“Agrarian Quests: The Search for Comunidades and Campesinos in Rural Peru.”

The history of twentieth-century Peru is the history of the rural countryside, its governance, and the making of comunidades and campesinos as foundational elements of a social, economic, and political landscape. Throughout a number of decades, domestic state powers and transnational capital turned lands and pastures into battlegrounds of ideas about labor, property, and modernization at large. In turn, clashing visions of power placed comunidades and campesinos at the center of their responses to enduring uncertainties and anxieties on the economic exploitation and sociopolitical control of the country. Hacendados, engineers, intellectuals, corporations, political parties, the military, among others, contended and disputed the meaning of being a comunidad and a campesino. Ultimately, a civil war brought the search to a violent end, revealing the extent, limitations, and failures of the rural making of a nation-state.

Javier Puente holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University and currently serves as assistant professor of Andean history at the Instituto de Historia of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

This lecture presented as part of the LAIS 200 graduate seminar. It is free and open to the campus community. A small reception follows the talk. Students interested in discussing further Dr. Puente’s work after the reception are encouraged to contact the LAIS Program Director at mendez@lais.ucsb.edu to get the reading materials.

*LAIS thanks the generous co-sponsorship of the Departments of History and Global Studies, and the Global Environmental Justice Project to this event.