 
point, they and their descendants were more than 
40 percent of Lima's population.

Blacks now amount to less than a tenth of Peru's 
29 million people. Yet socially, they've barely 
advanced in the 157 years since emancipation.

They "have always lived in misery because they 
never had access to property," said prominent 
Afro-Peruvian academic Jose Campos, a dean at the 
National Education University from which both he and Baca graduated.

Leftist dictator Gen. Juan Velasco expropriated 
large tracts from rich landholders in the late 
1960s but his land redistribution benefited not 
blacks but Andeans. Many blacks migrated to 
cities, often in the continued employ of their white "patrones."

___

Baca didn't know fame until middle age, when 
former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne 
introduced her internationally in the mid 1990s 
through his Luaka Bop label. Success came, she 
said, "little by little with great sacrifice."

Her family was musical; some of her cousins 
eventually would go on to formed the well-known 
Peru Negro troupe. Baca's father played the 
guitar, her mother danced. Yet she was barred 
from choral and dance troupes in both primary and secondary school.

"I said, 'You've got to choose me because I'm the 
"bailarina.'" I danced marvelously well. I 
inherited it from my mother. So I said, 'I'm 
surely going to be chosen.' But I wasn't. None of 
the Indian or black girls in my class were 
chosen. I remember my hurt, my anguish."

Hard on Baca, too, were her early years as a 
primary school teacher. She was assigned to 
ill-equipped public schools in the chilly 
highlands and in Lima's dirt poor Cerro del Augustin district.

"She suffered a lot and there's the additional 
ingredient of her being asthmatic, which makes 
her fragile," said her husband and manager, 
Bolivian sociologist Ricardo Pereira.

He knew almost no one in Lima when he arrived in 
the early 1980s, fleeing a right-wing Bolivian 
dictatorship. One day he happened upon a folk 
festival and saw Baca, on stage, for the first time.

"A skinny, diminutive woman, dressed in black," he recalled.

Baca was lucky she sang a capella well because 
she rarely could afford to put together a band 
and pay for rehearsals, Pereira said. She was 
"adopted" by poets and musicians, taken in for a 
time by Chabuca Granda, a legendary Peruvian singer/songwriter.

"She said, 'If I have to sing trivial songs in a 
nightclub I won't do it,'" Pereira recalled.

For about five years, the couple made ends meet 
making guayaba and quince preserves that Baca 
would sell to friends. Pereira motions to a 
kitchen tool hanging near their refrigerator as a 
reminder: "With that big spoon we rowed to Greece and back about 50 times."

Baca toured Brazil and Russia, yet "Susanita" 
couldn't afford to cut her own album. Ironically, 
a 1986 recording made in Cuba but released 15 
years later without the couple's consent would win her a Latin Grammy.

Baca's recognition by world music audiences came 
in 1995 when Byrne arranged for her to perform in 
New York. The New Wave rocker had just put her 
version of the painful slave lament "Maria Lando" 
on his "Soul of Black Peru" compilation.

She arrived with two percussionists and a bassist 
but no guitarist, who had been denied a U.S. 
visa. Baca's performance nonetheless seduced The 
New York Times, which called her "cool, distinct 
voice as beautiful as any working in pop."

Baca and Pereira were soon converting their Lima 
home into a musical academy, hiring Cuban 
teachers, expanding its library and moving into a back room.

"We managed to train 50 young people but it was 
always an economic disaster," Pereira said.

The experiment ended in 2000.

But that hasn't stop Baca from continuing to 
extend her reach and musical collaborations.

Her latest album, 'Afrodiaspora,' blends 
African-influenced styles from across the 
Americas, including New Orleans and Mexico.

Rene Perez of the Puerto Rican hip-hop band Calle 
13, among other musicians, perform on the album, 
and Baca sings on the chorus for Calle 13's hit 
"Latinoamerica." On Saturday night Sept. 10, she 
joined the hip-hop group on stage in Peru's 
highlands city of Cuzco to perform the song.

The next night, the barefoot minister was 
swirling and dipping in Lima's La Reserva park in 
a flowing white dress and shawl. Her five-person 
band joined a multi-artist benefit that gathered 
warm clothing for the needy in Peru's frigid highlands.

___

Baca turns her attentions to the political stage 
as head of Peru's youngest ministry.

"It is still a ministry in diapers," awaiting 
shape and vision, said Santiago Alfaro, a Catholic University sociologist.

Baca is in charge not just of Peru's cultural and 
archaeological riches but also of promoting 
"interculturalism," a vaguely-defined, politically charged mandate.

While Humala won office by promising to end the 
monopoly of Peru's European-descended elite on 
economic and social power, it remains to be seen 
how his center-left government will reconcile 
with indigenous groups' anger at environmental 
contamination from mining and oil and gas exploration.

Baca's most urgent priorities, for now, include 
ending the looting of and encroachment on Peru's 
archaeological sites and recuperating a thousand 
volumes recently stolen from the National Library.

Given the job's demands, some have wondered 
whether Baca shouldn't cut back on performing. 
Second Vice President Omar Chehade even suggested 
Baca stop touring altogether. When she took the 
job, Baca said, it was with the understanding 
that she would be able to honor her concert commitments.

Nonetheless, she canceled three dates in 
California last month when Congress convened the 
Cabinet. but she's going ahead with five European concerts beginning Sept. 15.

"It's really difficult for me to put singing 
aside," Baca said when asked about the issue.

Another musical great-turned-politician, Gilberto 
Gil, didn't stop performing when he was named 
Brazil's culture minister in 2003, a job he held for five years.

Baca said she's ready for the similar challenges 
of balancing her lifelong love with her new responsibilities.

"I don't know if I could live without singing," 
Baca said. "It's like food for me."

Bajak on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fbajak

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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