Barranco is the heart of bohemian culture in Lima and was a beach town in the 1800s. Early artists claimed Barranco as a place of creativity. Here is a list of the early artists who pioneered bohemian creativity in Barranco.
I live in Barranco, the romantic and beating heart of Lima. When you next visit, walk from the main plaza towards the famous Puente de Los Suspiros, and you’ll pass the Municipal buildings where you’ll see a display of photographs of old Barranco – the beach, funicular, old tram car – next to which are photographs of five artists – writers, poets, singers – who have contributed to Barranco’s literary reputation.
It is not difficult to see why Barranco provided the right environment for such creativity. In spite of the invasion and destruction by Chile in the late 19th Century, Barranco – founded as a village beach resort in 1874 – soon established itself as a tranquil setting blessed by grand, if faded buildings, access to the sea, and parks and gardens where it was possible to meet and to discuss the avant-garde, modernism, and more importantly, what role art and literature had to play in the relatively young Peru.
Look across the main square and you’ll see the grand Biblioteca, a symbol of Barranco’s important literary heritage. Barranco has also been the home of some of Peru’s greatest contemporary artists: Mario Vargas Llosa, the photographer Mario Testino, and sculptor Victor Delphin all made their home here. And I live in an apartment designed and built by the renowned architect Jose Garcia Bryce. But let’s stay with the past and focus upon those five historical artists who have contributed so much to Bohemian Barranco.
Abraham Valdelomar (1888-1919)
Abraham Valdelomar was born in Pisco and went to school in Chincha and Lima. In 1905 he studied briefly at the University Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, but his heart – and his interests – lay elsewhere. He left his studies and started work as a cartoonist for the magazines Applause and Whistles, Cinema, and Gil Blas, where he soon became the artistic director. In 1916 he founded the influential magazine El Colonida, establishing himself as a gifted and multifaceted artist, a pre-avantgarde poet, refined chronicler, essayist, frustrated playwright, and, above all, versatile storyteller. Many consider him as one of the founders of contemporary Peruvian literature. His aim was always to be new, challenge the old, and present a vision of life in all its extremes, tragedy, on the one hand, harmony of family life on the other. He soon developed into a gifted commentator on Peruvian life, drawing upon his army service and later as Second Secretary of the National Delegation to Italy where he wrote a series of articles, ‘Chronicles of Rome’. On his return from Europe, he led a group of young writers, using El Colinada, to showcase works he felt were consistent with the literary tastes of the new generation he represented.
He was no ivory tower writer though, traveling across Peru to understand the country better and giving talks on aesthetics, patriotism, and other social issues, heightened by the country’s experiences of the Spanish flu pandemic. It is also worth remembering that Peru was a relatively young country at this time, and Valdelomar, like many writers, recognized the role literature plays in shaping a nation’s identity. In 1919, he also found time to be elected to the Ica regional council often traveling to Ayacucho, headquarters of the Central Regional Congress. It was on one such journey on November 1st, 1919 that he was involved in a fatal accident.
He left behind an important body of work. The Children of the Sun (Inca tales), a set of stories was written in 1910 and published in Lima in 1921, and the Heroic Triptych, published the same year, a book of patriotic poems dedicated to school children, which was published posthumously. These books, and works scattered across numerous periodicals, have been compiled several times, the last a two-volume edition titled Works and published in Lima in 1988.
Jose Maria Eguren (1874-1942)
Along with Cesar Vallejo, Eguren is probably the most prominent figure in 20th-century Peruvian poetry. He was born in Lima on July 7, 1874, and at the age of six, after the Chilean army occupied Lima, his parents took him to live on the Chuquitanta ranch on the outskirts of the capital, where his father was an administrator. This closeness to nature became a key element in his conception of art and literature, the solitude of the natural environment, impressing upon him the importance of visual learning.
Painting and photography became the major media through which he would represent what he saw, though he also wrote poetry. He first exhibited an oil painting in the ‘National Exhibition of 1892’ in Lima. In 1897 he experienced a major turning point in his life. His parents died, and aged just 23, he moved to Barranco to live with his sisters, Susana and Angélica. He never married and lived a solitary life until his death in 1942.
Though introspective by nature, his work gradually gained recognition. In 1919, Don Teófilo said of the poet-painter: ‘His Lima landscapes are so authentically Lima, that they are unique, as no one has ever seen them. I think that no painter, whether national or foreign, has managed to give the pictorial note of the sky of Lima and its countryside with greater accuracy and justness than Eguren’. He also became known for his miniature photographs, some five hundred of which are preserved in the National Library of Peru.
Manuel Beingolea Balarezo (1881-1953)
Our third artist is Manuel Beingolea Balarezo who was born in Lima in 1881, the son of a General. On the death of his father, he had to leave his studies and find work as a clerk in the Artillery Regiment at the Santa Catalina barracks. In 1901 he began to find his feet as a teacher and writer, becoming Professor of Spanish Grammar, Geography, History of Peru, and French at the International Lyceum founded by German Leguia y Martinez. It reminds us too that Barranco was also home to a number of Europeans at this time, for example, the German Domeyer – who built the funicular – and the Englishman Mathisen who gave land to build the Malecon.
