The Archive in Chorrillos

In a house in Chorrillos — the Lima district facing directly south to the Humboldt Current, where the Pacific is closest to the cliff — Susana Baca has been building an archive for the better part of thirty years. The Instituto Negrocontinuo is not a museum. It does not have a ticketing desk or a standard programme for visiting groups. It is the working collection of a living artist who has spent her professional life doing what Lima's cultural institutions were too slow to do before her: preserving the specific instruments, recordings, oral testimony, and musical practice of Afro-Peruvian culture in a form that could be passed on.

A visit to the Instituto is not a standard element in any Lima itinerary. When the schedule allows — when Susana is in Lima and the Instituto is receiving private visits — we arrange it as one of the most significant encounters the city makes possible. This article explains what that means, and what is there whether or not the encounter happens.

Who Susana Baca Is

The international audience found Susana Baca through a compilation — David Byrne's The Soul of Black Peru, released in 1995, which introduced Afro-Peruvian music to listeners who had never heard the cajón, the landó, or the call-and-response structure of festejo as it had been sung in Lima's coastal districts for three centuries. The song that defined her position on that album — María Landó — became the document most associated with the global discovery of Afro-Peruvian music. It had existed, known within the tradition, for decades before anyone recorded it.

What the international profile does not fully convey is the institutional weight of what Susana Baca represents within Peru. She is a Grammy Award winner. She served as Minister of Culture of Peru in 2011 — the first Afro-Peruvian woman to hold a cabinet position in the country's history. And she founded the Instituto Negrocontinuo not as a career project but as a corrective: because the archive of Afro-Peruvian music was disappearing, because the oral transmission of the tradition was being broken by urbanisation and cultural marginalisation, and because someone who understood what was being lost needed to do the work of keeping it.

She has been doing it since the 1990s, in her home, in Chorrillos.

The Instituto as Archive

The Instituto Negrocontinuo holds what a museum cannot: the living residue of a working practice. The instruments are not display objects — they are the instruments that have been played, that show their use in their surfaces. The recordings are not the curated selections of a sound archive; they are the documentation of field recordings made across coastal communities, across decades, of singers and musicians who were the last in their lines and who recorded what they knew before the knowledge died with them. The photographs are not captioned as history; they are the personal record of a life spent in the tradition — images of performances, of community gatherings, of the faces of musicians whose names appear in the archive and nowhere else.

The negrocontinuo of the Instituto's name is a reference to the rhythmic structure that underlies Afro-Peruvian music — the basso continuo, the unbroken rhythmic thread beneath the improvisation, the foundation that holds when everything else changes. It is also a statement of intention: this is what continues, what the Instituto exists to ensure does not stop.

For visitors with a background in ethnomusicology, oral history, or the music of the African diaspora, the Instituto is a research resource as much as a cultural encounter. The archive contains recordings that are not available in any other format, documentation of musical traditions that no academic institution in Lima has systematically preserved, and the personal research notes of someone who has been asking the right questions in the right communities for three decades. This is what the Instituto offers before any conversation with the person who built it.

The Encounter

When Susana Baca is in Lima and the Instituto is receiving visitors — which is not always, and which we confirm before any commitment is made to our guests — the visit becomes something different from an archive tour.

The difference is not what it sounds like. This is not a celebrity encounter in the sense of a meet-and-greet arranged for photographs and five minutes of surface conversation. What our guests encounter, when the conditions align, is a musician and cultural researcher who has spent her life thinking about the specific questions the Instituto raises — what it means to preserve a tradition that the dominant culture tried to erase, what the relationship is between the diaspora music of the Americas and its West African sources, what is lost when the last person who knows a specific rhythm stops singing it.

The conversations that happen in that room are determined entirely by what our guests bring to them. A musicologist comes with different questions than a novelist, who comes with different questions than someone who simply heard María Landó for the first time on the flight and wants to understand what they heard. All of these conversations are possible. None of them are scripted.

What Kada Arranges

We arrange the visit to the Instituto Negrocontinuo in two forms, depending on what is available.

The first — and what we commit to in every itinerary — is a private visit to the archive itself, with a researcher affiliated with the Instituto who works with us as a permanent collaborator and who can provide the contextual framing that makes the archive legible: the oral history behind specific recordings, the geographic origins of the instruments, the specific communities and individuals whose contributions are documented in the collection.

The second — subject to Susana's schedule and availability, confirmed only when we have direct confirmation from the Instituto — is a visit at which she is present. We communicate this distinction clearly when we are designing the itinerary: our guests know in advance whether the encounter is confirmed or contingent. When it is confirmed, it requires minimum four weeks' advance arrangement and is among the most carefully coordinated visits we offer. We do not promise what we cannot guarantee.

For guests who have also arranged the private jarana in Barranco, we position the Instituto visit afterward rather than before — the evening of Afro-Peruvian music heard in a courtyard is different when it follows a morning spent understanding the archive that sustains it.

Expert Insight

"Every time I arrange a visit to the Instituto — with or without Susana — my guests come away changed by the archive rather than by the encounter. The room does it. The recordings do it. The photograph of a singer from Chincha in 1962 whose name you will never know but whose voice you've just heard on a tape that exists nowhere else — that does something to you that no concert hall can. What the Instituto holds is the before. And once you've heard the before, the music that comes after it sounds completely different."

— Katherine Cjuiro, Founder & Travel Director, KADA Travel

A Practical Note

Chorrillos is twenty-five minutes south of Miraflores by taxi — the same district as the fishing dock at dawn, on the southern coast where the Humboldt Current brings the cold Pacific in closest to the city. The Instituto is in a residential neighbourhood, in a house. Arriving by taxi, walking a block, entering through a gate: this is the correct preparation for a visit that is not a museum.

We arrange the visit on mornings — typically midweek, when the Instituto is in its working rhythm rather than its social one. For guests whose Lima stay includes the Chorrillos fishing dock at dawn as part of the Markets at Six morning, combining Chorrillos morning (4:15 AM dock visit, Surquillo market, 10 AM cevichería) with the Instituto in the afternoon of the same day produces a coherent journey through the same district: the fishing economy that shaped the neighbourhood, the musical tradition that the neighbourhood produced.