Huerequeque: Actor – Author
Felipe Arturo
2016

Huerequeque, who answers by the name Enrique Boháquez de Liguori, arrived to Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, in 1945 at the age of 15 years old. Since then, Huerequeque has embarked in multiple extraction economies and jungle commerce – like gold – leather or the wood, in rivers distant from the urban centers.

In the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, Huerequeque moved, with his family, to the city of Iquitos, where he established the Huerequeque Bar at Nanay’s harbour.

The experience on the rivers and villages of the Peruvian jungles have allowed Huerequeque to develop a poetic and narrative work which, until today, hasn’t yet come to be published, resting delicately, this way, in its memory and in some manuscripts and transcriptions already in deterioration. Thus, his literary work is essentially transmitted orally to visitors that occasionally attend his Bar.

In 1972 Huerequeque participated, for the first time, in the production of a film by coordinating in the construction of a boat over the top of a tree, for a scene of Aguirre, from the German film director Werner Herzog. In 1977 Herzog returned to Iquitos to film a second film in the Amazon, being it Fitzcarraldo. In the film script there was a character called Huerequeque whose role was of a boat’s drunken chef, who knew how to translate the jungle’s and indigenous world’s language and customs.

Initially, the role was to be interpreted by a Mexican comedian called Resortes. However, after several problems in the production of the film because of his interpretation, Resortes was withdrawn from the film and Huerequeque was hired for interpreting the role inspired on himself.

After the participation in Fitzcarraldo, Huerequeque came to enjoy some local notoriety and, with that, many local visitors started to be headed towards the Huerequeque Bar in order to listen the film stories and about the time when there was the rubber boom in Iquitos.

Paradoxically, its film personification, by interpreting himself, managed to make Huerequeque a recognised actor, overshadowing the recognition of its own narrative production.

The idea of this presentation is to suggest the confrontation of these two Huerequeque roles, as an actor and author, using the glass cabinet as a museumlike element.

At the front of the glass cabinet, over a shelf there is a presentation of a video composed by frames of Huerequeque’s appearances in Fitzcarraldo.

At the back of the glass cabinet, the projected video corresponds to three documentary versions of the poem Amazon.