The rural state : making comunidades, campesinos, and conflict in Peru's Central Sierra

On the eve of the twentieth century, Peru seemed like a profitable and yet fairly unexploited country. Both foreign capitalists and local state makers envisioned how remote highland areas were essential to a sustainable national economy. Mobilizing Andean populations lay at the core of this endeavor. In his groundbreaking book, __The Rural State__, Javier Puente uncovers the surprising and overlooked ways that Peru’s rural communities formed the political nation-state that still exists today. Puente documents how people living in the Peruvian central sierra in the twentieth century confronted emerging and consolidating powers of state and capital and engaged in an ongoing struggle over increasingly elusive subsistence and autonomies. Over the years, policy, politics, and social turmoil shaped the rural, mountainous regions of Peru until violent unrest, perpetrated by the Shining Path and other revolutionary groups, unveiled the extent, limits, and fractures of a century-long process of rural state formation. Examining the conflicts between one rural community and the many iterations of statehood in the central sierra of Peru, __The Rural State__ offers a fresh perspective on how the Andes became la sierra, how pueblos became comunidades, and how indígenas became campesinos. "Javier Puente studies rural political organization and how it intersects with the environment in Peru over the course of nearly a full century (he ends in 1990, just as Alberto Fujimori becomes president and leads an intensely brutal and ultimately successful military force against the Shining Path and MRTA rebels). Puente is particularly interested in understanding the surprising and overlooked ways that Peru as a nation-state was formed, not just in the capital of Lima but also in the countryside. Puente focuses on the role of land, sheep, and campenización, the process by which agrarian reform radically alters social relations of production in the countryside, to help scholars understand how policy, politics, and social turmoil shaped the rural, mountainous regions of Peru. He considers the ways these regions were, by the standards of the early twentieth century, relatively profitable places despite their physical remoteness and lack of industry and how the local communities negotiated control of their economies after increasing interest from the federal state. He continues through the twentieth century as these struggles between national and regional forces come into sharper focus, with a growing backdrop of violent unrest as the Shining Path and other groups find different methods for challenging the national agenda"-- Provided by publisher