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YouTube Kitsch and the Racial Politics of Taste in the Andes: The Case of Delfín Quishpe

Abstract: This article looks at “Torres gemelas”, a YouTube video by Ecuadorian indigenous musician

Delfín Quishpe, which went viral in the late 2000s, reaching millions of views. I argue that this video, and

associated phenomenon, can be considered a paradigmatic example of how some contemporary

indigenous creators are radically redefining their relationship with globalised and localised cultures in a

context of unprecedented technological change and time-space compression. By refusing to cleave to

expectations about Amerindian media production as political and collective or as an expression of

ancestral and traditional indigeneity, these Andean creators are challenging established views regarding

how they should participate in modernity and the digital world. At the same time, white audiences’

consumption of Delfín’s video (and similar media products) as kitsch (or “bad”) also points towards the

ways in which racism acts in the definition of indigenous cultural production – particularly when there is

a deliberate discrepancy with mainstream society’s expectations about Amerindianness. Rather than

arguing against the kitsch nature of “Torres gemelas”, and comparable media production, the article

proposes to critically appropriate the term in order to address how these new cultural products are

subject to symbolic violence, and yet at the same time have the potential to articulate anti-racist

strategies.

In the second half of the 2000s, three indigenous musicians – Delfín Quishpe from Ecuador,

and Wendy Sulca and La Tigresa del Oriente from Peru – went from complete obscurity to

transnational stardom in the most unexpected and rapid of fashions. Their sudden fame was

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propelled by music clips published on YouTube, a platform that, at the time, and despite its

newness, was quickly altering the landscape of pop culture and the music industry in Latin

America, as with the rest of the world. The videos “Torres gemelas” by Delfín and “Nuevo

amanecer” by La Tigresa, both published on YouTube in 2006, and “La tetita” by Wendy,

published in 2008, quickly went viral and by the end of the decade had gained more than ten

million views each – a significant number, given the rate of Internet penetration in Latin

American at that time. Delfín, Wendy and La Tigresa not only became Latin America’s first

“YouTube stars”, but also achieved a level of fame that few Andean indigenous musicians had

reached at that point. In the Spanish-speaking world, their videos were widely watched, shared

and commented on by users. The phenomenon quickly caught the attention of the traditional

media in multiple countries, and stories about the artists’ rise to fame and invitations to radio

and television shows followed. Yet, what made their cases so newsworthy was the fact that

their sudden shift from complete anonymity to international stardom via YouTube was not in

any way linked to the quality, originality or high production values of the music clips, the songs

or the performances. On the contrary, it was the result of the performers’ alleged absolute lack

of talent. In other words, millions were viewing and sharing Delfín’s, Wendy’s and La Tigresa’s

clips because they thought they were bad. In fact, they thought they were very bad.

The viral circulation of their videos and unexpected stardom of the three artists were

mainly framed as another example of the enduring appeal of kitsch, now heightened by the

possibilities opened up by Web 2.0 and convergence culture.1 Indeed, most users’ comments

focused on the poor quality of the songs, the singing, and the production values of the clips. Of

course, the case of these three artists is by no means exceptional. There are, in fact, countless

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examples of Internet sensations that have based their appeal on their apparent kitsch nature. 2

However, in this paper, I aim to show that what makes the cases of Delfín, Wendy and La

Tigresa different from other viral kitsch videos is the fact that they are embedded in specific

dynamics and discourses in Andean countries that have systematically constructed popular

culture by people of indigenous descent as debased and degraded – particularly since the huge

waves of migration to the cities radically transformed the way culture is produced, circulated

and consumed in these societies. Yet, crucially, while the type of kitsch embodied by Delfín,

Wendy and La Tigresa relates to this regime of racialisation and stigmatisation of urban culture

by Andean people, it features at the same time new characteristics that have been shaped by

the impact of accelerated globalisation and technological change since the beginning of the

new century.

Rather than arguing against the categorisation of these indigenous new media production as

kitsch (or “bad taste”), this article proposes to critically appropriate the term in order to assess

the particularities of these cultural products that, as explained, can be read as participating in

the history of Andean cultural hybridisations yet also show particular traits that result from the

rearticulation of indigenous people’s relationship with the global culture. The organisation of

the text is as follows: the first section will provide a short accout of Delfín’s “Torres gemelas”,

which has been chosen as a case study. The second section will be more theoretical in outlook

and propose the concept of “neo-Andean kitsch” as an concept particularly suited to assess the

rupture brought about by this type of indigenous cultural production that deliberately

embraces the language of US American and global popular cultures to the detriment of

traditional indigenous discourses and aesthetics. This is because, as will be shown, the term

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kitsch has traditionally conveyed the tensions between traditional and modern, yet it has also

experienced new meanings in late capitalism/postmodernity.3 Furthermore, and contrary to

concepts like transculturation and heterogeneity, it also points, like hybridity (as formulated by

Néstor García Canclini), to the centrality of market positions in the dynamics and interplay

between social sectors and cultural products, given its close associations with the rise of

capitalism and consumer society. However, kitsch also reproduces symbolic violence, given that

it implies differential power relations in which some social sectors define the notions of good

taste for an entire society. This constant reminder of social difference makes “neo-Andean

kitsch” a category particularly appropriate for studying issues such as indigenous struggle and

oppression outside mainstream understandings of political action. Such examination would

encompass discourses and practices that, though rejecting the language of political activism,

can counter established structures of racism.

The discussion will return to Delfín in the final part of this article, in which the theoretical

model proposed in the previous section will be put in practice. The analysis of Delfín’s clip as

“neo-Andean kitsch” will show how his video allows the articulation of a counter-discourse that

challenges established expectations about indigenous cultural production – thus, allowing a

degree of aesthetic democratisation – while at the same time experiencing diverse forms of

symbolic violence that act as a reminder of the intrinsically conflictive nature of Latin American

cultural realms.

