Fieldwork Archive
“Desde Cunya vienen” is a walina composed by Juan Rojas. Walinas are water songs composed and performed for Champería, an eight-day water festival celebrated each October in San Pedro de Casta, an agrarian community in the Lima highlands of Peru. During Champería, Casteños sing walinas as they clean the irrigation canals and reservoirs that water their fields, organize traditional games, share ceremonial coca and chicha (maize beer), and carry out the ritual labor that ensures the flow of water for another year.
Casteños are divided into four paradas, kinship-based work parties that form during Champería to carry out designated communal labor tasks. The author of “Desde Cunya vienen,” Juan Rojas, belonged to the parada of Cumao or Cumaopaccha. Walinas are typically composed, sung, and transmitted within specific parada lineages rather than at the level of the whole community. Thus, walina singer Roxana Olivares Bautista also belongs to Cumao and learned this song directly from its author. Yellow is the color of Cumao, hence the yellow bandana that Roxana’s daughter, Yajaira Salinas Olivares, waves in time with her mother’s voice.
Cunya, frequently referred to as Madre or Mama Cunya (“Mother Cunya”), is the most important of three mountain springs that feed Casta’s irrigation system. Cunya flows year-round, and Casteños say should it ever dry up, as other water sources do during the dry season, they would lose the very basis of their lives and livelihoods. Many walinas thus pay homage to Cunya in particular, expressing Casteños’ adoration for the source of life itself. Casteños regard Cunya as an apu, a sacred mountain spirit or deity characteristic of Andean cosmology. Upon visiting the spring they leave offerings of coca, cigarettes, and candy.
The song also references other important fixtures of traditional life in Casta, particularly its irrigation system and water cycle. From Cunya comes the water that flows into Carhuayumac, Casta’s principal canal. From there the water is diverted into a series of reservoirs or lakes called cochas and canals called acequias, gradually flowing down the hills into Casta’s many thirsty fields. Pampacocha is one of the primary reservoirs located along Carhuayumac’s course. The reference to neblina evokes the thick fog that often blankets Casta—one sign of the coming wet season annually welcomed by the celebration of Champería.
This particular song is unique for being perhaps the only walina to travel far from its source and take on a second life through commercially successful adaptations by outsiders. Under the names “Cuñaq” or “Kunyaq,” and featuring altered lyrics and music, versions of this walina have become popular fixtures in the emergent genre of “medicine music,” as performed in ayahuasca ceremonies and New Age spiritual retreats worldwide.
In commercial adaptations of this song, most of the lyrics that evoke local knowledge are replaced by more generic references without specific significance in Casta. For instance, commercial versions substitute “hacia nuestras vidas” for the original’s reference to Pampacocha, a landmark familiar to Casteños but unknown to outsiders. The line referencing Casta’s frequent fog is replaced by a reference to Pachamama, an Andean earth goddess figure rarely evoked in Casta but common in New Age imaginaries of Indigeneity.
Other such omissions and modifications give an overall impression of decontextualization. This pattern is typical of the ways in which New Age subcultures, particularly world music acts, frequently replace specific musical forms and cultural references with alternatives legible to broad audiences more interested in generic concepts than the particular content and context of the original artifact.
The same is true not only of the lyrics but the music itself as we compare the original walina with its commercial adaptations. Many walinas sung in Casta are a cappella. Instrumentation, when present, is typically limited to traditional Andean instruments, namely the chirisuya and the tinya. Commercial adaptations, however, introduce instruments foreign to Casta’s traditional musical environment. Changes to the song’s musical structure, such as its melody and chord progression, are also apparent.
In response to the fact that Casteños have received little recognition and no recompense for the global diffusion of this walina, the community is beginning to discuss options for securing a collective patent over the genre or seeking a cultural heritage declaration. Whatever may happen on the legal front, the cultural continuity of this unique genre is clear. Each October, Casteños will once more sing their melancholy songs in honor of the water that gives them life.
