What’s new in South America? Blackface is okay in Peru

Peruvian media have revived the debate regarding Negro Mama, a popular character of the prime time TV show El Especial del Humor. The show, aired on one of the country’s main TV channels, Frecuencia Latina, features actor Jose Benavides in blackface, wearing a prosthetic nose and lips as well as black, hairy gloves on his hands. […]

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Music Break / Calle 13

Puerto Rican band Calle 13 got their Peruvian fans talking today when they released the video for ‘Latinoamérica’ (which they partly recorded in Peru). And not just because it has their new (and first black) Minister of Culture Susana Baca in it.

Vargas Llosa in Congo

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Not sure whether Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa’s new novel, El Sueño del Celta (The Dream of the Celt), has been published in English yet — so I might be spoiling it for some future interested readers if it hasn’t — but halfway through the story about the Irish diplomat-turned-nationalist Roger Casement, I already regretted […]

These People Have Been Contacted

Sentinelese After the 2004 Tsunami

Wired.com, which usually knows better, has a photo gallery on its site that “takes you on a tour” of “the last uncontacted people.”  What drove them to publish the images are “the release … last week of a tribe in southwest Brazil.” And because publishing images of people who didn’t necessarily permit their bodies and […]

Music Break

A really nice new video from the Afro-Peruvian roots-electronic crew out of Lima. Not too many people in the U.S. (or on the African continent) are aware of the existence of the African descended cultures on the Pacific coasts of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, even if there’s a community in the neighborhood. So I was […]

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