Victoria Santa Cruz was born October 27th, 1922 in Lima, Peru and a Afro-Peruvian choreographer, composers, and activist. She is called the “the mother of Afro-Peruvian dance and theater”. She grew up in a bilingual household, her mother only spoke Spanish but her father spoke both English and Spanish. She grew up reading Shakespeare in English and would listen to Wagner and Puccini with her family. Later on, before 1960, Victoria and her brother started a theater company named ” Cumanana”. She is most known for her famous poem “Me Gritaron Negra”. In the poem, she speaks on her own experience when she was 7 years old when she first experienced racism and it rejects Eurocentric beauty standards.
https://mx.blastingnews.com/ocio-cultura/2017/01/victoria-santa-cruz-y-l…(PC:https://mx.blastingnews.com/ocio-cultura/2017/01/victoria-santa-cruz-y-l…)
In a 2007 interview she shared that when she was a little girl, she was the only Afro-Peruvian in her friend group, she said “One day there was a little girl among them with blond hair, and she immediately said, ‘If the little black girl wants to play with us, I’ll leave.’ And I thought, ‘Who is she?’ She had just arrived and was already dictating the law. What a surprise it was when my friends told me, ‘You can leave, Victoria.’”. This experience, impacted her so much that it changed her perspective after that, she stated “That girl stimulated something in me without knowing so,” she said. “And I came to discover what it means to stand on your feet without looking for someone to blame, suffering but discovering things. I began to discover life.”
Too watch her famous poem, click on the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZBHvMaTiuU