Preserving Peruvianism in the Quinto Suyo
A family party with traditional Peruvian music and dancing.
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My grandfather, Timoteo Sánchez, spoke Quechua, the native Andean language, and from him I learned that our Inca ancestors organized their empire—Tahuantinsuyo—into four suyos, or regions, that had Cusco as the epicenter. I thought about him when I first heard the phrase “quinto suyo,” a fifth region that refers to Peruvian communities abroad. My octogenarian parents, Sara Sánchez and Nicolás Vera, who were born in Peru and grew up in Lima became part of that suyo when they left Peru half a century ago. From Peru, to the Dominican Republic, and now Canada, they have been migrants more than half their lives, and were the first in their families to create a Peruvian home outside Peru. Driven by desire and determination to preserve their cultural identity, they cultivated Peru’s language, food, music, art, literature, and religion wherever they lived.
Over the past fifty years, they have fulfilled the promise of César Miró’s Peruvian 1940’s waltz “Todos Vuelven” (Everybody Returns) countless times. Its lyrics are an anthem to Peru’s expats:
Todos vuelven a la tierra en que nacieron,
al embrujo incomparable de su sol,
todos vuelven al rincón donde vivieron…
Everybody returns to the land where they were born,
to the incomparable enchantment of its sun,
everybody returns to the corner where they lived…
A few years ago, on one of our last trips to Peru before this global pandemic made travel impossible, we planned a large family reunion in Lima to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. In addition to the requisite meal with extended family and friends at a restaurant that served Peru’s traditional comida criolla, and an evening revelry at an underground peña with live music and Afro-Peruvian dancing, my parents wanted to visit their childhood homes. They wanted me to see where they came from, their old 1940s quintas in Barrios Altos.
Lima’s 19th century quintas were crowded tenement dwellings with single family shotgun apartments that housed migrants of Andean, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, or Afro-descendant heritage. These apartments had no running water, so families shared a single communal faucet. That’s why Limeños called these quintas “callejón de un solo caño.” From this caño, my grandmother Rosa Sánchez collected water that she boiled in her wood-fire kitchen to later use for cooking.
A block of quinta tenements in Lima.
Today, many of these quintas are hazardous rubble, some with squatters holding on to vestiges of home in a crime-ridden neighborhood. Everyone we asked said it was too dangerous to visit, and no taxi would drive us there. But, like all the challenges we faced, we were determined to find a way. And our family came through—my cousin’s husband helped us hire a driver with a van and two armed ex-Marines who escorted us on a tour of yesteryear.
I wondered how my parents felt about the precautions we had to take for them to visit their childhood homes, and the apparent contradiction of Peruvians, Limeños, not welcome in their home city. César Miró’s promise wasn’t so straightforward, after all. It required an addendum: everyone returns to the corner where they lived, but sometimes you’ll need a bodyguard.
In the span of one day, from Calle Capón in Lima’s Barrio Chino where my grandfather Timoteo was a beat cop; to the Mercado Central where my six-year-old mother shopped for groceries; through Barrios Altos to my parents’ old primary schools and the park where my grandmother Antonia Vera sold homemade picarones, our journey evoked memories my parents had of a 1940s Lima that has all but disappeared. Dressed as civilians, the ex-Marines escorted us as we walked on dusty and littered sidewalks, one in front, and the other behind. At one corner, a man walking in our direction got a little too close, maybe he was drunk or maybe he was a pickpocket, but our bodyguard swiftly pushed him out of the way.
Of all our stops, visiting my mother’s old two-story tenement home, Quinta Pinasco, had the most emotional impact. This was where she grew up, where she learned to cook, where she celebrated her quinceañera. Our van stops across the street from the building, and one of the ex-Marines tells us to wait while he goes inside to make sure it’s safe for us.
The top of the tenement building’s facade still has a lion’s head, with an open mouth. For almost a century it has been guarding the building from intruders. A tall doorway beneath the lion’s head leads to a hallway that ends at a small courtyard surrounded by crumbled walls and dusty stray bricks. Walls that once echoed the rhythms of all-night jaranas that took place here. Creole music jam sessions with guitar, cajón, and singers that competed against each other with improvised lyrics based on décimas, a ten-line poetry style from Spain that Afro-Peruvian poet Nicomedes Santa Cruz reclaimed and popularized.
As we walk inside escorted by our bodyguards, it’s hard to believe anyone still lives here, but a young family comes out of their apartment when they notice us. One of our bodyguards tells them that my mother used to live here, and they look at her with the profound respect given to elders in Latinx culture. Even though the family seems new to the quinta, and weren’t around when my mother lived there, they know the history of the place. I notice them look at my mother with empathy and I think they understand the melancholy of returning to a childhood home.