“Torres gemelas”

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Delfín is a Kichwa musician from Chimborazo, the Ecuadorean province with the greatest

indigenous population. He describes his music style as “tecno folklor andino”, a mixture –

which, he claims, he created – of electronic instrumentation with sounds, rhythms and

harmonies characteristic of sanjuanito, a musical genre from Imbabura that has pre-Columbian

roots and is particularly popular among the indigenous and mestizo people of Ecuador.4 He

sings both in Spanish and Kichwa. Until the success of the “Torres gemelas” music video, Delfín

was a little-known name in the popular music circles of the central Ecuadorian Andes. As

mentioned, everything changed dramatically once his video clip, uploaded to YouTube in

December 2006 by an anonymous user, became an Internet sensation. I will proceed to

describe the video, though it is strongly recommended that the reader watches it for

her/himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NecoBo0BhEk

The video starts with Delfín, wearing an ordinary polo shirt and trousers, sitting on the

couch of what appears to be a working-class living room. A simple electronic beat can be heard

in the background. As he turns the television on, a non-diegetic computerised voice resembling

a news presenter explains: “el martes once de septiembre del 2001, siendo las ocho y cuarenta

y seis de la mañana, Estados Unidos sufrió la mayor ofensiva de su historia que terminó con la

destrucción de las Torres Gemelas en Nueva York”. Delfín reacts to the news with a scream:

“¡No puede ser! ¡Noooo!”. He stands up, makes a phone call that no one answers, and returns

to the couch, where he crosses himself. The body language and facial expressions are supposed

to signify shock and sorrow, but they could also be described, from a technical point of view, as

clumsy and exaggerated acting. As Delfín makes the sign of the Holy Cross, the beat is replaced

with the actual song, which is based on the repetition of a simple pentatonic melody typical of

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sanjuanito played with synthesisers – some resembling Andean pan flutes – over electronic

beats. There is an abrupt cut and the living room scene gives way to a succession of footage of

the terrorist attack: the towers on fire and eventually collapsing, the United Airlines Flight 175

crashing into the South Tower, people in the streets crying as they stare at the buildings in

flames or escaping the falling debris, and aerial views of the New York City skyline before the

attack. The images seem to be captured from the Internet and put together in seemingly

random order. They are also superimposed with images of Delfín singing to the camera and

dressed in a flamboyant white outfit loosely resembling cowboy clothing, with his name

inscribed on it. There is a clear disparity between the juxtaposition of Delfín in the foreground,

and images of the 9/11 events in the background, as can be seen in the following Figures 1 and

2, which contributes to the impression of either deliberate or accidental poor and careless

editing.

Figures 1 and 2: The juxtaposition of Delfín and the World Trade Center. Source: YouTube.

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Roughly speaking, the song’s lyrics tell the story, in the first person, of a man whose

girlfriend worked in the World Trade Center. The narrator arrives in New York City to meet her,

but the couple never get the chance to reunite since she perishes in the attack. Yet, just before

dying, she manages to make a phone call to her boyfriend from the towers to say a last,

emotional goodbye. Though the music is cheerful, the story is full of melodramatic overtones,

something that is emphasised by Delfín’s continuous histrionic screams (“¡Dios mío, ayúdame!”

and “¡No puede ser!”), which could be seen as hyperbolic and artificial. The lyrics, most of the

time, do not rhyme and seem improvised. Furthermore, they include some grammatical

oddities. Examples of the latter are: “Un mal recuerdo, yo la viví” (with the pronoun “la” lacking

agreement with “mal recuerdo”) and “los terroristas, lo exterminaron” (here the pronoun

should be feminine, as it is referring to the narrator’s girlfriend). These discrepancies are

actually common among Kiwcha speakers who speak Spanish given that, in the former, the

morphology of the pronouns indicates a number but not gender. An additional reason for these

oddities could be the fact that Kiwcha, contrary to Spanish, is an inflected language. Yet, for the

listener not aware of this, these grammatical discrepancies can be confounding, adding to the

general impression that the video and the song are poorly made.

In the last parts of “Torres gemelas”, the fictional love story is abruptly left aside. Delfín, at

times referring to him in the third person, proceeds to dedicate the song to his “friends” in the

United States and those Ecuadorians killed in the terrorist attack. There is also a shift at a visual

level, as the images of 9/11 and New York City are now intertwined with those of the

Ecuadorian countryside, chagra peasants and Delfín on horseback carrying an Ecuadorian flag,

and Delfín again standing under a larger Ecuadorian flag.5 The repetitive melodic pattern that

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up to that point characterised the song (there is no verse/chorus structure or modulations) is

combined with the motif of Ennio Morricone’s main theme to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western

classic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The video and song ends with Delfín addressing

the (male) spectator directly (“Desde Ecuador, con mucho amor, ¡escúchelo compadre!”) and

bidding him goodbye with an informal “Nos vemos, ¡chao!” – all of which contrasts with the

melodramatic tone of the song’s lyrics.

By February 2007, the video had reached one million views and thousands of comments, as

well as numerous entries in blogs across Latin America. Users were sharing the video and

creating mashups and memes. Covers of the song in different styles (folk, heavy metal, techno)

were also uploaded to YouTube by self-proclaimed fans. Delfín was hired to play at the parties

and festivals of the upper-class youth of Santiago de Chile, Quito and Buenos Aires, invited to

local and national radio and television talk-shows in many Latin American countries, and even

discussed by the “serious” press. There were claims that the song might be the most

internationally famous song composed and performed by an Ecuadorian. Delfín became the

face of Aceite Sabrosón, a low-priced Ecuadorian vegetable oil. His fame also crossed the

Atlantic: in 2012 he headlined the Madrid edition of YouFest, the self-proclaimed “festival of

the YouTube generation”. At the time in which this article is written (June 2019), the video has

achieved 17,727,748 views and almost 41,000 comments; 76,000 users dislike the video

compared to 54,000 who like it. A very similar pattern can be found in the coming of fame of

Wendy and La Tigresa (which, for reasons of space, cannot be described in depth in this article).

In fact, they were united in a 2010 video entitled “En tus tierras bailaré”, which was also a

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YouTube sensation, though a less unexpected one, in the sense that the song and the clip were

created by three advertising executives.

Now that the case study has been presented, the discussion will move on to developing the

concept of “neo-Andean kitsch” in order to explain its suitability to the analysis of Delfín’s case

and other associated phenomenon.

From Kitsch to “Neo-Andean Kitsch”

Either as a noun or an adjective, kitsch is common in many European languages, often used

to designate cultural products of numerous types considered as being in poor taste without

intending to be so. In other words, kitsch entails an inadequacy or discrepancy between these

artefacts’ formal characteristics and the cultural content or purpose behind their creation.

