A feature of the colonial past in Latin America was corporatism, a form of organization where the individual self was secondary to the membership in a group (a guild, a city, a university, a brotherhood). Historiography has studied the problematic nature of the myth of the liberal reforms that “broke” these colonial corporations, especially in relation to claims to land rights in rural areas (i.e. peasant and indigenous communities). Not much attention, however, has been paid to urban areas. Was the project of individualization of citizenship and land rights more successful in cities? Taking the case of the city of Lima, Peru, this project begins to answer this question saying that no, that there is evidence of the persistence of corporations that played a significant role in the development of the city during the 19th and well into the 20th century. Using the experience of civil and religious associations of Black, Asian and Andean population in the city, the paper posits that land rights were claimed and enjoyed in a much more corporatist fashion in urban Peru than what liberal political projects and their laws envisioned.
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