Founded by two sisters then in their late 40s, the Hummingbirds had been writing songs for decades, and our first challenge was to pare that catalog down to roughly a dozen pieces that we would have time to record. Notably, pumpin was also a prominent genre in the testimonial song movement, and I hoped to learn from the Hummingbirds some of the reasons for that prominence.īundled against the chill mountain air, we began our evening together huddled around my microphone and a bare light bulb in their neighbor’s small adobe home.

The Hummingbirds were one of several dozen groups in the region who specialized in a carnival genre known as pumpin, played on 12-string guitars and sung in Quechua in the high, strident vocal style typical of much highland Andean indigenous music. In February of 2001, I visited Fajardo’s provincial capital to record the “Hummingbirds of Huancapi,” a group renowned for “saying it in songs” with a ribald sense of humor and oft-fierce political commentary. A Fajardino songwriter and schoolteacher named Adriancha Quispe, who fled the outbreak of violence as a young man, put it to me like this: “People in rural areas could not speak out. Indeed, people often seemed more willing to sing about the conflict than they were to talk about it. Nearly every group that I recorded had composed songs about the conflict, both during and after the years of violence, and many of these canciones testimoniales (“testimonial songs”) revealed a great deal about local experiences and attitudes toward the war. Over the course of the next two years, I recorded hundreds of songs in villages through the central Fajardo Province, in contexts that ranged from private recording sessions in musician’s homes to large, open-air competitions held annually during the carnival season for hundreds of spectators. What, I wondered, did other carnival songs have to say about the more recent conflict? And what might they tell us about music’s capacity for remembering and working through traumatic pasts? Upon my arrival to Peru, in January of 2000, while reviewing field recordings archived at the Ethnomusicology Institute in Lima, I stumbled across a recording of “ Señor Cáceres,” a carnival song recorded in the mid-1990s that told of local involvement in the War of the Pacific more than a century before. I already had some sense of the ways that music in this region might be used as a vehicle to remember the violent past. I had arrived to investigate the role that music had played in this conflict and its aftermath, and my choice to work in Fajardo was based in part on its location at the very heart of the war zone. I began field research in the Fajardo Province of Ayacucho, just across the Pampas River from Accomarca, fifteen years after the Accomarca massacre, and a little more than seven years after the capture of the Shining Path leadership that marked the transition to an uneasy peace. As the violence dragged on and new atrocities demanded public notice, the events and mass graves in Accomarca quietly receded from national attention-literally and figuratively buried again, where they would remain for nearly two decades.

Despite extensive evidence to the contrary, subsequent investigations by the Peruvian Congress and the military absolved the soldiers of all responsibility. Seven witnesses were also hunted down and killed the following week, presumably to prevent them from testifying about what they had seen.

Dozens of those killed were children or elderly, and eyewitness accounts held that many female victims were raped prior to being shot and their bodies incinerated. Even in the context of the ongoing war, this was an especially brutal massacre. On August 14, 1985, in the midst of a bloody and protracted conflict between Maoist Shining Path guerrillas and the Peruvian state, an army patrol entered the town of Accomarca and killed 62 residents suspected of collaborating with the insurgents.

Remembrance songs