Three-time Latin Grammy winner and ethnomusicologist Susana Baca: 'My music belongs to a movement for human rights.'
My music belongs to a movement for human rights.“What have Afro-Peruvians done on this land? Fought in wars and died for our independence. I wanted to know why this happened,” she says. To do this, she became a student of African studies, learning about African enslavement in Spain, Portugal, and then Latin America. “People like me were enslaved because others felt superior. That has made me so strong and has given me a passion to learn and study,” she continues.
Through música criolla, an Afro-Peruvian genre that includes components of waltz, pregón, festejo, marinera, tondero, and landó, Baca has spent her career reviving a musical style originated by enslaved Africans who were brought to Peru by Spanish settlers during the 16th century. Enslaved people were banned from performing their own music, so they got innovative and made musical instruments from old packing crates that could be disguised as seats.
Finding success in the music industry through folk genres and pro-Black lyrics wasn’t easy. Baca, who has been making music since the 1980s, remembers promoting her shows herself during her early years because the . “I had to create an audience for myself outside of the country,” Baca says. And she did. In 2001, she received a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Tropical Latin Album for her album. That’s when her country started to finally pay attention to the genius in their own backyard. “They almost fell back. They didn’t know one of their own citizens would win a Grammy,” Baca, who is writing an autobiography, says.
Baca describes her sound on the project as"a hug," filled with lots of love, and sometimes a “grito,” made of fury. There are songs like “Cambalache,” which critiques Peru’s current political climate and the politicians who have thrive off corruption. There are poems like Alejandro Romualdo’s “Color de rosa,” a plea to not paint the country “color de rosa” but rather the color of fury, anger, and hope, because that’s how he feels about his homeland.
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