My mother, who is less than five feet tall and has the same indigenous complexion as her father Timoteo, seemed even more diminutive as she stood in the courtyard surveying the upper balconies. She pointed at a landing where a wooden staircase once stood and led up to her apartment. She told me how she hated the communal shower beneath the staircase because the wood floor crawled with cockroaches. As she continued to look up at her apartment, I saw the six-year-old girl in the stories she told us over family dinners. Like how she learned to cook from her mother Rosa, standing on a stool to reach the stove top. And I wondered how she escaped from an almost certain fate of staying in this building all her life.
I am not sure how long we stayed in the tenement courtyard, or how many memories my mother relived during our visit. Maybe enough so that for a moment she no longer felt like a tourist. For a moment, she was home again. Even today, when I ask my mother what she misses most about Lima, she mentions her quinta tenement from 80 years ago.
Though my parents didn’t meet until they were in secondary school, they shared many of the same values and ethics that shaped their lives and brought them together. My grandfather Timoteo once told me about the three laws of the Inca—ama sua, ama llulla, ama quella—which in Quechua mean don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t be lazy. These were embedded in my mother’s and father’s DNA, even as children. For them, getting an education was instrumental to break away from a life of poverty. So they both were the first in their families to go to college and pursue professional degrees. My mother studied law at Universidad de San Marcos, the oldest university in the Americas, and my father studied engineering at the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería.
A family portrait a few years after the wedding, with the extended family on the author’s mother’s side.
The author’s parents at their wedding in Lima
Once they settled into their careers, and earned professional salaries, Sara helped her parents Timoteo and Rosa purchase a new home, and Nicolás helped his parents Nicolás Sr. and Antonia purchase land for their new home. My parents set the example for their siblings, who followed in their footsteps and attended university as well. And like many of their contemporaries, it would have been easy for the trajectory of their lives to follow a traditional course. Stay in Lima. Get married. Find a home. Start a family. Instead, they realized that to have a better life, for themselves and for their children, not only did they have to leave their tenement homes, they also had to carve a new path and leave Peru.
When I asked my father what motivated their journey into an expat life, he answered like an engineer, brief and precise: education and economics. He wanted his children to have an education, but the political climate and socioeconomic inequality was a catalyst for protests and violent clashes between university students and police. And he knew that as an engineer he could get a better job abroad. But he also reminded me that all my grandparents were migrants who moved from the Andes to Lima, and were looked upon as foreigners by city folk. So perhaps leaving Lima was part of a journey that began before my parents were born.
Their vision and pioneering spirit led them to the Dominican Republic. With my younger brother, three, and myself, four, they made Bonao, a small town in the center of the island, their home for ten years. My father worked as an engineer at a Canadian-owned mining company, but my mother gave up her career to raise us. Here, in the middle of the Caribbean, is where my mother, for the first time, recreated a Peruvian home outside Peru. This is where my parents entered the quinto suyo.
At first, from the Dominican Republic in the 1970s, family visits to Peru were for Christmas, when it’s the middle of summer in Lima, and they all revolved around food. During breakfast, we planned lunch outings, the largest meal of the day. Inevitably, we ended up at a Chifa for hours, enjoying plate after plate of Chinese-Peruvian family-style fare. Dinner was an afterthought, something light to curb the appetite until tomorrow. And on Christmas day, it seems that all we ate was panettone, the dried-fruit bread that 19th century Italian immigrants introduced to Lima. I remember seeing street vendors pile pyramids of panettone boxes on street corners, where brands like D’onofrio made panettone more popular in Lima than its birthplace in Milan.
During these trips, my parents took us to casas artesanales to shop for handmade Peruvian art and furniture. And little by little, they began to furnish their Caribbean home with crafts that reminded them of Peru. Leather chairs with Inca engravings. Copper tumis, the half-circle Inca ceremonial knife. Retablos, carved wood altars with double doors. Colorful Andean wool textiles. And Nativity scenes. Our house was like a shrine, frozen in time, that paid homage to our ancestors, our country. Art was part of what made my parents Peruvian.
Like Peru, the Dominican Republic has a colonial legacy which gave birth to familiar creole food and music that made us feel at home. Here, dancing to merengue was as joyful as the Afro-Peruvian festejo, and the hearty sancocho stew with butternut squash and carrots was reminiscent of Peru’s seco, a lamb and vegetable stew that is one of my mother’s favorite dishes. And though there was no language barrier, we quickly learned the local slang. In Lima, “ahorita,” means right now, but in the D.R. it means later, much, much later.
