Lecture by Dr. Javier Puente. “Agrarian Quests: The Search for Comunidades and Campesinos in Rural Peru."

Event Date: 

Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - 4:00pm to 6:00pm

Event Date Details: 

Wednesday January 30th, 4:00 pm HSSB 4020.

The history of twentieth-century Peru is the history of the rural countryside, its governance, and the making ofcomunidades and campesinos as foundational elements of a social, economic, and political landscape. Throughout a number of decades, domestic state powers and transnational capital turned lands and pastures into battlegrounds of ideas about labor, property, and modernization at large. In turn, clashing visions of power placed comunidades andcampesinos at the center of their responses to enduring uncertainties and anxieties on the economic exploitation and sociopolitical control of the country. Hacendados, engineers, intellectuals, corporations, political parties, the military, among others, contended and disputed the meaning of being a comunidad and a campesino. Ultimately, a civil war brought the search to a violent end, revealing the extent, limitations, and failures of the rural making of a nation-state.

 

Javier Puente holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University and currently serves as assistant professor of Andean history at the Instituto de Historia of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

 

This lecture s presented as part of the LAIS 200 graduate seminar. It is free and open to the campus community. A small reception follows the talk. Students interested in discussing further Dr. Puente’s work after the reception are encouraged to contact the LAIS Program Director at mendez@lais.ucsb.edu  to get the reading materials.

 

LAIS thanks the generous co-sponsorship of the Department of Global Studies, and the Global Environmental Justice Project to this event.