Sustaining Indigenous Sounds

Abstract

What now might now be dubbed “cultural sustainability” has long been part and parcel of university life throughout Latin America where such institutions have been pivotal in preserving and shaping peripheral or threatened musical traditions. This chapter describes the work of a Peruvian organization called the Centro de Capacitación Campesino (Center for Peasant Training), which was instrumental in the musical life of rural-indigenous communities around the Andean city of Ayacucho in two distinct moments: first in the 1980s when the CCC was founded at Ayacucho's national university amid the Shining Path's war against the Peruvian state; the second moment came after 2000 when community-based Radio Quispillaccta made old CCC recordings the centerpiece of its broadcasts and a symbol of indigenous ecological rationality.