After a brief sojourn in Buenos Aires, Balarezo returned to Peru where he actively collaborated in various magazines such as Balnearios, Mundo Limeño, Turismo, Panoramas, as well as in newspapers such as El Tiempo and El Comercio. In El Tiempo, he wrote two columns on local current affairs, entitled Street Psychology and Merchants and Swordsmen, social satires that bring to mind some of the writing of Vargas Llosa. He also held a number of important public positions such as Secretary of the Prefecture of Tacna; professor at the National School of Tarapoto; Secretary of the District Council of San José de Surco (1910-30); and Head of the Library of the Senate (1930-40). In 1947 he was honored as a man of letters by the Lima Writers and Artists Association on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday.
Notable Works include, Bajo las Lilas (1923), a short novel set in Barranco and Cuentos Preteritos (1933), a collection of stories that unfold in different environments.
Ramon Rafael de la Benavides or Martín Adnan (1908-1985)
At 16 years old and in his last year of school, Ramon Rafael began to write what would be his greatest work, La Casa de Cardboard, published in 1928. Later he contributed to the Amauta magazine and was part of the group of the same name led by Jose Carlos Mariategui. He also received his doctorate in Letters from the University of San Marcos.
He was a member of the Peruvian Academy of Languages and won the National Poetry Prize in both 1946 and 1961. In 1976 he was awarded the National Literature Prize. As time passed, he lived in increasing financial straits, suffering from severe alcoholism. A good part of his last years was spent in sanatoriums, until his death in 1985. Allen Ginsburg was interested in his work and met with Adnan in Peru during a visit to learn more about ayahuasca.
It is also known that for some years he worked in the legal section of Banco Agrícola. And that he was commissioned by the Central Library of the University of San Marcos, to begin the development of the ambitious Critical-Bibliographical Dictionary of the Literature of Peru. Critics agree that his first work, The Cardboard House (1928), is truly avant-garde. His next two publications were poetic works: The Spinel Rose and Crossing the Seas, the latter a brilliant series of sonnets dedicated to Chopin. These reveal him moving away from his initial avant-garde interests and finding the depths of his voice in an unusual mixture of traditional elements (baroque, and mysticism) and contemporary (rhythmic-semantic dissonances), influenced by Yeats and Pound, and his readings of the new German philosophers.
The rest of his work is made up of his poetry. They exhibit a great depth of feeling and philosophical reflections on the mysteries of the eternal and the transcendent expressed through a succession of images and metaphors. The rose always stands out. Like the other artists discussed here, the tensión between reality and identity, and the desire to créate new forms of expresión. Watching the sun sink down over the sea from the Malecon, it is easy to appreciate the larger questions in life.
Adán wrote great poem, Escrito a Ciegas, which foreshadows his illness and untimely death. It begins like this:
Do you want to know about my life?
I only know my step,
my weight,
my sadness and my shoe.
Why do you ask who I am?
Where I go? Because you know a lot
about the Poet, the hard
and sensitive volume of my human being
that is a body and vocation,
however.
If I was born, I don’t remember the year.
The one I remember
why I live, why I kill myself …
María Isabel Granda Larco (1920 – 1983)
Our final artist is María Isabel Granda Larco, better known as Chabuca Granda, a Peruvian singer, and composer. She created and interpreted a vast number of Criollo waltzes with Afro-Peruvian rhythms. Her best-known song is ‘La Flor de la Canela’ or the ‘The Cinnamon Flower’.
She was born in September 1920, in a copper mining area in the region of Apurímac. At 12 years of age, she discovered her voice in the school choir at the exclusive girls’ school Colegio Sophianum, in San Isidro, a prosperous suburb of Lima. She began singing as a soprano, but after an operation, her voice became much deeper. She also gained notoriety after her divorce, an event that shocked her more conservative Catholic neighbors. Early in her career, her work was expressive and picturesque – evoking the romantic and beautiful Barranco which she grew to love. Some of her most famous songs from this period include Lima de Veras, La Flor de la Canela, Gracia, and Zeñó Manué. She broke the conventional rhythmic structure of the waltz, and later defied convention with her poetic cadences as well. In the latter part of her career, she wrote songs dedicated to the Chilean Violeta Parra or Cardo o Ceniza, and to Javier Heraud, a Peruvian poet and guerrilla, who was killed by the Peruvian army in 1963. Towards the end of her life, she incorporated Afro-Peruvian rhythms into her work. Afro-Peruvian music, while popular, was not considered ‘high art’ due to the prevalent racism and devaluation of Afro-Peruvian culture. She masterfully blended the suggestive and colorful rhythms into her work, and in so doing, enriching Peruvian popular music.
She died of heart problems in the United States in 1983. Her legacy is her voice and her compositions known far from the borders of Peru, her popularity giving the world a fine example of the sensitive, multicultural character of Peruvian music. Her song La Flor de la Canela has become an anthem for the city of Lima since it was made popular by the Peruvian group Los Chamas in 1952.
Their legacy
So, five artists have contributed to Bohemian Barranco. The term, bohemian was originally a pejorative one given to the Roma gypsies in Bohemia, central Europe. Today the term has a more positive interpretation. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition talks of an artist, literary person, or actor, a man or woman, who leads a free, vagabond, or irregular life, someone slightly detached from society, an individual giving priority to their creative work rather than social convention.
And I would add, custodians of what it means to be alive, to be forever seeking something just out of reach. Like the sun that sinks down over the horizon.
