UCSC To Host International Conference On Quechua Expressive Art

Conference Features Presentations By World’s Leading Scholars As Well As Public Performances

SANTA CRUZ, CA–Leading scholars in Andean Quechuan studies from around the world will convene at the University of California, Santa Cruz, September 4-6 for the conference, The Quechua Expressive Art: Creativity, Analysis, and Performance. The conference features lectures, symposia, and performances. All events take place in the campus’s Music Center, Room 131, and are free and open to the public.

The Quechua (pronounced ket-shwa), who inhabit the Andean regions of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and northwest Argentina, are the largest Native American culture in the Western Hemisphere, with an estimated population of between 10 and 13 million people. The UCSC conference will look at historical and contemporary Quechua musical and verbal artistic forms in song, dance, poetry, narrative, folktale, myth, and riddle from both scholarly and performance perspectives.

Performances, panel sessions, and round-table discussions feature 25 eminent scholars from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Germany, the Netherlands, Peru, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. These experts will offer scholarly and performance- oriented presentations on Quechua folkloristics, ethnomusicology and musical performance, anthropology, linguistics, literature, ethnohistory, and cultural studies.

Conference organizers are John Schechter, UCSC associate professor of music, and Guillermo Delgado, UCSC lecturer in Latin American and Latino studies. Delgado is a member of The Indigenous Research Center of the Americas, a universitywide program studying indigenous issues from transnational perspectives. Schechter is founder and director of UCSC’s Latin American Ensembles. Now in their 11th year, the performance groups focus on Quechua- and Spanish-language traditional musics of South America. Both scholars have published widely on Quechua cultural expressions, in the areas of exegesis, translation, ethnomusicology, cultural and linguistic anthropology, historical linguistics, and cultural studies.

Quechua Expressive Art is supported by the UC Humanities Research Institute, the UCSC Divisions of Arts and Social Sciences, the Music Department, and the Chicano/Latino Research Center. A complete conference schedule is attached. For more information, call (408) 459-2019 or 459-3449.