1 Citation: Salas Carreño, Guillermo. 2020. “Intangible heritage and the indigenization of politics in the Peruvian Andes: the dispute over the political party appropriation of the pablito/ukuku dancer”. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2020.1796316 Intangible heritage and the indigenization of politics in the Peruvian Andes: The dispute over the political party appropriation of the pablito/ukuku dancer Guillermo Salas Carreño Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Abstract This article analyses the opposition of the Council of Pilgrim Nations of Lord Quyllurit’i to the appropriation of the pablito/ukuku dancer by the Kausachun Cusco Political Movement during the 2014 Cusco municipal elections as part of a process of indigenization of politics in the Peruvian Andes. Quyllurit’i is the largest pilgrimage in the Peruvian Andes, recently included in the List of Intangible Heritage of Humanity. The pablito/ukuku dancers are crucial mediating between Lord Quyllurit’i –a Christ painted over a rock– and Apu Qulqipunku, a glacier closely related to the shrine. The opposition of the Council of Nations to Kausachun appropriation of the pablito/ukuku as well as the increasing electoral appeal of indigenous symbols are shaped by the confluence of two concurring processes: first, the democratization of the regional society partly due to the rural-urban migration and the 1979 instauration of universal suffrage; second, the global emergence of indigeneity and its instruments and the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. While intangible heritage is closely related to neoliberal forms of governmentality, it has strengthened the Council of Nations in its organic and implicit indigeneity, and has even pushed it to an instance of explicit indigenous identification. Keywords: Andes; cultural appropriation; elections; indigeneity; intangible heritage; pilgrimage Introduction This article analyzes the dispute around the pablito/ukuku dancer between the Consejo de Naciones Peregrinas del Señor de Qoyllurit’i (Council of Pilgrim Nations of Lord Quyllurit ’i, from now on Council of Nations) and the Kausachun Cusco political party (from now on Kausachun) during the 2014 municipal elections in Cusco, Peru. This dispute is part of a larger process of the indigenization of politics in the Cusco region; understanding this one debate can shed light on the broader trends taking place. As has been repeatedly stated, there is not a strong claim of indigeneity in the Peruvian Andes compared with Ecuador, Bolivia or the Peruvian Amazon (Degregori 1993; García and Lucero 2004; Huarcaya 2015; Pajuelo 2006). However, this evaluation has been shifting, and the region no longer appears so exceptional (Rousseau and Morales Hudon 2017). Recent research on indigeneity and politics in the Peruvian Andes has paid attention to the ways in which ethnic identification is starting to emerge in contexts of social protest, especially in relation to extractive