Acclaimed Afro-Peruvian singer unearths a hidden history

[Judi Lynn]

Acclaimed Afro-Peruvian singer unearths a hidden history
Latin Grammy winner Susana Baca is building a center dedicated to Peru's African heritage. In combing the coast, she found songs rooted in the days of slavery, possibly saving them from extinction and bringing vindication to the present generation.

By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

July 11, 2011
Reporting from Santa Barbara, Peru— In this village that still bears the name of the old Santa Barbara sugar plantation, Susana Baca is trudging through a field of sweet potatoes. Not 48 hours earlier, the internationally acclaimed diva of Afro-Peruvian music returned from Paris, the last stop in her latest world tour.

But on this day, she is visiting her mother's tumbledown hometown, a neglected part of Peru that is the cradle of its multiethnic history, where the descendants of black slaves and Chinese and Japanese field hands have lived together for generations, intermarried and even now continue to work the land.

"We are all equal here," says one of Baca's old friends, Carlos Franco Aguilar, a caramel-colored man with almond eyes whose Chinese grandfathers felt compelled to change their last names (Lao became Franco, Lin Aguilar), and whose mother is part-black.

"All equal," he says with a laugh. "Equally poor."

More:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afro-peruvian-20110711,0,4190982.story

Susana Baca - De Los Amores
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXo4AfC8HFY

Susana Baca - Maria Lando
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1orreicjE8

[flamingdem]

1. This is really interesting, Baca is great nt