Remembering Victoria Santa Cruz: A Global Life

This post is part of our forum on “Black Women’s Activism in the African Diaspora.” 

“I was born Black, I was born a woman, and later being Latin American also presented an obstacle,” Victoria Santa Cruz (1922–2014) testified, looking back upon her global life. A fearless and legendary Peruvian cultural icon, Santa Cruz was convinced that obstacles exist for one reason: so that we may convert them into opportunities.

Today Santa Cruz is revered around the world for her powerful rhythmic poem “Me Gritaron ‘¡Negra!’” (They Shouted ‘Black Girl’ at Me”), based on her earliest childhood experience with racism on the streets of Lima. In moving performances on international stages, Santa Cruz reenacted the dawning of her realization that others perceived her as racially different and therefore inferior—a painful awakening that resonates for many Black people worldwide as a “tragic rite of passage” and “the first and most formative experience in a lifetime of racist insults,” as scholar and activist Salamishah Tillet writes. In her poem’s inspirational climax, Santa Cruz transformed the term “Black” from an insult to a source of pride. Backed by a chorus and thundering Peruvian cajón (box drum), she shouted triumphantly, “Now I have the key!”

Indeed, Santa Cruz deployed rhythm as the key to overturning barriers imposed because of her race, gender, and ethnicity. Armed with her signature rhythm technique, she unlocked unprecedented access to prestigious positions in the arts, government, and higher education in a remarkable career that spanned four continents from the 1950s to the 2000s.

When Santa Cruz began her work in the late 1950s, few women rose to positions of authority in Peru, and the country’s Black population was commonly believed to have “disappeared”—despite intense discrimination and marginalization faced by its small minority of African descent. After Peru stopped collecting racial census data in 1940, the nation’s Black population literally did not count. To avoid the stigma of Blackness, many Afrodescendants no longer identified as Black, whether during a lifetime or across generations.

Inspired by the Katherine Dunham Company’s 1951 Lima debut, Victoria teamed up with her brother Nicomedes Santa Cruz to launch a Black arts resurgence as co-directors of Peru’s landmark Black theatre group Cumanana beginning in 1958 or 1959. To make Black lives visible in a country that denied their presence, the Santa Cruzes reconstructed forgotten Afro-Peruvian songs and dances and created musical plays and poetry about the Black experience in Peru. Victoria Santa Cruz went on to study at the University of the Theatre of Nations in Paris in the 1960s, where she filmed her ballet The Black Doll for distribution in French-speaking Africa and witnessed performances by artistic ensembles from across the African Diaspora and the world.

In 1967 Santa Cruz returned to Lima and founded a group of her own, Black Theatre and Dances of Peru. With her young protégés, she continued to recreate Black Peruvian dances and to produce plays and songs about Black life in Peru’s theatres and abroad. Her pathbreaking work for the stage explored themes including sexual relationships between enslaved Black women and White slaveowners, environmental stewardship, colorism, structural racism in music notation, the stigma of Black hair, and dancing while Black. Importantly, she developed her technique, “Discovery and Development of Internal Rhythm,” at first to reawaken Black consciousness among her company members and later for use in her rhythm workshops for diverse participants around the world. In 1968, the Peruvian government named Santa Cruz as director of the delegation that represented the nation at the Cultural Olympics in Mexico City. Under Peru’s military Revolution (1968-1980), Santa Cruz broke new ground for Black women with unprecedented government appointments as director of the Center for Folkloric Arts (1969-1972) and founding director of the National Folklore Ensemble (1973-1982)—despite protests based on her race.

After Peru’s Revolution ended, Santa Cruz bid her country adios and moved to Pittsburgh. As a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama, she presided over a rhythm class from 1982 to 1999 (including a semester at Moscow Art Theatre in 1995) that profoundly impacted her students, many of whom are now eminent and award-winning performing artists and educators. Striking a blow for Black representation, in 1984 Santa Cruz recruited every Black student in CMU’s Drama Department (only seven, including a young Blair Underwood) to perform in a show she directed at La MaMa in New York. Her rhythm workshops continued to attract worldwide demand, and she returned to Paris for an invited residency at rehearsals for acclaimed director Peter Brook’s controversial intercultural production of The Mahabharata. She gave talks at arts medicine congresses and international gatherings of leading Black scholars, artists, and activists, notably in a panel with Maya Angelou and Lelia Gonzalez that illuminated Black women’s inequality at the historic 1987 Négritude Conference where Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire reunited. One of few Black professors at Carnegie Mellon, Santa Cruz won her battle for tenure, despite scarce access to tenured positions for Afro-Latinx and African American faculty. After she retired in Lima in the 2000s, she published her book Rhythm: The Eternal Organizer and founded the Rhythm-Balance-Health Institute.