There is agreement that the term first appeared in Munich’s art market in the 1860s and 1870s

to refer to cheaply mass-produced images.6 The etymology of the word, nonetheless, is

indeterminate. A possible origin could be the German verb verkitschen, meaning “sell off

cheaply” in the Mecklenburg dialect.7 Ludwig Giesz claims that it is derived from the word

kitschen, which was used in southwestern Germany to describe the collection of rubbish from

the street.8 Theodor Adorno, Norbert Elias and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, among others, subscribe

to the proposition that the word stems from the German mispronunciation of the English

“sketch”.9 US American and British tourists in Munich, allegedly, used that word to request

cheap, speedily produced renderings of stereotypical Bavarian landscapes and themes, which

they bought as souvenirs. Less plausible theories argue that the term kitsch could be an

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inversion of the French chic or is derived from the Russian word kičitʹsja, translated as “to

boast”.10 Despite the discrepancies regarding the origin of the word, most scholars on kitsch

tend to concur on three essential matters. The first is that, since its inception, kitsch has

conveyed distinctively pejorative meanings linked to imitation, forgery and deception. Since

these are not fundamental qualities (the fake cannot be such without an original), it is possible

to deduce that kitsch’s existence would be dependent on something that can be identified as

“good”, “true” or “real” art. The second (related) aspect is that kitsch is supposed to offer

immediate gratification without entailing sublimation or intellectual and interpretative effort –

which would be purportedly required for the appreciation of that “good”, “true” or “real” art.

The final feature on which researchers agree is that kitsch as a notion emerged in response to

the sociocultural transformations brought about by modernity in Western societies – in

particular, the decline of the aristocracy’s power to define the acceptable parameters of taste

along with the emergence of mass society and consumption. Beyond these three basic

characteristics, it is hard to come up with a unified and clear taxonomy of kitsch. As Matei

Calinescu puts it, “determin[ing] whether an object is kitsch always involves considerations of

purpose and context”.11

By the 1920s and 1930s, the term was already well known outside the German-speaking

world, though restricted to elite culture, where it was used to express a bitter contempt

towards various mass-produced goods, which were considered as aberrations of taste. During

these years, it also started to be the object of increasing intellectual scrutiny, mainly by German

authors. For Adorno, kitsch was intimately linked to the commodification of culture in capitalist

society as a technology for the production of false consciousness.12 In that sense, he argued

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that kitsch realises a social function: “to deceive people about their true situation, to

transfigure their existence, to allow intentions that suit some powers or other to appear to

them in a fairy-tale glow”.13 Elias also traced a direct connection between kitsch and the social

tensions existing in industrial society. However, he was less condemnatory in his assessment,

maintaining that, although kitsch contained regressive tendencies, it could potentially have

progressive implications in terms of undermining elitist hierarchies.14 In this sense, his position

was closer to Walter Benjamin’s, who argued about kitsch’s potential to release the affective

energies present in ordinary things to articulate a counter-politics of desire that could challenge

fascism’s political use, at the time, of sentimentalised emotion.15

The influence of Adorno, Elias, Benjamin and other German authors in the establishment of

the foundations of kitsch theory did not parallel that of Clement Greenberg, whose 1939 essay

“Avant-Garde and Kitsch” largely shaped future debates on the politics of taste. Greenberg also

saw kitsch as a social phenomenon intimately related to alienation in capitalist societies.

Nevertheless, there was a crucial difference between his position and that of Adorno: for

Greenberg, kitsch is not imposed on but actively demanded by the proletariat, since they have

cut their ties with the folk culture of their rural ancestors – which they see as strange and

uninteresting – yet are also unable to appreciate authentic art. This, Greenberg claims, explains

the working class’s turn to kitsch objects as a way to satisfy its appetite for cultural

consumption.16

Greenberg’s impact in the creation of a conceptual apparatus for the academic study of

kitsch can only be compared to that of Hermann Broch, whose approach favoured an ethical-

aesthetic philosophical framework rather than a sociological one. For Broch, kitsch cannot be

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considered inferior or bad art; rather, it is a system that is separate from the art world yet

linked to it via imitation. Moreover, kitsch operates according to a different logic: whereas the

system of art is structured around the search for ways of expressing goodness and the infinite,

kitsch is concerned only with beauty, but understood in a sentimentalised and complacent

manner. This makes kitsch highly seductive. Indeed, because it only presents a saccharine

version of reality, in which everything is beautiful (in a shallow and frivolous way), kitsch allows

evading the unpleasant and problematic dimensions of life.17 However, for Broch, the problems

with kitsch go beyond escapism and neurosis and have moral implications. In fact, he defines it

as “ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil”.18

Greenberg’s and Broch’s early interpretations, strongly shaped by modernist conventions,

the colossal expansion of US American mass culture and the experience of Nazism (which

forced Broch into exile in the United States), contributed to defining kitsch primarily as an

entity that parasitically feeds off established cultural traditions and past art, offering a promise

of genuine aesthetic experience that, though enormously attractive, is inevitably false. Their

assessment of Nazi Germany’s uses of mass culture and aestheticised emotion and its hostility

towards avant-gardism convinced them of kitsch’s significance for the consolidation of

authoritarianism. They also shared the belief that kitsch would continue to expand to the point

of colonising and destroying not only real art but also all other forms of cultural expression in

the world.19

The socio-political, economic, cultural and technological transformations that led, in the

1970s and 1980s, to the the consolidation of postmodernism as a dominant epistemological

and aesthetic paradigm, as part of the transition to a new stage of capitalistic accumulation,

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seemed to suggest that – despite the elitist and alarmist overtones – there was an element of

truth behind Greenberg’s and Broch’s prediction. For Fredric Jameson, “postmodernisms have,

in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole ‘degraded’ landscape of schlock and kitsch”. 20

Indeed, kitsch seems to share far too many traits with postmodernity: the imitative nature, the

disregard for modernist values like simplicity, novelty and authenticity, the intimate relation

with mass culture, the persistent return to the past (understood in the postmodern framework

as “citation”). This new phase in kitsch’s life cycle brought with it an exponential escalation in

the use of the term, which was previously circumscribed to the work of philosophers and art

critics. Despite voices claiming that, in contemporary times, “it seems pointless, if not

impossible to maintain the concept of kitsch” or that “the term kitsch, rife with parvenu

Victorian arrogance, has largely disappeared from the vocabulary of serious contemporary

cultural analysis”, kitsch is now widely present in everyday language, to the point that its

meaning is often taken for granted.21 However, as Ruth Holliday and Tracey Potts convincingly

argue, this self-evidence of kitsch conceals the fact that there is no kitsch as such, but only

“activated kitsch”.22 In other words, rather than an essence to be recognised, kitsch should be

understood as a capital that can be mobilised by those who have the power over judgements of

taste. Because one of the key characteristics of kitsch is its lack of intentionality – which, as will

be explained later, distinguishes it from camp –, the act of defining something as kitsch implies

an external form of symbolic violence over the creators and consumers of that particular object

– violence that is usually class-based. Therefore, kitsch works to assert the authority of the

elites and other social arbiters of taste over those who enjoy a particular kitsch object.

