Nicomedes Santa Cruz

Nicomedes Santa Cruz Gamarra was born on the fourth of June 1925 in the Breña district of Lima, the ninth of ten children of Nicomedes Santa Cruz Aparicio — a playwright and naval band musician — and Victoria Gamarra Ramírez, a seamstress whose own family preserved within Lima's small Afro-Peruvian community the oral practice of the décima espinela: the ten-line stanzaic verse form developed in Spain by Vicente Espinel in 1591 and brought to the Pacific coast of Peru in the seventeenth century by enslaved Africans.

His sister Victoria Santa Cruz (placed in this archive) trained him in the family tradition. He worked through his twenties as a blacksmith and as a railway forge-man at the Talleres de la Estación Desamparados; he taught himself the prosody of the Spanish Golden Age from second-hand books bought in the markets of Lima and began publishing décimas in the daily press in 1956. From 1958 he was a regular contributor to the Lima papers La Crónica and El Comercio.

Across the following three decades he reconstructed almost single-handedly the Afro-Peruvian folkloric tradition. He toured Peru collecting the village forms of the landó, the festejo and the panalivio; he published the first systematic collection of Afro-Peruvian décimas in his Décimas of 1959 and the foundational anthology Cumanana in 1964; and he established Black Peruvian poetry as a recognised national literary lineage. His later prose — including Ritmos negros del Perú of 1971 — established the academic framework for Afro-Peruvian studies as a discipline.

He moved to Madrid in 1980 to host a radio programme on Afro-Latin music for the BBC World Service and Radio Exterior de España. He died of cancer in Madrid on the fifth of February 1992, at sixty-six.

He is honored here as the recoverer of Afro-Peruvian poetic tradition.