Victoria Santa Cruz (Peru, 1922 – 2014)

Victoria Santa Cruz was born in 1922 in Lima to a family of Black artists, musicians, and intellectuals. Santa Cruz’s mother and father both shared tremendous cultural experience and traditions with Santa Cruz, cultivating a powerful creative foundation for her. In 1958, together with her younger brother Nicomedes, she cofounded the first Black theater company in Peru, Cumanana, which she codirected until 1961. During her time at the company, Santa Cruz developed powerful musical plays focused on Black histories, the history of slavery in Peru, and the rediscovery of Black culture based on rhythms and ancestral memory. She sought to awaken Black consciousness in Peru.

Between 1961 and 1965 she studied theater and choreography in Paris at the Université du Théâtre des Nations and École Supérieur des Études Chorégraphiques, with esteemed professors. While in France she also became a highly regarded costume designer, visited Africa for the first time, and produced the ballet La muñeca negra in 1965. She returned to Peru in 1966, where she founded the group Teatro y Danzas Negras del Perú, which performed in Lima and on Peruvian television and toured internationally, most notably at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. During the 1960s Santa Cruz re-created such seminal Afro-Peruvian dance forms as landó and zamacueca. In 1969, she was appointed director of the newly established Escuela Nacional de Folklore, and in 1973 she became director of the Conjunto Nacional de Folklore. The company would tour extensively throughout Latin America, the United States, Canada, and Western Europe in the 1970s. When the company disbanded in 1982, she took a position as a visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She was later awarded tenure and was a professor there until her retirement in 1999. She died in 2014 in Lima and for her contributions, was laid in state at the Museo de la Nación there.

Victoria Santa Cruz’s strong upbringing in the arts contributed to her interest in reclaiming Black identity, believing strongly in rhythm and ancestral memory as a tool in awakening Black consciousness.

In 1978, Victoria Santa Cruz wrote and performed the powerful poem, “Me Gritaron Negra“. Santa Cruz’s poem serves as a social commentary on race and the othering of the Black body, and furthermore illustrates the racially-motivated bullying and hatred targeted at Black people and dark-skinned people in our societies. The poem details Santa Cruz’s internal acceptance and reclamation of her identity as a Black woman, despite the efforts of a society that tells her to be ashamed, to make herself small.