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Kitsch’s trajectory in Latin America follows some of the patterns seen in Euro-America, yet

it also includes some particularities that are important to consider. In the region, kitsch found

expression through the Spanish cursi but, more often, in a variety of local terms, such as naco

(Mexico), pavoso (Venezuela), cafona or brega (Brazil), grasa (Argentina), picúo (Cuba and

Puerto Rico), and huachafo (Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia). Lidia Santos – following Gillo Dorfles and

Ludwig Giesz – points out that there is a fundamental semantic difference between such words

and kitsch. Although they indicate poor taste, they are usually not related to the aesthetic

deficiency of an object but instead are associated with improper, pretentious or ostentatious

habits or actions.23 Thus, in the case of Latin American societies it is possible to see a clear

priority of the social dimension over aesthetic considerations, given that human qualities and

experience tend to be the main parameter to define tackiness.24

Although it is not as common as huachafo (the primary term to describe vulgar and

pretentious attitudes), the word cholo is often used by white middle- and upper-class groups in

Andean countries to refer to unrefined behaviour and taste. This term has a long history in the

Andean region, and also beyond, as since colonial times it was employed to refer to urban

mestizos and Amerindians in a derogatory manner. In fact, the Diccionario de Americanismos

compiled by the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua defines cholo as both “indígena, que ha

adoptado usos y costumbres urbanos y occidentales (desp)” and “mestizo de sangre europea e

indígena”.25 Despite its linguistic reclamation by subaltern sectors in the twentieth century for

the purposes of political empowerment, or its occasional usage in daily interaction as a term of

endearment, particularly in the diminutive form (and not only among cholos), it can still carry a

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pejorative meaning. Illustrative of this is the derivative verb cholear, which designates the act of

insulting or treating someone with disdain.26

The fact that in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia cholo is also used in everyday discourse as an

adjective that describes inappropriate manners and taste offers an interesting perspective on

the particularities of Andean kitsch. The Diccionario de Americanismos describes these

alternative employments of cholo in the following ways: “Referido a persona, tosca, de escasa

cultura … Referido a cosa, de mal gusto”.27 These two modalities of the word would suggest, in

principle, its dissociation from its traditional connections with Andean indigeneity, given that

the definitions allude, respectively, to “persona” and “cosa”, without any references to race as

in the other acceptations. However, if the social history of the usage of cholo as kitsch is traced,

it is possible to see that it is actually the opposite: contrary to other meanings, cholo tackiness

is a modern phenomenon, linked to the massive waves of migration from the rural highlands to

the large urban centres – particularly, Lima and Quito – in the second half of the twentieth

century.28 It is as a result of the impact of this migration in the social configuration of these

cities, and the perceived threat that the indigenous popular subject represented to the

hegemony of the white urban middle and upper classes – which historically controlled these

urban spaces – that cholo assumed this additional signification in the vocabulary of these social

sectors. Thus, cholo tackiness is not so much associated with traditional Andean habits and

patterns (which are conventionally seen by the elites as folklore), but with the mixture of the

latter with the modern elements that indigenous migrants encountered in their new setting.

Consequently, the identification of cholo with kitsch emphasises the apparent failure of Andean

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people, due to their lack of education and capacity, to adapt to and imitate the aesthetic

conventions and expectations of Occidental modernity shared by the white urban bourgeois.

The previous discussion demonstrates that, in the case of cholo (but also in the case of

longo, which is used in Ecuador in a similar way), the focus of disapproval does not solely

emphasise the social over the aesthetic, as in the case of kitsch’s other substitute terms. Cholo

also indicates the presence of race as a further mediation in Andean kitsch, as this unacceptable

behaviour becomes identified with that of a person with indigenous ancestry. And although

cholo can be applied to white people as well, the disapprobation emerges precisely because of

the perception that their comportment does not correspond with the protocols specific to their

social and racial condition, but to that of an Andean person, leading to a momentary racial

othering (acholarse) that needs to be quickly rectified to avoid stigmatisation. What emerges

from this discussion is that in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, there cannot be kitsch without race –

and racism. In this sense, Andean kitsch can be understood as intrinsically linked to the race-

mediated collision between indigenous migrants and white urban sectors, as part of a process

of differentiated modernisation where culture becomes a battlefield with specific

characteristics that are absent from European debates on taste.

As Jesús Martín Barbero and Carlos Scolari point out, contrary to the United States and

Western Europe, in which “popular” and “mass” culture are considered the same, “mass

culture” in Latin America relates to the cultural industry – as conceptualised by the Frankfurt

School – while “popular culture” – or, more appropriately, “popular cultures” – refers instead to

the traditional, pre-industrial cultures of the indigenous and mestizo subaltern.29 In Europe, the

cultural homogenisation of national populations was implemented much earlier than in Latin

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America, and through literacy, schooling and the printing press. In Latin American countries, by

contrast, this process developed largely after the 1940s, and mainly via the electronic media. As

William Rowe and Vivian Schelling put it, “[m]odernity arrived with television rather than with

the Enlightenment”.30 Martín Barbero states that, within this process, mass culture should not

be seen as an external entity that has been imposed on the people and effaced folkloric

culture.31 It is, instead, the development of a series of capacities of the popular – which, in

Andean contexts, was significantly shaped by indigenous migration to urban centres.32 The

outcome of the interplay of negotiations, confrontations and hybridisations between social

subjectivities and cultural systems has not been the cultural homogenisation of the population

or the substitution of the traditional by the modern. It is, instead, the coexistence of different

temporalities and cultural systems – which Antonio Cornejo Polar defined, for the case of Peru,

as “cultural heterogeneity”, given that highland migrants position themselves in two

antagonistic poles (that of origin and arrival) without a necessary dialectical resolution to such

tensions, as suggested by the ideology of mestizaje.33

In this particular dynamics, kitsch in the Andean countries could also be conceived as a

mediation in the multitemporal cultural heterogeneity of social formations. In particular, it can

be thought as one that allows the indigenous popular subject to navigate between the

traditional and the modern, and between elite culture, mass culture, and popular culture,

without arriving necessarily at a synthesis.34 This approach allows going beyond views of

popular culture as either the realm of plebeian resistance or the locus of alienation. Instead,

Carlos Monsiváis suggests understanding it as a space in which the hegemon and the subaltern

engage in negotiations, defined by the former’s imposition of what is “acceptable” culture and

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behaviour, but also by the latter’s capacity to appropriate and transform these notions – in

other words, to create and enjoy kitsch.35 Thus, kitschification does not only expose the alleged

deficiency of the masses when dealing with the elites’ conventions of good taste, but also their

creative capacity.

