The sounds of the resistance: music, Chileanization and Peruvian memory in the oases of Pica, Matilla and Valle de Quisma

This article analyzes the musical and choreographic practices that evoke the Peruvian past in northern Chile, the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) and the subsequent Chileanization. As a result of an ethnomusicological work and review of archive materials, it is suggested that the Chileanization process imposed administrative and punitive measures and actions of political violence that constituted traumatic events for the populations of the oases of Pica, Matilla and Valle de Quisma; facts that have been recorded in stories, objects, music and dances that today are part of the regional tradition and in which community memories about Peru are reconstituted, as a counterpoint to the coercive processes of the Chilean State.