Nicomedes Santa Cruz

Nicomedes Santa Cruz Gamarra was born on the fourth of June 1925 in the La Victoria district of Lima, the ninth of ten children of Nicomedes Santa Cruz Aparicio — a playwright and cultured polyglot who had lived for years in the United States — and Victoria Gamarra Ramírez. Into that crowded, book-loving household was born a boy who would one day give Black Peru a voice it could not be denied.

He came to his calling by an unlikely road. Trained and working for years as a blacksmith, he set down his hammer only in 1956 to travel Peru and Latin America, composing and reciting his verse. A decisive encounter with the master decimista Porfirio Vásquez in the 1940s turned him toward the décima — the ten-line Spanish poetic form — which he would raise from near-forgotten craft to a living national art.

As poet, journalist, musician, and folklorist, Santa Cruz became the great recoverer of Afro-Peruvian tradition. With his sister Victoria he built a theatre company to restore Black folklore to the stage; through radio, recordings, and columns in Expreso and El Comercio he carried it to the nation. His collections — Décimas, Cumanana, Canto a mi Perú, and Ritmos negros del Perú — remain foundational, and his research made him Peru's leading ethnomusicologist of African-rooted music and dance.

He died on the fifth of February 1992 in Madrid, far from the coast that shaped him, yet his birthday is now honored across Peru as the Day of Afro-Peruvian Culture. May the rhythms he rescued keep sounding, and the dignity he sang for endure.