Given its close relation with consumption and commodity, any conceptualisation of the role

of kitsch in the dynamics of Latin American cultural modernity requires focusing on the market,

which encompasses formal and informal economies. In fact, the limits between both structures

can sometimes be difficult to distinguish due to the complex range of mutual dependencies and

cross-fertilisations between them. The informal market constitutes a locus in which rural

migrants and their descendants – who are condemned to a condition of systematic economic

and social precarity – express an alternative modernity within capitalist rationality. As such, it is

a privileged space for the development of popular subjectivities via the consumption and

production of kitsch. It could then be argued, following Santos and Monsiváis, that kitsch fulfils,

in these dynamics, a pedagogic and democratising function.36 This is because, despite its

stigmatisation, kitsch allows the incorporation of aesthetic criteria into everyday life in a

context, like the Latin American, where access to high art and culture for the masses is

restricted and precarious.

This situation has been fed by the impact of digital technology, which since its arrival in the

1990s has progressively lowered the price of music and video production, allowing the

emergence of an informal media economy that has opened up further forms of participation,

boosting the cycles of production, circulation and consumption of Andean kitsch. Digital

technology, and particularly the Web, has also allowed indigenous creators to re-negotiate their

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relationship with globalised popular cultures, enabling rapid access to a range of cultural

production at a scale and speed unparalleled to those of the pre-Internet era.37 Simultaneously,

these novel reterritorialisations of transnational discourses (which create new “glocalities”) are

still decoded in mainstream society as failed attempts to reconcile and negotiate Andean

culture with (post)modernity. “Neo-Andean kitsch” as a category, therefore, addresses both the

ruptures brought about by technological change along with the persistence of the asymmetrical

relations that characterised Andean cultural modernisation in the second half of the twentieth

century. In this sense, it is particularly suited for the analysis of contemporary indigenous

production that, on the one hand, sidelines neo-indigenista expectations that conceive

indigeneity as ancestral, fixed and collective and, on the other hand, refuses the mandate to be

necessarily political. This is because it reveals the possibility of agency and inclusion of

indigenous cultural products without cleaving to expectations that it should be folkloric or

politicised, while reminding us that this is done in unequal power conditions framed by those

who define good taste.

YouTube and Kitsch

The discussion returns to “Torres gemelas” in order to analyse how “neo-Andean kitsch”,

as conceptualised in the previous section, mediates how non-indigenous consumers engage

with the video. As mentioned before, what makes the case of Delfín (but also of Wendy and La

Tigresa) different from other Internet kitsch sensations is that in Andean and, to an extent, Latin

American contexts, these videos are decoded in mainstream society not just as kitsch, but as

20

racialised kitsch. Therefore, the kitsch effect in “Torres gemelas”, for example, is activated not

only by the alleged technical deficiencies of the song or video or the low production costs, but

also by the fact that the creator is indigenous (this effect is enhanced, in the case of Wendy and

La Tigresa, by gender and age expectations). In fact, looking at various comments on YouTube

and the media about “Torres gemelas” indicates that the video was largely read as a failed

imitation of international music and style models due to an alleged indigenous backwardness.

Users’ comments such as “Cuando un indio aprendió a usar un computador?’, “Esto pasa

cuando un indio ve demasiado Justin Bieber!” or “indio verga, ni siquiera puede hablar bien

español, mete puros errores cuando habla” imply the mediation of historical racist tropes that

portray Amerinidans as incapable of modernity in the decoding of “Torres gemelas”. To add to

the alleged kitsch effect, Delfín engages with 9/11, a topic with which, within the framework of

expectations around indigeneity, he should in theory not deal. He does it drawing mainly on an

economy of affect closer to melodrama, illustrated by the choice of a tragic love story that

unfolds in a catastrophic setting, as well as Delfín’s constant screams of sorrow (excessive

sentimentalism has always been seen as a central attribute of kitsch). However, as mentioned,

he combines this with a cheerful melody, techno beats, and Morricone references.

Few things can be seen as more inappropriate as the kitschification of disaster, and many

have interpreted Delfín’s video as a trivialisation of the attacks or, even more, as a mockery. 38

Some comments like “Indio y mierda!! qe tienes en la cabeza .... torpe que no te das cuenta o

no sabes que estas faltando al respeto a esto!!” or “este indio aprovechado de la desgracia que

todos pasamos desagra todo con su presencia” exemplify this. Nonetheless, for the

communities of poor indigenous Ecuadorians from where Delfín originates, the video could be

21

seen as challenging the official memory of 9/11 and allowing for their own ways of conceiving

and memorialising the attack. Around 250,000 people of Ecuadorian origin live within the New

York metropolitan area, making it, after Quito, Guayaquil and Madrid, the largest Ecuadorian

city in the world. Like other Latin American countries, emigration in the case of Ecuador was

accelerated by the impact of neoliberal reforms in the economy during the 1990s and early

2000s. The video could be read as casting light on the many invisibilised Ecuadorian and Latin

American immigrants who died in or were deeply affected by 9/11 but have no place in the

state-sanctioned commemoration of the event prevalent in the United States, which is

articulated around notions of white American nationalism.39

The video is also an intervention in the Ecuadorian national imaginary, in the sense that it is

claiming an alternative modality of Ecuadorianness, one rooted in an indigeneity that has been

traditionally marginalised from dominant narratives of nationhood. During the twentieth

century, as in other Latin American countries, national identity in Ecuador was articulated

around the idea of mestizaje, resulting from the mixture of indigenous and white.40 However,

the notion of homogeneous, undifferentiated citizenship, in which racial differences were

theoretically irrelevant, was also tied to an ideology of blanqueamiento (whitening), according

to which the white element would eventually prevail over the indigenous, leading to the

withering away of Amerindian culture. This idea was summarised in the 1970s in Dictator

