LA CHICHERA y Other Hits is an act of cultural memory, a celebration of summer, and a ritual for collective healing. Through the story of purple corn and the chichera, the project honors ancestral knowledge, the labor of women, and the forms of resistance carried through food, music, and communal gathering.
La chichera is the woman who makes chicha, an ancestral fermented drink made from corn and rooted in Quechua traditions. Traditionally prepared and shared during agricultural celebrations and rituals of hospitality, chicha has long served as a space for exchange, care, and the transmission of knowledge across generations and communities.
Purple corn, the main ingredient of chicha, has a long history in the Andes and can be traced back to pre-Hispanic cultures of northern Peru. Centuries later, the internal migrations that transformed Lima during the second half of the twentieth century gave rise to chicha music, a hybrid genre blending Andean huayno, Colombian cumbia, and electric guitar, becoming an expression of identity, adaptation, and cultural resistance.
Developed in Lisbon, the project proposed an evening of storytelling, performance, music, and communal food to trace the cultural journey of chicha and purple corn. Through collective acts of preparation, listening, and conversation, participants reflected on the relationships between food, migration, memory, and identity.
The project functioned as a living homage to chicha morada and the communities that continue to sustain these practices. Through gestures of hospitality, participation, and collective care, it invited participants to recognize food as a vessel of cultural memory and a tool for imagining more sustainable, connected, and rooted ways of being.