This paper examines the role of magic in shaping gendered trajectories within the Huanchaco festival in Baños del Inca (Cajamarca), celebrated in honor of the Virgin of the Nativity (Cánepa Koch 1993, Martínez & Rodríguez 2014)). The ritual performance is organized around distinct dance groups: the chunchos (adult male dancers associated with Amazonian inhabitants), the pallas (young, unmarried women representing Inca maidens), and the incaicos, who are often schoolboys (Reichlen 1953). Although publicly framed as Catholic, the festival incorporates indigenous conceptions of magical efficacy.

Drawing on repeated field visits conducted over three consecutive years, I analyze how male dancers account for their withdrawal from performance. While pallas cease dancing upon marriage in accordance with norms of female chastity, and incaicos withdraw as the boys reach adulthood, chunchos often explain their discontinuation to having been harmed through magic. This belief also motivates protective practices undertaken privately by dancers and musicians in preparation for the festival or during the making of instruments.

I argue that magic operates as a discursive framework that externalizes masculine decline. Rather than interpreting bodily limitation as personal failure or social regulation, male withdrawal is attributed to occult aggression. Ritual masculinity is thus symbolically preserved even as participation becomes precarious.

The pollera has historically been a gendered, racialized clothing object in the Peruvian context. In its various situated designs, it has been associated with low-class, primarily rural, indigenous women, establishing a distinction between elite and grassroots women, and embroidering considerations of class, race/culture, and territory. Indeed, “pollera” could be understood as a “metonimic object” that names otherness derogatorily. Nevertheless, during Milena Warthon’s (MW) concerts, we can observe many girls wearing this traditional garment and singing her songs. MW is a singer who performs a genre that she calls the New Andean Pop. During her performances (in concerts, music videos, and social media), she wears polleras and sings about the struggles of the women and girls who wear them. I argue, echoing Silvia Citro’s understanding of performance, that MW’s performances are the convergence of poietic artistic objects that articulate social critiques with political goals. This happens through (sonic) political interruptions (Rancière) that invite her audience to hear an alternative discourse and therefore relate to the social life of this object in a different affective way, generating new aural affective commonalities (Ochoa-Gautier). If we consider the pollera as an object that represents an instituted hierarchy, MW’s performance uses the pollera as an instituting object. In other words, if the hierarchized pollera represents “politics,” the pollera that this artist wields expresses “the political. This ethnography aims to contribute to discussions concerning the intersections between aesthetics and politics as a means of creating alternative spaces for the political and the decolonization of feelings.

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.