Guillermo Rodríguez Lara’s famous claim that “no hay más problema en relación con los

indígenas … Todos nosotros pasamos a ser blancos cuando aceptamos las metas de la cultura

nacional”.41 The exclusivist ideology of mestizaje and the invisibilisation of indigenous people

are challenged in Delfín’s clip, which includes several shots of Delfín with the Ecuadorian flag, as

22

well as statements by the artist that he sings “desde Ecuador” – which highlights his national

origin. Through this, he asserts his claim to participate in the nation as indigenous. It is not a

coincidence that Delfín’s video emerged in the immediate aftermath of the 1998 constitutional

reform that recognised the pluricultural and multiethnic composition of the national body as

well as special rights for indigenous groups – a direction that would be consolidated in the new

constitution of 2008. These changes were mainly the outcome of large-scale protests led by

CONAIE (Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador), the country’s largest

indigenous organisation, which sustained systematic pressure on the Ecuadorian state to

advance reforms on issues like land and territory and cultural, religious, linguistic and political

rights.42 CONAIE’s efforts have included the development of video and film production, as part

of a cultural programme that places media as a strategic sphere. Freya Schiwy explains that the

emphasis on media production is intended “to change power relations and dominant traditions

of representing indigenous cultures [by] largely bypassing the media industry and the sphere of

literacy, long considered the hegemonic form of exerting and contesting power in Latin

America”.43 Thus, the 2000s were a context in which the idea of Ecuador as a mestizo country

was being increasingly questioned, not only by direct political action but also by indigenous

cultural and media production.44

Delfín is not only proposing an alternative memorialisation of 9/11 and Ecuadorian

nationhood: he is also claiming an alternative form of indigenous media expression, one that

refuses the politicisation of Ecuadorian indigenous video production like that by CONAIE, and

also challenges the romanticised view of indigenous people that, as Fiorella Montero-Díaz has

shown, shapes in principle white middle- and upper-class expectations about YouTube music

23

videos by Andean people.45 Instead, Delfín engages in productive and original dialogues with

global and transnational culture via kitsch and digital technology. Through the techno beats, the

melodramatic narrative of the song, the references to Morricone, or his flamboyant clothes, to

name a few examples, Delfín refuses to adhere to a reified folkloric version of indigeneity or

follow the precepts of indigenous filmmaking, sustained on the defence of territory and identity

and the advancement of political rights. In fact, contrary to the preconception of indigenous

videos as a product of the community, here Delfín continually underscores his individual

authorship, by means of extreme close-ups of his face, references to him in the third person

(‘¡Te canta Delfín!’), and the display of a phone number to book him for performances. There

are no direct allusions to ancestral Kichwa cultural traditions. In conclusion, rather than a failed

copy of the aesthetics of the global music industry, what can be seen here is an indigenous

cultural producer who is fully participating in global culture, although in his own terms.

How Delfín negotiates indigeneity can partly explain his appeal among Kichwa communities

in Ecuador and other indigenous audiences in the Andes that have been affected by migration

to the United States. Indeed, Delfín’s references to emigration and his flashy cowboy clothes

can be seen as extravagant appropriations of the aesthetics and themes popularised by Ángel

Guaraca, known as “El indio cantor de América”. Guaraca is a well-known Ecuadorian chichero –

chicha being a term commonly used in Ecuador to refer to a modernised version of sanjuanito

that appeared in the 1980s. However, despite his success among mestizo and indigenous

communities with songs that also address the plight of Ecuadorian migrants, Guaraca never

managed to crossover to other audiences. The question that follows, thus, is what motivates

the hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of non-indigenous people in Latin America who

24

have watched Delfín’s video and ultimately turned him into a star? “Neo-Andean kitsch”, as

explained before, cannot be dissociated from race and, in fact, in many cases, people’s

engagement with Delfín and his music denotes significant racism. Using SentiWordNet – a

software that measures emotion on YouTube by scanning a specific set of adjectives established

by the user – it was found that 68.1 per cent of the (as of 14 July 2018) 38,121 user comments

on “Torres gemelas” included terms that could be considered racist. Another example of how

overt racism shapes mainstream society’s attitudes towards Delfín is a series of interviews he

did for late-night television talk shows in Chile, Peru and Argentina, in which he was

systematically and openly ridiculed and scorned.46 Delfín’s responses would indicate that he

seemed unaware of the mockery, illustrating the argument that one of the conditions of kitsch

is not knowing about its own degraded status. Many Ecuadorian users, in particular, expressed

their consternation at the fact that some people might identify Ecuador with Delfín, claiming,

for example, “Ecuador no es este indio hijueputa, que no se confundan”. Another user

commented, “todos los mejicanos cierren ese ociquitos pendejos que yo de indio no tengo

nada soy blanco entendieron, yo vengo a este video es a limpiar la mierda y la porqueria que

hace Delfín y que por culpa de este hijo de puta la gente de otros paises insultan al ecuador”.

Nevertheless, it would be inaccurate to catalogue all feelings towards Delfín and “Torres

gemelas” as simply displays of plain racism, even if this constitutes an important element that

contributes to its categorisation as a kitsch product in an Andean context. There are many

white middle- and upper-class Latin Americans – and beyond, as the example of Spain shows –

who consider themselves genuine fans of Delfín, post messages of admiration on YouTube,

have spent time creating versions of the video or sharing their own covers of the song, and

25

have paid – sometimes expensively – to see him live. In this case, their behaviour can be

explained by camp. Susan Sontag famously described camp as a sensibility towards the

exaggerated, the artificial and the sentimental.47 Camp sensibility is always playful, a form of

enjoyment, and therefore works as “failed seriousness”. Andrew Ross identifies in camp’s failed

seriousness a crucial difference with kitsch, which is, on the contrary, very serious, in the sense

that it has true artistic pretensions.48 Camp, to put it simply, can be considered the love of

kitsch precisely because of its denigrated condition. To go back to our example, we do not know

Delfín’s motives for sure and, especially, whether he deliberately wanted to attract attention by

creating something that would be perceived as extremely bad. However, the belief that the

tackiness of the clip is involuntary is the key characteristic that attracts viewers with a taste for

camp.49 In this sense, Delfín’s clip is also capable of generating, in those people with a

predisposition for camp, a differential affective response to that of hate or repulsion saw in the

previous paragraph.

