She was a pioneer when it came to spreading Latin American culture around the world from the late 1940s – she laid the first stone.”Īfter divorcing Vivanco, making a rock album in 1971, becoming a favourite of San Francisco’s gay community and slipping into semi-retirement in the 1980s and 1990s, Sumac died of cancer in Los Angeles 2008. “Yma always had that little battle with Peru and she wasn’t honoured by the country until 2006 – even though she’d helped mythologise Peru. “A lot of those people came from very conservative folk schools and didn’t understand that you could create a hybrid that would transcend all that,” says Nuñez del Prado.
However, as Nuñez del Prado points out, while Sumac and Vivanco found fame exporting their vision of Peru to the world, their work was not always well received in some intellectual circles back home, where it was considered a vulgar pastiche of Peru’s rich indigenous culture. She and Vivanco toured the world in the 1950s and 1960s, and Sumac appeared in the 1954 film Secret of the Incas, in which Charlton Heston plays a roguish treasure-seeker who wears a brown leather jacket and a fedora hat. They also gave rise to the urban myth that she was actually a woman from Brooklyn called Amy Camus who had simply reversed the letters of her name. Sumac’s extraordinary voice, striking looks and carefully packaged heritage – she claimed to be a descendant of Atahualpa, the Inca emperor garrotted by Pizarro and his conquistadores in 1533 – propelled her to international fame. Together with her husband, agent and composer, Moisés Vivanco, she became one of the biggest names in the gaudy, dramatic and lushly other genre known as Exotica, which blossomed in the 1950s. Born Zoila Emperatriz Chávarri Castillo in Peru in 1922, Sumac took her stage name from the Quechua words for “how beautiful”.
0 kommentar(er)
