“Looking to the Government”: Politics, Citizenship, and Indigeneity in the Peasant Struggle in Ayacucho, Peru, 1940–60

Focusing on the highland Quechua communities of Huanta and La Mar, Ayacucho, this paper explores indigenous political and legal struggles for land and their mobilization against the owners of landed estates between 1940 and 1960. It seeks to understand how people's idea of the government was constructed and became a political identity in their relationship with the state and in their struggle against the “Hacendados' Law.” Beginning in the 1930s many indigenous leaders traveled to Lima, seeking government support and official recognition for their villages. Only in the 1960s, however, did their efforts finally receive some attention. Fernando Belaúnde and his administration endorsed their mobilization and struggle for land, resulting in the repossession of communal indigenous properties in many regions of the country. In this critical moment, people in the highland communities who regained their land identified with the political notion of government, and Belaúnde secured a place in the people's memory as the president who hit the Hacendados hard. Local politics and memories also became powerful tools for the visualization of indigenous actions. Indeed, varying forms of local politics, as well as languages of citizenship and ethnicity, shaped what became one of the most important peasant mobilizations of the 1960s. But this process of political articulation remains unfinished, as many of peoples' claims to recognition did not succeed. The idea of “government,” then—as viewed through a cultural and linguistic lens—is an expression of the specific manifestation of the state in time and space. It is a concrete presence that conflicts with the state's lack of recognition and its partial presence, and shapes the contradictory, ambiguous and conflictive relationships between the state and the indigenous communities throughout the 20th century.