ABSTRACT
Lima is divided by intricate categorisations of class, race and ethnicity. The urban white upper classes have historically topped Lima’s socio-ethnic hierarchy and kept to their own. Contemporary studies on this stratum are scarce, but mostly describe them as racist, distant, without a culture of their own, hostile towards marginal communities and largely responsible for the conditions leading to Peru’s internal war (1980–2000).
In the aftermath of this conflict, and in an attempt to approach previously rejected individuals, Limeño upper-class musicians fused foreign genres and music associated with the marginal classes. The resulting fusions enabled a segment of the young white upper-class audiences – ‘the alternatives’ – to reshape their music taste, enhance their experience of the city and imagine and construct new citizenships.
Based on ethnographic case studies, this chapter focuses on experiences by ‘the alternatives’ of musical subversions of class identity through participation in the fusion scene. The chapter examines how their embodiment of marginality and rapprochement with previously rejected genres, performed by intercultural and interracial bands, is interpreted as an opportunity to construct a different upper-class citizenship with access to cultural and political participation beyond music contexts in a ‘more real’ and plural Lima.