Today Victoria Santa Cruz is widely regarded as a pillar of Black feminism in Peru, Latin America, and Afro-Latinx communities worldwide, in large part because of the impact of her poem “Me Gritaron ‘¡Negra!’.” Shortly after she left Peru in the 1980s, the burgeoning Afro-Peruvian women’s movement claimed “Me Gritaron ‘¡Negra!’” as its central text. In the twenty-first century, the Internet fueled an explosion of interest in a riveting 1978 film clip of Santa Cruz performing her poem, excerpted from Denmark-based Odin Teatret’s documentary film Victoria – Black and Woman. During the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder, Madonna included the clip alongside footage of Angela Davis, Nina Simone, and Shirley Chisolm in her Instagram video montage “Beautiful, intelligent Black Women who have and will continue to Rise Up!” The film clip also appeared in Omilani Alarcon’s award-winning documentary film Latinegras and in the traveling museum exhibit “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985.” Performing artists, children, and political activists around the world have interpreted Santa Cruz’s poem in many languages. In a dramatic illustration of the poem’s social significance, in 2014 thirty Afro-Latin American women from different countries stormed the stage at the 13^th Feminist Encuentro of Latin America and the Caribbean and recited “Me Gritaron ‘¡Negra!’” to protest the exclusion and tokenism of Black women.

Notwithstanding the milestones she accomplished, Victoria Santa Cruz did not identify as a feminist or activist. Championing individual transformation and self-knowledge, she publicly expressed disdain toward “-isms,” labels, and “so-called revolutionaries,” and she advised members of Black Theatre and Dances of Peru to steer clear of emerging Black political organizations in Lima in the 1960s and ’70s.¹ On one television program, Santa Cruz made this revealing statement: “Often people say to me, ‘Victoria, the way you speak, are you a Marxist?’ And I say, ‘Before Marx, there was rhythm!’”² A decade after she composed “Me Gritaron ‘¡Negra!’” she insisted that her poem did not express racial protest and had “no color,” applying equally to all dominated peoples.³ She urged all human beings to rise up “without looking for someone to blame. Because there is no revolution without evolution!”

If Santa Cruz did not call herself an activist, she identified as a fighter for freedom and unity on the battleground of life. “I began fighting for the Black race,” she announced in her later years, “and today I fight for the human family—to which I belong.”⁴ She fiercely insisted that Black Peruvians must be included as Peruvians whose indisputable humanity was universal. As for women’s rights, she affirmed, “I am fully in agreement with giving Woman her space, preparing her in every way to fight shoulder to shoulder with Man.”⁵ In her struggle against racism, oppression, ignorance, divisiveness, and other social illnesses that persist as urgent problems today, she zealously believed in rhythm’s healing power. She had discovered secrets, she said, emanating from a rhythmic sensibility linked with Africa and its descendants but available to the world. When she realized the “cosmic” relevance of her African-based knowledge, she declared, “That day I became free!” Her rhythmic practice and fight for freedom repeatedly led to dynamic encounters with Black internationalism, Cold War cultural diplomacy, spiritual growth movements, intercultural theatre, and global fascination with “African rhythm.”

In the years following her death, Victoria Santa Cruz’s rhythmic poem went viral, but her broader global impact seemed to fade from public memory. Thankfully, a flurry of recent activity, bolstered by the Peruvian government’s commemoration of Santa Cruz’s Centennial in 2022 and designation of her life’s work as national cultural heritage in 2024, is recovering her “legacy for humanity.” Among these posthumous homages are exhibitions, books of previously unpublished writings, critical essays, panels, films, television specials, live performances, a mural of Victoria Santa Cruz and Aretha Franklin at the U.S. Embassy in Peru, an award-winning play about Victoria and Nicomedes Santa Cruz produced at GALA Hispanic Theatre in Washington DC, and the Victoria Santa Cruz Fulbright grant. The resulting public archive will enable future generations to honor and remember Victoria Santa Cruz’s fight for the human family.