Excited to share this review of Soy Andina in the latest edition of Visual Studies, an international journal published 3 times a year for the International Visual Sociology Association.
Thanks to author M. Gabriela Torres (Wheaton College), editor Darren Newbury (Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham City University) and Routledge publishers for giving me permission to reprint this article here.
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REVIEW OF SOY ANDINA
Reviewed by M. Gabriela Torres, Wheaton College, MA
© 2009 M. Gabriela Torres
Visual Studies, Volume 24, Issue 3 Dec. 2009, pgs 276 - 278
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Soy Andina is a joyous film that seeks the essence of
diasporic Andean identity through the linked lives of
Fulbright scholar and professional dancer Cynthia
Paniagua and folklore instructor Nélida Silva.
It meanders widely, from an intense dance competition
in Peru’s Piura region that features a combination of
Iberian dance forms with African rhythms (Tondero), to
a giddy first dance lesson for United States-born
Peruvian children in Queens, New York.
The narrative journey is unexpectedly non-linear as the
Andean women featured in the film travel repeatedly
from the United States to Peru. They move from
folkloric dance halls in Queens, New York to the small-
town Andean fiesta and Afro-Peruvian dance halls in
Lima and other locations on the Peruvian coast. The
fractured narrative used in Soy Andina to highlight and
reframe Paniagua and Silva’s life stories gives viewers
insight into the ways that diasporic identities are
continuously managed and sustained as immigrant
families and their offspring are settled and unsettled in
their host/home countries.
Soy Andina describes in rich detail the unanticipated
impact that the back-and-forth movement of today’s
migrants has on individual and communal identities in
both the United States and Peru. Nélida Silva, a
diasporic Llamellín community member with
permanent residency in New York, is captured
unwittingly reshaping indigenous practices through her
sponsorship of a local patron saint fiesta. As a non-
resident sponsor of the fiesta with a United States source
of income, who travels to Llamellín for the fiesta itself,
she assumes a position of great local power and prestige
while conducting the associated responsibilities of feast
sponsorship from afar.
Cynthia Paniagua, a New York native of Puerto Rican
and Peruvian origins, seeks to understand her ethnic
origins by travelling to Peru. Prior to her return, she has
idealised her maternal Peruvian roots into a hybrid that
harmoniously combines coastal, Andean, urban and
rural cultural practices. She moves to Peru seeking this
untenable Peru. Yet her inability to find the Peru she
envisioned is not the greatest difficulty of Paniagua’s
journey as Peruvians also initially fail to recognise Ms
Paniagua herself as one of their own. She likens the
feeling of being an outsider in Peru to her inability to feel
like she has a perfect fit in her birthplace, New York City.
Seeking to understand how a person can feel alienated in
their ‘homeland,’ Ms. Paniagua turns to Ms Silva, an
indigenous Peruvian, for support. In a poignant
moment, Ms Silva explains that being an ‘immigrant in
her own country’ has come to be emblematic of
indigeneity in Peru.
The film’s strength is its focus on the difficulties of living
and expressing hybrid constructions of identity.
Structurally, the film mimics this hybridity in multiple
crossings in and out of Peruvian locations, rituals, music
and dance. It focuses on learning the performance of
different forms of culturally syncretic Peruvian dances
(Marinera, Huaynos, Festejo and Tondero), and seems
to suggest that learning dance as a cultural practice can
enable a reframing of the dancer’s own individual
identity.
For Paniagua, swaying her skirts to Huaynos in
Puno alongside a parade of the top indigenous dancers
from across the country seems to give her a connection
to pre-Columbian highland roots evidenced in the high-
pitched vocal accompaniment of the charango rhythm.
This experience is markedly different from the dance
instructors of the coast who seek to teach Paniagua not
just specific steps but the poise, attitude and heart that
the dancer must embody as she gazes into her partner’s
eyes while expertly commanding the attention of the
audience.
As the film progresses it is evident that
Paniagua’s conception of herself and Peru is changed
through her increasing knowledge of Peru’s diverse
pre-Hispanic, colonial and syncretic dance traditions.
Soy Andina goes further by relocating Andean dances
through the spaces that are actively inhabited today by
those who self-identify as Andinos in the United States.
Faced with the extension of Peruvian traditions today
and in the past, Soy Andina challenges viewers to rethink
the meaning and vitality of being Andean.
For the film, Andean essence is found in the impromptu
modern dance performance of an immigrant offspring
(Paniagua) in New York City as much as it is found in
the annual fiesta Huaynos in the small Andean town of
Llamellín, Ancash. Visually, the film supports the
multiple beginnings of ethnic subjectification as it moves
from the texture of a narrow market space lined with
bags of various sauces, containers of colourful spices and
stacks of plastic chairs, toys and bins, to the intimate
sexual play seemingly evident in a Tondero dancer’s face.
The film’s images work in a constant back-and-forth to
strike at both the roots and the changing practices of
today’s Andean cultural traditions – from hints of
ancient fiesta rituals represented by the blood that spills
from the animals slain for a ceremonial Andean meal
(comunmicuy), to the eerie breath of pan pipes played in
a New York subway station as a modern dancer sways to
their rhythm.
Soy Andina is an accessible film that allows for complex
and multiple understandings of what it means to be
Andean and Latino in the United States today. Using
dance as an entryway into the practice of culture, it
highlights the agency that individuals have in establishing
and reframing their understandings of the self.
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