Performing in the Chinese New Year (CNY) celebrations of Lima, Peru is painful. The frenzied crowds push against us, and elderly women aggressively grab, and even rip at my clothing. After two years of fieldwork as a Chinese lion dancer, I have experienced firsthand the excitable atmospheres of this event, and the fervent crowd behaviors that accompany them. This paper is an examination of the atmospheres created by Peruvians around the CNY season in Lima, Peru—a perplexing fieldsite that despite having the most Chinese people in Latin America, has CNY events attended mostly by non-Chinese Peruvians.

Based on participant observation and atmosphere theory from Benjamin Anderson (2014) and Kathleen Stewart (2011), I theorize the performance of Chinese lion dance as a space around which a carnivalesque, mobile atmosphere forms. Like a planet with satellites in orbit, our traveling troupe has an atmosphere that moves (literally on wheels) and gravitates audiences towards and to move with it. However, because Peruvians invent traditions (Hobsbawm 2014), I argue that that atmosphere is effectively orientalist. As these atmospheres become more exaggerated, the barrio chino acts as a sort of amplifier whose orientalized facade fuels the audience’s fervor and emplaces lion dance into its musical topophilia (Bolderman 2020). Examining this phenomenon I ask: What kind of atmospheres does orientalism make possible, and how does performance intensify that desire? In doing so, I contribute to studies on Chinese diasporas in Latin America as well as affect and atmosphere theory in ethnomusicology.