In June, 1980, the Los Masis folk group founded the Masis Cultural Center with the mission of preserving and disseminating the cultural heritage of the region.

 

In this way, the musical education which the cultural center has carried out for 39 years, seeks to give children and teenagers  a cultural identity through providing an open home and place to foster positive personal and social development.

 

Many of them are young people and  descendants of the area’s first urban migration. Now the majority of this children live on the outskirts of the city where there is an intercultural clash between the rural and the urban, which often causes deep problems in their personal development.

 

Through folk music, the teenagers who are playing, singing and dancing in the youth group “Los Q’arapanzas” receive a complete education that transmits community values ??according to the Andean vision.

 

In addition to its musical training and academic support Los Masis Cultural Center has become a center for the diffusion of social values an has receive visits from researchers an musicians from around the world. Together with the material collected in their own field research, Los Masis has collaborated in a wide repertoire of diverse Andean musical rhythms and styles which has formed the model for which they teach their students.