"Progress" in the Countryside: Agrarian Reform and Other Proposals of Development in Central Peru, 1942–68

This paper discusses different proposals of state-sponsored development in the Peruvian countryside during the Cold War era. Focusing on the central highlands of Peru - a core region that experienced both American corporate mining and increasingly capital-intensive ranching – this work argues that the Peruvian countryside became a battleground for ideas about industrialism, labor, race, and citizenship. Among these ideas of rural development, agrarian reform did play a remarkable role. However, the discussion about the structure of land ownership was just one among many projects that aimed for the “integration” of not only the indigenous into the Peruvian nationality, but more concretely of the community-based production into the state structure. This paper will explore discourses at the policy making and visual levels concerning such “integration”. Archival pieces from the Indigenous Affairs section of the Ministry of Development, the National Office of Agrarian Reform, and the Council of Wool Industry will be of particular relevance for the former. Social photography will provide the visual dimension of the “integration” discourse and its appropriation, as well as the role that private entrepreneurship played in advancing development within an era of capitalist expansion. Two conclusions will be drawn from our discussion. First, indigenous peoples grouped in communities became aware of the advantage of adapting to the changing socio-economic environments produced by these discourses of integration, and in seeking to retain autonomy –political, social, and economic – found ways of navigating them to gain a better position vis-à-vis the state. Second, that the project of state making and capitalist expansion put the politics of production – meaning the capitalization of community production and its centralization – at the center of the national debate, a debate that became increasingly influenced by hemispherical, often US-sponsored notions of rural development and the advancement of westernized notions of citizenship.