ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the historiography of hybridity in performance using a case study of the Tunantada Fiesta, a so-called mestizo patron-saint fiesta in Yauyos, Jauja, in the Peruvian central Andes. As a hybrid performance form, the Andean patron-saint fiesta poses many challenges to how mestizo (mixed) and Indigenous identities are performed and constructed across time. By focusing on sacred and secular forms of ritual seen in this celebration, the chapter argues that engaging the mestizo space of the fiesta reveals multiple interacting epistemologies. This follows Stephanie Nohelani Teves’s call to consider indigeneity as a performative process that challenges logics and views of Indigenous “authenticity”: both indigeneity and hybridity are partially connected performative processes that invite us to utilise an Indigenous Studies critique of the fiesta, and thus not mark hybridity as a sign of “inauthenticity.” The Andean patron-saint fiesta connects interacting epistemologies and racial and ethnic categorisations in the national context of colonial legacies, leftist ideologies, migration, and class, shaping the way that identities are performed in the annual fiesta itself. Additionally, recent contributions by queer men and transwomen add queerness as an additional epistemological layer complicating hybridity.