Infrastructure and Agency: Negotiating Road Conscription in Peru, 1920–30

In 1920, the government of Augusto B. Leguía introduced a nation-wide policy of conscripción vial (transport conscription) in Peru. All men between the ages of 18 and 60 had to provide 12 days of free labor to build roads. Over the next decade, millions of Peruvians were conscripted to build over 18 thousand kilometers of new roads. Following Leguia’s fall from power in 1930, Peru’s new leaders ended transport conscription and denounced the practice as one of the dictatorship’s most abusive policies. Few historians have challenged this narrative leaving little understanding about the social consequences of transport conscription in Peru. This paper revisits the history of transport conscription, by examining its history in the region of Ancash. While transport conscription was certainly an imposition on locals, the case of Ancash shows that it was much more complex and responsive to local social conditions than previously believed. Initially, the Peruvian state’s road construction in Ancash started slowly because urban communities effectively resisted conscription. As a result, road construction increasingly relied on rural Indigenous communities. These rural communities did not passively accept this fate. Instead, rural Indigenous communities would use their high rates of participation in road construction to leverage their own demands on the Peruvian state win recognition and protection for their lands at levels previously-unseen in Ancash’s history. Because roads in Ancash created networks between rural and urban residents in the region, we see how these communities exerted agency not just in reaction to the state, but to each other. We see that, while Leguía’s transport conscription policies may have begun as a top-down-state infrastructure project, it created new infrastructure – both physical and political – for rural and urban communities to assert their agency.