Peruvian singer Susana Baca poses for a portrait at her home in the southern city of Santa Bárbara.Sebastián Castañeda
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With her short, slightly gray hair and sweet eyes that pop out of her dark complexion, Susana Baca (Lima, 78 years old) talks about her childhood, her career, her social commitment and what it means to be black in Peru be. a country where, as he says, “racism is a disease”.
– A few years ago — she says — I arrived at a diplomat’s house with Ricardo (her husband) and a friend. At first they wouldn’t let me through. Even though I was the guest…
When she was eight years old and studying at a school in Chorrillos, the district of Lima where she lived, a dance teacher came to organize a ballet company. Since she had danced and sung since she was a child – and her classmates and teachers knew it – she was sure she would be chosen. But it was not like that. “They chose the whitest girls, not the black ones and the Andean ones,” she recalls.
On that day, he tells in his book, I came to sacrifice my heart. Memoir: “I hated my colour, I doubted myself.” Shortly before, another episode also tagged his identity with pain. Some ladies came to their school to invite the children to a new milk with sweets. She and another compañera, “the others,” were put at the end of the line and got less.
“I discovered the taste of distinction with the sweet and delicious condensed milk. It was at that moment that I became aware of my color,” he writes. Later, already in high school, some teachers from the National Conservatory of Music came to select girls with musical ability and give them scholarships. The students in her class chose her themselves. And the conservatory teacher applauded her. You never called her. I was 13 years old and again I felt segregation.
“All of this strengthened me,” explains Baca, who has given more than 600 concerts in different countries around the world to date and is currently touring through Europe. It started on April 15th in Lanzarote (Canary Islands, Spain) and will travel through France, Spain, UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Italy and Switzerland to arrive at the Arniche Theater in Alicante on May 27th , Spain, to end .
He has won three Latin Grammys in 2002, 2011 and 2020. He has also received numerous awards, such as the Order of the Sun of Peru, the Order of Arts and Literature of the French Republic, an honorary doctorate in Latin Music from Berklee University (Boston, USA) and the “Candle of Hope” award from Amnesty International .
The three Grammy Awards won by Susana Baca, exhibited at her home in Santa Bárbara.Sebastián Castañeda
Susana Baca was born in her home in an alleyway in Lince, a suburb of Lima. Since the colony, poor people have generally lived in the streets of Peru; among them the slaves, when they had already gained their freedom, or were even still dependent on a master. Some had a single pipe (faucet) from which water came for the houses and where people would gather to do laundry, fill their buckets, discuss and most importantly sing and dance. Much of Peru’s black music was born there.
Living in one of them was like a second family to her. It meant self-protection, closeness. Because the alleys worked almost like a palenque (place where runaway slaves fled). And most importantly, they were cultural centers where endless merrymaking was organized. When she was Minister of Culture (2011), she tried to have her recognized as such, but was unsuccessful. However, he continued to visit her.
The Cultivation of Blackness
Baca, like much of Afro-Peruvian, cultivates “blackness,” which in his words “is a way of being, of feeling the history we’ve lived through; is to recognize our contribution. We weren’t just slaves. We were part of this nation, we fought for its independence,” he says. Blackness is actually an intellectual, political and literary movement that arose in Paris in the 1930s when the poets Aimé Césaire (Martinique), Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) and Léon-Gontran Damas (French Guiana) founded the magazine L’ Etudiant created Noir (The Black Student) to promote black awareness of their identity, their history.
She accepted it and included being a teacher in her life plan. He studied education at the Enrique Guzmán y Valle University, located about 30 kilometers east of Lima, where he got to know almost every ethnic group in this country. After graduating, she worked as an elementary school teacher in places where black populations were virtually absent.
He taught for a time in the city of Ochonga, which is more than 3,000 meters above sea level in the country’s central sierra, where he had to go with his asthma on his back and where they sang in Quechua, not Spanish. He appealed to singing to teach it and absorbed the Andean tradition that he carries in his heart, especially when his little disciples sang to him the Black Song of the Soul.
Susana Baca, in her home in Santa Bárbara.Sebastián Castañeda
It was a job she missed for the rest of her life, although by that point she was already a well-known singer. In the mountains, she experienced somewhat strange episodes for her too, like the habit of paying a black man to carry a child and remove the evil eye. All this helped him to get closer to diversity. “It makes me happy to hear all the voices from my country,” he says.
Susana Baca had a hard time being who she is. Scorn and no one he had to overcome, not only in childhood; even as she – against wind, tide and social storms – persisted in being an artist, singing and dancing. Once, in 1985, she was stranded with her musicians in Berlin after a lack of coordination following a festival she attended in the Soviet Union.
He spent days full of fear and narrowness, but he never gave up his artistic vocation, which gives him identity, social commitment and political word. Recently, after the wave of repression by Dina Boluarte’s government, which left almost 50 dead, he published a video criticizing the president, parliamentarians and violent demonstrators. At one point it says that they want to “impose a foreign state on a people that demands a different kind of justice and life”.
Baca has shown her warm voice in prestigious auditoriums in different countries and has also done so in humble neighborhoods such as a human settlement in San Juan de Lurigancho, the largest district in Lima and Peru. It was intended to support the people’s kitchens, the neighborhood committees that cook pots together. “There was no sound technology, no tabladillo. Just one speaker. But I still made my presentation with a lot of love,” he says. In February 2021, together with Wendy Sulca and Marié, two other Peruvian artists, she launched the song Mujer Montaña to support the campaign Vivir sin miedo, which aims to combat gender-based violence.
While he cooks and listens to the sound of the waves in his home in Santa Bárbara, about 110 kilometers south of Lima, a place where slaves once lived, he conjures up concerts and unforgettable experiences. Like when she was performing in Nigeria and there was a crowd waiting for her at the door of the concert hall singing toromata, a famous black Peruvian folk song.
“I was in tears,” he explains. On another occasion, they gave her the lyrics of La Veguera, a song that says: “Bold but more beautiful than a spring day”. As she sang it, she said, “Pretty as a spring morning,” without the “but.” Because in her eyes this is everyone’s country, the country where she was born in an alleyway. And there isn’t one, but it’s worth not wanting.