The Rural State

In many ways, Ondores is the modern-day counterpart of colonial Huarochirí, a highland community whose official creation, recognition, reform, and rupture have been vividly historicized using an amazing range of sources. Javier Puente brilliantly reveals the processes of conciliation and struggle with the Peruvian state that both formed and destabilized agrarian communities and peasant livelihoods in the Central Andes—in the process, revealing the inherently local nature of Peru’s devastating internal armed conflict. This work deserves to be read widely by anyone interested in the political challenges of rural existence and changing meanings of indigeneity and community during the twentieth century.

— Gregory T. Cushman, University of Arizona, author of Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History

Based on field research, local and national archives, and abundant oral testimonies, Javier Puente’s scholarship is deep and impressive. His fine-grained analysis of these sources combines multiple perspectives to shape an examination of broad sociopolitical patterns from the locus of a peasant village. Rather than being coastal or Lima-centric, or even Cuzco-centric, The Rural State is anchored in the story of a forgotten village that was swept into the larger currents of national and global change.

— Brooke Larson, SUNY, Stony Brook, author of Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910

The Rural State is a welcome contribution to the agrarian history of Peru. Zooming in and out of the local, regional, and national, Javier Puente sheds new light on key processes that shaped Peru’s twentieth-century history, including the rediscovery of the sierra as a region with economic potential; the creation of Indigenous communities as legal entities visible to the state; the expansion of agrarian capitalism and the modernization projects that accompanied it; the ambiguous impact of military reformism and top-down agrarian reform; the Shining Path insurgency and its devastating effects on communal life; and the new dawn of neoliberalism and its transformation of sierra landscapes and livelihoods. Historians of Latin America and agrarian studies scholars will find much of interest in this book.

— Paulo Drinot, University College London, author of The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s–1950s

[An] impressive new book...[Puente] tells a dynamic story about historical transformation driven from above and below: how rural, colonial pueblos in Peru’s Central Sierra became legally recognized comunidades and how Indigenous peoples became campesinos over the course of the 20th century through different forms of state intervention...This is an intensely local community history that simultaneously integrates regional, national, and international scales into its historical scope...An evocative, rich and meticulously researched study.

— NACLA

The Rural State makes an important contribution to our understanding of the evolution and dynamics of rural statecraft (seen here as a knowledge-practice) in twentieth-century Peru. The long-term arc traced by the book, combined with the broad and finely interpreted source work, is the real strength of the book...It will make profitable reading for historians of Peru and Latin America as well as scholars of peasants, indigenismo, and rural policies more broadly.

— H-Environment

Through its unique perspective, The Rural State joins a burgeoning category of scholarship that takes account of rural politics, recognising often ignored rural communities as central arenas of nation-state building...The Rural State successfully draws a through-line across the major events of twentieth-century Peru, arguing that the countryside and the state have maintained an intimate—and often antagonistic—relationship that shaped national history, whose lasting frictions lead to the violence of the century’s final decades...The Rural State is ambitious, novel, and clear. I highly recommend it to any scholar searching for a new lens with which to consider nation-state building, development, and rural politics in Latin America.

— LSE Review of Books

The Rural State also allows us to reflect on the need to research the making of both comunidades and the state via interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies. This book will appeal not only to history and social science scholars but more broadly to those interested in understanding interactions between peasant politics and the Peruvian state.

— Hispanic American Historical Review

Like all good studies, The Rural State opens new lines of enquiry too . . . Scholars interested in Peruvian history, indigeneity and agrarian studies will learn much from Puente’s book. This reader certainly did.

— Journal of Latin American Studies