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As a researcher, Dr. Valderrama has placed a new emphasis on the plight of indigenous peoples; as mayor of Cusco, he led the reaction to The Covid-19, who killed him.
By Mitra Taj
This obituary is part of a series about other people who died in the coronavirus pandemic. Learn more about others here.
Before being mayor of Cusco and its surroundings, a region of more than 1. 2 million people in Peru and the historical capital of the Inca Empire, Ricardo Valderrama had spent 4 decades reading indigenous life in the Peruvian Andes.
He recorded love songs in ancient villages and described bandits in the highlands. He has written dozens of books and articles on everything from peasant uprisings to the collective trauma of colonization.
But it is his first ebook – published in 1977 and written, like almost all his work, with his wife, the anthropologist Carmen Escalante – that has become an instant harvest of Andean literature.
“Gregorio Condori Mamani: An Autobiography”, published in seven editions and translated into at least nine languages, tells the story of a Quechua-speaking employee with whom Mr. Valderrama had befriended Cusco. I followed him from his reports as an orphan forced to the Andes through his remains as a soldier, prisoner, pastor and factory employee. A shorter segment tells the story of his wife, some other highland migrant who lived with him in a cabin on the outskirts of Cusco.
The e-book is a vital step in Peruvian anthropology, said César Aguilar, anthropologist at the Peruvian National University of San Marcos in Lima, as it broke with the emphasis on other indigenous people as a means of understanding the emergence of Inca civilization. Valderrama and Ms. Escalante, on the other hand, saw them on their own terms in the present, offering rare and first-hand stories rich in culture and ancient main points of others at the back of Andean society.
“We tried to draw attention to Aboriginal cultures that had become devalued and become vulnerable in cities,” Escalante said in a telephone interview. “But the magnitude of the suffering and wealth of his reports were astonishing. “
Mr. Valderrama learned and told vital stories of the Andes in his educational career, during which he experimented with film and photography. He turned to politics in 2006, when he arrived at city hall to publicize culture and the arts, Escalante said.
Mr Valderrama died on August 30 at a hospital in Cusco. He 75. Escalante said the Covid-19 cause, which had the greatest in the Andes of southern Peru.
With his wife, Mr. Valderrama is survived by 3 children, Gonzalo, Julian and Carmen Valderrama; grandchildren.
He had only been mayor since December; his predecessor had been suspended for fraud and Mr. Valderrama was online to succeed him. He spent most of his time in force directing the province’s reaction to the new coronavirus, visiting markets to put social estating measures into force, and overseeing the distribution of systems to help poor residents.
He replaced through a 25-year-old former councillor, Romi Infantas.
Mr. Valderrama was born on April 3, 1945 in the Cusqueña region of Bonifacia Fernández and Roberto Valderrama. Su father worked as a hydroelectric technician and then as a bank teller. Both parents were native Quechua speakers.
Raised in a middle-class family, Mr. Valderrama earned a bachelor’s degree from the National University of San Antonio Abad in Cusco in 1976 and an instructor there in 1990. He learned Quechua from his grandmother, Ms. Escalante said, and continued to speak it more than her 8 siblings.
Mr. Valderrama began dating Ms. Escalante, an acquaintance of years of st. Jerome’s training, while studying at the university; He courted her with books through feminist writers. They have helped a generation of young academics in anthropology redirect the field’s attention to the urgent problems facing millions of Aboriginal people, Aguilar said.
“They learned that other indigenous people were not just subjects of study; those were other people who were struggling,” he says. “They treated them equally, and this gave very valuable testimonies to the social sciences. “
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