The inversion of the stigma that takes place in the “camping up” of Delfín’s kitsch,

nonetheless, is not completely detached from the structures of race and class through which he

and his work are constituted as subaltern in an Andean context. Actually, it can be argued that,

on the occasions in which kitsch is camped up, a series of operations are activated that,

following Alan Warde, Mark Tomlinson and Andrew McMeekin, reproduce in the realm of

culture what David Harvey describes as “accumulation by dispossession” – that is, late

capitalism’s naked transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.50 Kitsch that is camped up by

the white upper- and middle-class self is appropriated and revalorised, extracting from it a

surplus value that can be capitalised on as a cultural capital. The well-known expression “it is so

26

bad that is good” summarises this procedure. In our example, the product of the subaltern – a

lower-class indigenous musician – is captured by dominant sectors – not only individual users

but also websites, the traditional media, music promoters – and exchanged at a higher symbolic

value in the neoliberal symbolic marketplace. Potts argues that the process through which

culture is valued and given an exchange-value for selling, leasing or asset accrual is all-

encompassing, to the point that subjectivity itself can be mobilised as an asset.51 She draws on

the work of Alan Liu to suggest that contemporary recognition of the self as an asset lies not on

the establishment of clear borders and the perfection of a specific habitus, but on the capacity

to recognise the cultural others as sources of symbolic revenue.52 This is particularly pertinent

to newer generations that grew up within these dynamics. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that

the main consumers of Delfín’s video are young: the ability to move freely between established

hierarchical cultural boundaries – which, in the past, upper- and middle-class people did not

dare to cross to avoid social stigmatisation – can, in the current neoliberal cultural economy,

actually increase the value of the self. This valorisation of subjectivity, in itself, is not

incompatible with a Bourdieusian understanding of taste as defined by class stratification and

struggle.53 Social distinction today also rests on the ability to continually reinvent oneself,

assuming fluid positions that entail the capacity for “cultural omnivorousness’. Nevertheless,

this does not dissolve but re-enacts, in more covert ways, social hierarchies and symbolic

violence. The reconsideration of Bourdieusian homology – that is, the isomorphic relationship

between social status and aesthetic preferences – should not make us sideline the fact that

social tourism is usually one-way. The consumption of Delfín’s video can be capitalised only by

those who, because of their class positions and racial identities, can also detach themselves

27

from its stigmatising qualities when necessary – a privilege not allowed to Delfín and those who

cannot “activate” kitsch but are rather constituted as kitsch from the outside. This configuration

of taste in the postmodern/neoliberal age of alleged cultural democracy implies a new stage of

kitsch’s life-course. As Potts puts it, “[p]aying heed to the intricate manoeuvrings that help to

stage and revalue certain kitsch objects is revealing of a set of obscured class actions, that are

all the more powerful as a means of securing social distinction for remaining beneath notice”.54

It is true that, a few decades ago, the possibility of white middle-class Latin Americans mass-

consuming indigenous culture that did not conform to the expressions allowed by the state and

the market – mainly in the form of folklorised indigeneity – would have been unthinkable.

However, as the analysis of Delfín’s fandom demonstrates, this should not be seen as helping to

reduce Andean social and racial hierarchies.

To conclude, through kitsch, indigenous cultural producers can develop strategies of

aesthetic and cultural democratisation that refuse to accommodate to expectations from both

mainstream society and indigenous political discourse. In this process, they explore conceptions

of indigeneity that potentially could, thanks to digital technology and convergence culture, have

a destabilising effect on cultural hierarchies and established stereotypes and expectations,

particularly regarding Amerindians’ relationship with modernity. At the same time, the very

kitsch reception of their work by the white/mestizo Latin American middle-class youth also

entails that the process of democratisation will necessarily be countered by the persistence of

social – and racial – symbolic violence, which runs from explicit racism to more covert

operations, like the camping up of kitsch.

28

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1 For an account of the concept of “convergence culture” see Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).2 See Hyunseok Lee, “Analysis of the Gangnam style Music Video through the Concepts of Kitsch and Meme,” The Journal of the Korea Contents Association 13, no. 11 (2013): 148–158.3 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 2.4 Juan Mullo Sandoval, Música patrimonial del Ecuador (Quito: Ministerio de Cultura del Ecuador, 2009), 129–30.5 For a discussion of chagra identity see Emma Cervone, “Celebrating the Chagras: Mestizaje, Multiculturalism, and the Ecuadorian Nation”, The Global South 4, no. 1 (2010): 94–118 (100).6 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 234.7 Hermann Schüling, Zur Geschichte der Ästhetischen Wertung: Bibliographie der Abhandlungen über den Kitsch , vol. 1 (Gießen: Universitätsbibliothek, 1971); Ludwig Giesz, Fenomenología del Kitsch: Una aportación a la estética antropológica, trans. Esther Balaguer (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1973), 21.8 Giesz, Fenomenología, 21.9 Tomás Kulka, Kitsch and Art (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 19; Whitney Rugg, “Kitsch,” The University of Chicago. Theories of Media. Keywords. Accessed 12 July 2018, http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/kitsch.htm.10 Rugg.11 Calinescu, Five Faces, 257.12 See Theodor Adorno, “On the Social Situation of Music,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002), 391–436; Adorno, “Kitsch”, in Essays on Music, 501–505; Adorno, “Commodity Music Analysed,” in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 2011), 37–52; Molly Barnes, Between Modern and Postmodern Worlds: Theodor W. Adorno’s Struggle with the Concept of Musical Kitsch [dissertation]. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2012.13 Adorno, “Kitsch,” 502.14 Norbert Elias, “The Kitsch Style,” in The Norbert Elias Reader, ed. Johan Goudsblom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 26–35. 15 See Winfried Menninghaus, “On the ‘Vital Significance’ of Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of Bad Taste,” in Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Charles Rice (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), 39 –57; Walter Benjamin, “Dream Kitsch,” Sulfur 32 (1993): 185–186; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).16 Clement Greenberg, “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 3–21.17 Hermann Broch, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” in Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles (London: Studio Vista, 1969), 49–76.18 Broch, “Evil in the Value-System of Art,” in Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spiritual in an Unspiritual Age, ed. and trans. John Hargraves (New York: Counterpoint, 2002), 13–40 (37).19 Greenberg, “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 12.20 Jameson, Postmodernism, 2.21 Eva Londos, “Kitsch is Dead—Long Live Garden Gnomes,” Home Cultures 3, no. 3 (2006): 293–306 (293); Sam Binkley, “Kitsch as a Repetitive System: A Problem for the Theory of Taste Hierarchy,” Journal of Material Culture 5, no. 2 (2000): 131–52 (133).22 Ruth Holliday and Tracey Potts, Kitsch! Cultural Politics and Taste (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 31.23 Lidia Santos, Tropical Kitsch: Mass Media in Latin American Art and Literature , trans. Elisabeth Enenbach (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006), 72–73; Gillo Dorfles, Il Divenire Della Critica (Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1982), 27.24 This does not imply that attention to human qualities and confucts are complete absent from European theories of kitsch. Broch’s concept of the kitsch-man, for example, precisely addresses behavioural elements. However, as Santos shows, the emphasis tends to be more on the aesthetic than on the social compared to Latin American contexts. See Santos, Tropical Kitsch, p. 87, Broch, “Notes”, p. 49, and Giesz, Fenomenología, p. 29.25 Real Academia Española, Diccionario de americanismos (Lima: Santillana Ediciones Generales, 2010), p. 251. A good exploration of the semantic elasticity of the word cholo can be found in Juan Álvarez Vita, Diccionario de peruanismos: El habla castellana del Perú (Lima: Universidad Alas Peruanas, 2009).

