Dependence and Domination in Peru’s Southern Andes

This paper theorizes the shifting historical and social conditions shaping ideas about property and experiences with domination in postcolonial Peru. It brings together ethnographic findings about contemporary conflicts over mining and 20th century archives from Peru’s Fuero Agrario (Agrarian Tribunal) and a provincial judiciary in the Southern Mining Corridor to probe connections between Peru’s unfinished Agrarian Reform and contemporary forms of extractive capitalism. These archives contain legal complaints brought over land, labor, and cattle theft between indentured Quechua residents and their hacienda overlords in areas that are the subject of high-profile disputes over industrial mining today. As the Southern Andes has become an exceptionally lucrative site for capital-intensive mineral industry, changes to the physical and economic landscape breathe new life into the long-standing tensions between peasants and former hacendados over ownership of land, labor, and animals. Now neighbors, both peasants and hacendado descendants are navigating a changing market for peasant-held lands, growing peasant political power, and corporate dispossession. To understand these shifts, this paper explores peasant genres of claim-making, experiences with exploitation and domination, and patterns of dispossession from the hacienda period to the mining present.