UCR Department of Music
Wednesday@Noon via Zoom 
 
Jonathan Ritter 
Associate Professor, UCR Department of Music 

Indigenous Cosmopolitans and the Tourist Encounter: 
Taquile’s Fiesta de Santiago as Contact Zone
            
February 17, 2021
Wednesday, 12:00-12:50 P.M. PST  
Zoom
Free and open to the public

Please register in advance for this event: 
https://ucr.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcuf-6oqzspE9Ut5KnEUJOHn7T7xcgHuDPW ;
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For more than forty years, tourists have travelled en masse to Taquile Island in the Peruvian waters of Lake Titicaca, with the goal of experiencing local indigenous life among some of the “last Incas.” While critiques of similar model villages, heritage sites, and the accompanying exploitation of indigenous peoples suffuse the robust literature on cultural tourism, Taquile’s model of grassroots control over the local tourist industry—assisted by the natural borders of the island itself and determined community leaders—have made it a celebrated, if regularly challenged, outlier in this narrative. In this talk, I focus on the Fiesta de Santiago, the island’s patron saint festival and now also a two-week arts and crafts fair, as a dynamic, autoethnographic text: a changing story expressed in music, dance, textiles, speech, food, and even modes of communal organization, that Taquileños tell to themselves and to the world about who they are as an indigenous community in the 21st century.

Information:  
performingarts@ucr.edu  music.ucr.edu
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View the 2020-2021 Wednesday@Noon series here