Today, Peruvian food is famous around the world and cuisine is a strong part of Peru’s cultural identity. For seven consecutive years, The World Travel Awards named Peru the top culinary destination. And before the pandemic, tourists flocked to Lima’s restaurants, many on San Pellegrino’s World’s 50 Best list. But my parents have always loved the Peruvian food they grew up with, decades before popular Peruvian restaurants popped up in Miami, New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Madrid, or Tokyo. They remind me that to them Peruvian food is “la mejor comida del mundo,” and that sometimes the best food in the world can come from the poorest of families and humblest of kitchens.
During our time in the Dominican Republic, my mother’s cooking made us Peruvian. She prepared all of Peru’s traditional dishes: ceviche, lomo saltado, arroz chaufa, papa rellena, tallarines rojos, causa, and more. Not just for us, but for friends and neighbors. At potlucks, everyone looked forward to my mother’s prized Peruvian dish, ají de gallina, a spicy, slow cooked, pulled chicken stew. And my father prepared frothy pitchers of pisco sours with fresh lime juice, sugar, egg whites, ice, and pisco he brought back from our trips to Lima.
In addition to pisco, my parents always had a stash of Peruvian hot peppers, ají amarillo, ají panca, and rocoto, for cooking and for condiments to provide extra heat to a dish. Even though the etymology of ají is axi, from the Caribbean Taino Indians, ají is not prevalent in Dominican cooking. I remember seeing my father and uncles add more ají to their plates, sweating from the piquant spice, wiping their foreheads with handkerchiefs, quenching the heat with ice cold beer, and then going back for more, all under the hot Caribbean midday sun.
After eating, and once the sun set, came the dancing, sometimes by candlelight when the power went out. Merengue, salsa, cumbia, and always vals criollo, the Afro-Peruvian creole waltz, a syncopated hip-swaying rhythm. Dancing the Peruvian waltz is a lost art, I think.
My mother is fond of “La Flor de la Canela” (The Cinnamon Flower), a vals criollo by Chabuca Granda, which was popular when she was a teenager. The lyrics are from the point of view of a woman from Lima, a Limeña, who is strolling and reminiscing about her city that is named after the river Rimac. My father identifies with the plight in El Provinciano (The Man from the Countryside), a creole waltz by Los Trovadores del Perú, that is about a man from the Andean region who leaves his home for the city, but longs for it. I don’t know if my parents realize how their love for these songs planted a musical seed in me. Even at a young age, one of my favorite creole waltzes was Propiedad Privada (Private Property) by Lucha Reyes, who sings about the lengths she’ll go to, to claim her partner:
Para que sepan todos
que tu me perteneces
con sangre de mis venas
te marcaré la frente
So that everyone knows
that you belong to me
with blood from my veins
I will mark your forehead
There is profound nostalgia and passion in these old songs, especially when they are played on a vinyl LP from the 70s.
On Sundays in the D.R., the whole town attended mass, and the priest greeted everyone by name. Because Peru is a devout Catholic country, going to church strengthened community ties. And the stories my parents told us connected our religious experience abroad back to Peru. There was the African slave who three centuries ago painted the Black Christ on a mural in Lima, a mural that remained standing after an earthquake devastated the city. Or 17th century San Martín de Porres, a Peruvian mixed-race creole and patron saint of social justice. And the Señor de Los Milagros brotherhood that my grandmother Antonia belonged to which celebrated with a city-wide procession in October. There was also a religious connection to food, as the nuns of Santa Clara were famous for their wildly popular shortbread pastry, Turrón de Doña Pepa. Now, decades later, I realize my parents were not only migrants preserving their own cultural identity, but also ambassadors, proud of their heritage, and eager to share it with others.
I think my parents always considered the D.R. as a stepping stone, and had started a plan to move to Canada even before our time as expats in the D.R. ended when an economic downturn and layoffs at my father’s mining company forced many foreigners to leave. They then faced a choice: go back to Peru, or continue living abroad. It was the early 80s, and violent terrorism—led by the Shining Path—was rampant in Peru. Lima was a war zone, and even the countryside was under siege. Bombings. Assassinations. Executions. This was not a Peru my parents would ever consider for their family, so they chose to continue living abroad, But nothing prepared them for the culture shock of moving even further from Peru to Canada.