26 Cholear does not imply necessarily abuse committed by a white person towards a cholo, but it can also take place between two cholos, which illustrates the relational nature of Peru’s racial dynamics. 27 Real Academia Española, Diccionario de americanismos, p. 251.28 José Guillermo Nugent, El laberinto de la choledad: Páginas para entender la desigualdad (Lima: Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, 2012); Aníbal Quijano, Dominación y cultura: Lo cholo y el conflicto cultural en el Perú (Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1980).29 Jesús Martín-Barbero, “Retos a la Investigación de Comunicación en América Latina,” HUMÁNITAS. Portal temático en Humanidades. 23 August 2018, http://www.perio.unlp.edu.ar/catedras/system/files/barbero_martin_retos_a_la_investigacion_en_la_comunicacion_en_a.l. pdf.; Martín-Barbero De los Medios a las Mediaciones. Comunicación, cultura y hegemonía (Mexico: Gustavo Gilli, 1987); Carlos Scolari, “From (New)Media to (Hyper)Mediations. Recovering Jesús Martín-Barbero's Mediation Theory in the Age of Digital Communication and Cultural Convergence,” Information, Communication & Society 18, no. 9 (2015): 1092–1107.30 William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London: Verso, 1991), 8.31 Martín Barbero, De los Medios; Scolari, “From (New)Media.”32 Martín Barbero, “Retos,” De los Medios. 33 Antonio Cornejo Polar, “Una heterogeneidad no dialéctica. Sujeto y discurso inmigrante en el Perú moderno,” Revista Iberoamericana 62, no. 176–77 (1996): 837–44.34 Tropical Kitsch, 170.35 Monsiváis, Entrada libre: Crónicas de la sociedad que se organiza (Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1987), María Eugenia Mudrovcic, “Cultura nacionalista vs. cultura nacional: Carlos Monsiváis ante la sociedad de masas”, Hispamérica 27, no. 79 (1998): 29–39.36 Santos, Tropical Kitsch, 89, and Carlos Monsiváis, Escenas de pudor y liviandad (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1988), 186.37 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).38“¿Qué Dicen Los Yankees?: ‘Delfín Quishpe - Torres Gemelas’ - Ep. 5,” YouTube, accessed 20 January 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWeQ7Uf4vJo.39 See Thomas Ross, “Whiteness after 9/11,” Journal of Law & Policy 18, no. 223 (2005): 223–43, and Dana Heller, ed., The Selling Of 9/11: How A National Tragedy Became A Commodity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).40 See Erika Silva Chavet, Identidad nacional y poder (Quito: Abya-Yala, 2004), Hernán Ibarra, La otra cultura: Imaginarios, mestizaje y modernización (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1998), and Norman Whitten Jr., “Los Paradigmas mentales de la conquista y el nacionalismo: La formación de los conceptos de las “razas” y las transformaciones del racismo,” in Ecuador Racista. Imágenes e identidad, ed. Emma Cervone and Fredy Rivera (Quito: FLACSO, 1999), 45–70.41 Quoted in Ronald Stutzman, “El Mestizaje: An All-Inclusive Ideology of Exclusion,” in Cultural Transformation and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador, ed. N. E. Whitten (Urbana: University of Illinois. 1981), 45–94 (45).42 Maximilian Viatori, “Defending White-Mestizo Invisibility through the Production of Indigenous Alterity: (Un)Marking Race in Ecuador’s Mainstream Press,” Anthropological Quarterly 89, no. 2 (2016): 485–514. 43 Freya Schiwy, Indianizing Film: Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology (Rutgers University Press, 2009), 16.44 The 2008 Constitution replaced the words “pluricultural” and “multiethnic” with “intercultural” and “plurinational”.45 Fiorella Montero-Diaz, “YouTubing the ‘Other,’” in Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media, ed. Thomas R. Hilder, Henry Stobart, and Shzr Ee Tan (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2017), 74–94.46 “Delfín hasta el fin, Delfín Quishpe – ‘Gigantes con vivi’ Parte 2,” accessed 15 January 2019., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdf4pSK5L_w.47 Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 53–65.48 Andrew Ross, “Uses of Camp,” in Cleto, Camp, 308–29.49 The fact that in 2011 he produced a clip on another global media disaster event – the 2010 Copiapó mining accident – indicates his desire to replicate the formula that worked so well in his previous video. However, even if his embracement of kitsch after the success of “Torres gemelas” was a calculated strategy, this does not invalidate the fact that the viewers of the first video were attracted to it because of the perception of it being involuntarily bad.50 Alan Warde, Mark Tomlinson and Andrew McMeekin, Expanding Tastes? Cultural Omnivorousness and Social Change in the UK (Manchester: Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition, 2000). See also David Harvey,

“The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register, 40 (2004): 63–87.51 Tracey Potts, “‘Walking the Line’: Kitsch, Class and the Morphing Subject of Value,” Nottingham Modern Languages Publications Archive, accessed 23 January 2018, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/17377.pdf. 52 Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool : Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).53 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 2010); Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore,” American Sociological Review, 61 (1996): 900–7; Peterson, “The Rise and Fall of Highbrow Snobbery as a Status Marker,” Poetics, 25 (1997): 75–92; Peterson, “Problems in Comparative Research: The Example of Omnivorousness,” Poetics, 33 (2005): 257–282. See Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture , ed. Laurie Hanquinet and Mike Savage (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015) for the affinities between Bourdieu’s sociology of taste and “omnivore theory”.54 Potts, “‘Walking the Line’”.