Bricherismo in the Peruvian touristic places: the shape of gender in asymmetrical and intercultural encounters

Juliette Roguet (1)

1 CREDA - CREDA - Centre de Recherche Et de Documentation sur les Amériques - UMR 7227

Bricherismo is a phenomenon that appeared in Cusco during the 1970s, describing how Peruvian men and women seduce Western tourists so as to gain economic or symbolic benefits from them. The term “brichero” could be supposedly derived from the word “bridge”, as indeed these persons manage to enter Northern countries throughout migrations, or/and obtain benefits from the cultural and economic capital of their partners while living in Peru. Bricher@s create a dynamic of exotic imaginaries at the interstice between their social and economic ambitions and the tourists’ desires in a narcissistic perception of the Other. A bricher@, within the context of tourism, is a technician of seduction and a romantic expert in conquering travellers. These “gring@ hunters”, as they can be called, develop a folkloric “self”, constructed according to the representations of Peruvian exoticism. These encounters of seduction form a social interface in which cultural, socio-economic and sexual fantasies allow for a reading of complex power logics. This practice becomes a real job for these individuals. In a context of tourism, western visitors’ relationships with local people synthesise social markers of difference and also discrimination process in the junction point between gender, sexuality, race and class. In this paper, focus will be put on a specific male subgroup of bricheros named “waykis”. This Quechua term stands for « brother of a man », manifesting their proximity with the renovated Andean culture and the Inca heritage. These individuals characterize themselves by forging an Indian identity, which can be real or reinvented, to seduce foreigners. The Andean culture is mixed with a vast patchwork of new age elements, Waykis are part of the Neo-Indian nebula. The hybridity process elaborates an urban indigeneity: bricheros develop a “savage poetic” made to satisfy travellers’ imagination. I will propose a reflexion about femininities and masculinities, analysed in this intercultural context and asymmetrical socio-economic situations. Focusing on exoticism seduction strategies, I will present the results from the study of gender staging through social representations of alterity in a specific touristic context.

Mots clés: Peru; exoticism; fantasy; intersectionality; bricherismo; romance tourism

Domaines: Sociologie

Juliette Roguet. Bricherismo in the Peruvian touristic places: the shape of gender in asymmetrical and intercultural encounters. Alternautas, 2016. ⟨halshs-01575691⟩