My parents relocated to Scarborough, a suburb east of downtown Toronto, forty years ago, and they transplanted the inside of their home in the D.R. to Canada. The emotional warmth of all the art my mother collected, hung, and arranged provided comfort during our first cold, snowy winter. As did her cooking. But I know that my parents struggled with the culture and language. Though they had both studied English in school, this was the first time they had to live, work, and socialize, completely in a language other than their native Spanish. Over time, however, they made friends and started building community with neighbors. And like in the D.R., my mother’s cooking and my father’s pisco sours won everyone over. However, as a family we always spoke Spanish at home. And we laughed when my mother spoke Spanglish, with her wonderful Peruvian accent, saying co-see instead of cozy. Their conversations in Spanish always felt more intimate, expressive, romantic, colorful, or playful.
My father recalls that there was a time when moving back to Peru was possible. During the first few challenging years in Canada, they still had a home in Lima that we could return to. But they ended up selling it to purchase their current home in Canada. That, I think, is when there was no going back to Peru. Their lifelong momentum continued to push them away from their home country.
In their new town, my parents had to figure everything out. Where to shop for groceries. Which schools were the best for us. And where to go out for dinner. At that time, there were few Peruvians in Toronto, and it took years for Peruvian restaurants to pop-up. So in their search for something familiar, they took us to Toronto’s Chinatown, where we found Cantonese restaurants, filled with locals, that reminded us of the Chifas in Lima.
Going to mass in Canada was also challenging, not because the sermon was in English, but because it was too large and there was no sense of community. So eventually, they stopped going, and practiced at home. “Gracias Señor por el pan de cada día”, began their gratitude prayer before meals. For Christmas, my mother set up a nativity scene that would rival any displayed in Lima in December. Then, my father would play, on repeat, a cherished Ronda de Pascua vinyl LP, Christmas carols performed by a Peruvian children’s choir, while my mother sliced panettone that we enjoyed with Peruvian hot chocolate. And at midnight on Christmas eve, we prayed in front of the nativity scene before exchanging gifts. So, in their own way, they were able to keep their religious traditions alive.
Though my mother gave up her law career in the D.R., in Scarborough she became an admired and respected college-level Spanish teacher. That way, through language, she continued to share part of Peru’s culture with her students. My father, despite being an engineer, was very interested in improving Peru’s economy, social development, and democracy, so he obtained a Political Science Master of Arts from the University of Toronto while working full-time. But he also used his engineering degree to help others. He tutored immigrant high school students in the neighborhood and taught mathematics to adults obtaining their high school certificate at an Indigenous school.
A multigenerational family dinner.
Over the past forty years in Canada, it was family that became their real community. One by one, many of my parents’ siblings saw that Canada offered good public education, free healthcare, and career prospects, so they began to migrate to Toronto with their families, and they stayed with us until they found homes of their own. Sometimes, with only three bedrooms, one kitchen, and one bathroom for ten people, it was a little crowded, but my parents always showed up for family. This new, large, extended family got together for potlucks, reunions, birthdays, anniversaries, Peruvian Independence Day, and of course Christmas.
Here, so far away from Peru, is where my mother taught me to cook Peru’s traditional dishes. It was a family tradition to pass on recipes orally. That’s how my grandmother taught my mother, and now it was my mother’s turn to teach me. Before we started, I’d ask her what she wanted to listen to, and she’d select some Afro-Peruvian, Andean, or Latinx artists. Then, while we cooked, we took dancing breaks in the kitchen, laughing. I think that music, and the joy it gave us, could be tasted in our cooking.
One one occasion, the intersection of food and music manifested itself in an encounter between my mother and famed Afro-Peruvian singer Susana Baca. We had attended one of her concerts, and some of the band members I knew invited us backstage after the performance. Immediately, Susana and my mother connected over Lima, its food, and music. Before saying our farewells they decided that we would all get together the next day for lunch, and my mother and Susana would cook. So, on their day off, her band brought their instruments and performed a house concert while in the kitchen, like old friends, Susana and my mother cooked ceviche and arroz con pollo. It was a treat for us, but also for the band, because being on long tours away from Peru, the thing they missed the most was the food, and a home cooked creole Peruvian meal gave them respite, joy, and nourishment.
While I lived with my parents in the D.R. and Canada, they showed me how to be a Peruvian abroad. And after I left their home over two decades ago, I’ve followed in their footsteps. I became a Peruvian chef. I learned to play Afro-Peruvian percussion. And I now write about Peru’s food and drink culture. Once a year, I meet my parents in Lima to visit family. And we reminisce about the obstacles they faced over the past fifty years.
Life is hard, no matter where you live, especially as one gets older.
In my mind, I can hear my father recite a verse from one of his favorite poems by Peru’s César Vallejo, “Los Heraldos Negros” (The Black Messengers):
Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes... ¡Yo no sé!
Golpes como del odio de Dios;
There are in life, such hard blows… I don't know!
Blows such as God's wrath…
On a recent trip to Lima, I noticed that my parents wrote down the address and details of apartments they found for rent or sale. They were interested in somewhere central where they could go to their favorite cafes for lunch or afternoon tea, walk to the park, browse bookstores, shop at supermarkets, visit casas artesanales, or stroll down the malecón that looks over the Pacific Ocean. But when I ask my parents if they would ever really move back to Lima, they are torn. They cite “razones sentimentales,” as their inspiration, but realize that practicality defeats their sentimental reasons. Perhaps thirty years ago, they say. I wonder if my parents knew how their choice to live abroad impacted their life trajectory. How it built a momentum that eventually made it impossible for them to return to the home they once knew. But now, in their 80s, they depend on access to healthcare that is not available in Peru. And Lima has changed too much for them. It’s larger and more chaotic than they are accustomed to. Traffic is among the worst in the world. Crime is a problem, so they wouldn’t be able to walk in their old neighborhoods. And when we return to Lima to visit family, they are treated as foreigners by locals. When my father strikes up a conversation about politics or the economy with a taxi driver, they immediately ask my father where he is from. My father, shocked, explains that he was born in Lima. As was I. It seems that he has lost his Peruvian accent from living abroad. And I know I have too.
Today, my parents are retired and live alone in Toronto, in the same house my siblings and I grew up in. I think it’s too large for them, at their age. But they don’t want to move to a smaller home or an assisted living facility. It has too many memories for them, and maybe they are a little stubborn, resistant to change. My parents tell me that when they pass they want to rest in Canada. Perhaps, after all their travels, they finally found home.
The author’s home in Portland, and the Peruvian art that he has collected over the years, inspired by his parents.
Because of the pandemic, it’s been two years since I’ve seen my parents, or since they have been able to visit family in Peru. So to stay in touch they have regular Zoom sessions with family in Peru, and they also listen to Peruvian news on the radio, every day. And when I ask them “como están las cosas?” they say that things are terrible in Lima, as if they are living there. I also FaceTime my parents every morning so that they can see their six-month-old granddaughter grow. We all hope to be able to travel again, and visit each other, once it’s safe to do so.
Sometimes, I think of the many Peruvians that left Peru. César Vallejo, the famed bohemian poet, and Jorge Chávez, the first aviator to cross the Alps both lived in France. Exotic soprano Yma Sumac, Wimbledon champion Alex Olmedo, and star percussionist Alex Acuña lived in Los Angeles. While Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, relocated to Spain. These, of course, are the famous ones. Today there are large communities of Peruvian expats all over the world. Recently, I read about one of the largest ones—Little Lima—in Paterson, New Jersey, where Peruvian owned business and restaurants thrive and Peruvian migrant families feel welcome. It wasn’t like that for my parents in Toronto. There was no welcoming committee. They had to figure everything out on their own. And their own family became their community. But like the families in New Jersey, my parents represented an evolution of Peruvian identity abroad, the quinto suyo.
My grandfather once told me that it’s possible to leave Peru and still be Peruvian. But something is lost by living abroad for so long like my parents have. For my mother, she lost the depth of her connection to her siblings in Lima, and the many family reunions and celebrations that took place in her absence. My father talks about missing his high school and college friends. Once in a while they have a class reunion, where they get together for a beer and conversation, a banter that is only possible with someone who shares your past. None of their friends in Canada is a substitute for what they left behind in Lima. An emotional cord may connect them to their birthplace, and they’ve preserved their Peruvianism through family, food, music, art, religion, literature, and nostalgic memories, but despite the promise of a Peruvian waltz, they can never truly return.
Cinco Esquinas in Lima.
At the end of our tour of my parent’s old neighborhood a few years ago, the driver was taking us back to our hotel when I recognized where we were—locals called the intersection of five streets at the edge of Barrios Altos the five corners or Cinco Esquinas. Mario Vargas Llosa penned a novel about this famed neighborhood that in the past was home to artists, bohemians, and musicians. So I asked the driver if we could stop and walk around, but our bodyguards said no, definitely not, it was too dangerous, even for them. As we crossed the intersection, I looked through the rear window of the van and snapped a photograph that I still keep as a reminder that even by moving forward, sometimes you catch a glimpse of what you’ve left behind.
Nico Vera is a freelance writer, photographer, and vegan Peruvian chef specializing in Peru’s food & drink culture. His stories, photographs, and recipes appear in Taste, Whetstone, VegNews, The Bold Italic, New Worlder, and Imbibe. Born in Peru, he now lives in Oregon with his fiancée Alec and their daughter Rio.