ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the city of Lima, Peru, to map out the cultural ascendency of a faded advertising genre locally known as grafica popular, or the Chicha aesthetic, into a mainstream advertising aesthetic. Frank Jump (2012, p. 20), suggested that fading advertisements-ghost signs as they are otherwise known-“are and will always be a metaphor for survival, echoing the struggle of the producers and consumers in an ever-changing global economy … [and] the resiliency of commercialism and the art driven by it.” As we will come to see, Chicha, as a promotional aesthetic, first emerged and, subsequently, re-emerges during times of crisis as a manifestation of a particular struggle to progress. Chicha posters, banners, and sign boards are ubiquitous in Lima’s conos-also referred to in varying contexts as pueblos jóvenes (young towns) or barriadas (shanty towns); that is, peripheral neighbourhoods of the rural-urban migrant popular classes. These promotional signs have typically been placed prominently on walls or hung precariously between buildings along main transport routes or in hubs of informal commerce (as has been typical of ghost signs written about in other parts of the world, for example, Roberts and Groes 2007, Jump 2012, Stage 1989, 2013). They are visually arresting: either drawn by hand and lowcost screen-printed, or painted by hand, and characterised by the use of fluorescent lettering against a dark background. First developed to promote local Chicha music concerts and festivals, the aesthetic has increasingly been appropriated and used to advertise anything from local eateries to beauty salons. The signs might be described as ghosts, not in the sense that they are hidden and vanishing as historical residues of advertising messages, but rather because they were, for a long time, invisible to the dominant traditional Limeñan culture. In this chapter, we contribute to an emerging body of both academic scholarship and online archival activity, which aims to shed light on the economic and socio-cultural context within which ghost signs have emerged.1 In the case of Chicha, we also account for its survival, revival, and more recent incorporation as an aesthetic of mainstream advertising.
