“Desde la distancia se vé con tristeza y lágrima a nuestro país”: vignettes of displacement—three periods, three places

Three periods when the Peruvian people who refer to themselves as Huasicanchinos/as were displaced are discussed. The experiences of displaced people in each period are presented, and these are set in the differing conditions of the political economy of each period

1. Names have been changed or not in accordance with informants’ preferences. All photographs are by the author.

2. ‘Settlement’: (1) the act or state of being settled, (2) a collection of dwellings forming a community, and (3) a community formed by members of a group. Collins English Dictionary Complete and Unabridged 6th Ed. 2003 [there are seven additional entries].

3. I use the term ‘project’ intentionally. National welfarism and neoliberalism both intertwine ideology and programme without necessarily producing the historical realities they claim will be the result of their projects.

4. Barriada was the term used for the shanty towns surrounding Lima until the mid-seventies when they were given the more positive name pueblos jovenes [young villages]. Inner city concentrated squatted settlements, usually in a space between two buildings in the downtown, were known among the migrants as coralones for which there is no English translation.

5. After first use, Spanish terms are not italicized.

6. For a discussion of the mutual influence of Guevara and key figures of Peru’s rural struggles of the sixties, Hugo Blanco, Luis de la Puente, and Hector Bejar see the interview with Ricardo Napuri at https://web.archive.org/web/20020620173045/http://www.redflag.org.uk/frontline/seven/07che.html. Accessed 15-Aug-23. Nevertheless, Degregori and Sandoval’s assessment (Degregori and Sandoval 2008: 157-8) captures best the earlier atmosphere that was the setting for Huasicancha’s struggles from 1966 to 1972. They speak of, “[T]he passive peasant and left-wing political protests in which organized Andean peasants recovered, between 1958 and 1964, hundreds of thousands of hectares of land.”

7. They elaborate: “The economy from 1948 until the end of the 1960s was the example par excellence in Latin America of that dream of orthodox development economists: an export-led system … in which the entry of foreign capital and the repatriation of profits were virtually unrestricted and in which government intervention and participation were kept to a minimum…In the 1960s Peru offered tax and investment incentives of almost unbelievable scope to national and foreign firms…” The point to be made is that, in terms of the opportunity structure with which displacement occurs, the Peruvian regime of accumulation was about as dependent as a dependent state could get and the highland rural economy the most supine sector within it.

8. For a discussion of Caesarism versus passive revolution, see Smith (2023). See also Thomas (2013).

9. In the highlands, a man’s facial hair was seen as a sign of laziness and lack of dignity. The same man finding himself selling fruit in the suburbs of Lima would often sport a moustache as a means of rendering his person more mestizo.

10. The fact that highland pastoralists would never use horses of the kind being displayed that day for their work made their display at the fiesta the more symbolic.

11. By 1990, inflation hit 7650%. Five years later, Fujimori had reduced it to 11% (Lust 202?: 14). These vast swings are just one illustration of the economic instability facing urban domestic enterprises after 1975.

12. Cuartel lit. barracks. It is likely Joel is speaking of a holding camp of some kind. Migrants I spoke to generally refer to these places as prisons.

13. In Narotzky and Smith’s (2006) work, we speak of the interlacing of small enterprises in this area much as Marshall (1923) had spoken of the special ‘industrial atmosphere’ that explained Birmingham’s success in the late nineteenth century (see Ravix 2014). The region has come to be known as ‘the Third Italy’ (as distinct from the North and the South). It is a rural landscape that is well suited to small goods carriage between firms. Huasicanchinos/as claim to draw on their familiarity with similar activities in Lima as tricycle sellers and in Huancayo as goods traders.

14. Between 1986 and 1990, the value of governmental expenditures in education diminished by 75% and went on doing so (Lust 2019: 14).

15. In 2017, Palmira worked in a hospital as a qualified nurse. A widely held belief among middle-class Italians is that Peruvians are ‘natural care-givers’. This evokes amused and cynical reflections from the Huasicanchino women and men who have these jobs. They speak of the training they gave one another in a practice with which they were no more familiar than anybody else with old and young kin.

16. In the event, Angelica didn’t immediately settle in Italy but found work in France where for 2 years she worked in the household of an elderly couple for whom she has fond memories. Soon after our conversation on the piazza, she left her job with the racist employers and, together with a cousin, joined Joël jointly running the Peruvian restaurant. Besides the three of her sons living in Varese, her eldest who was 28 in 2017 had found work in La Paz though his future was uncertain, and Juan, her third son, worked for a while in Italy but eventually decided to return to Lima’s petty trading economy in the settlement of Villa el Salvador.

17. By 1990, Samuel had gradually dispensed with most of his herds in the highland pampa. Leaving his remaining animals dispersed among relatives, he began selling fruit from an ambulant tricycle. By the time of this photo, he had no animals in Huasicancha but continued to visit annually at Fiestas Patrias and was engaged both financially and politically in the community’s ongoing reivindicación.

I acknowledge the generosity, hospitality, and kindness offered to me by the people of Huasicancha over a period of 50 years, especially Pedro and Paulina Cano and the late Grimaldo Pomayay. I am forever in their debt. In Italy, I especially thank Ramiro, Angélica, Palmira, Joel and Gavín and, in Lima, Samuel [last names withheld]. I am also grateful for the help and insights offered by Corin Sworn whose initiative it was to return to the field sites in 2013 pursuant to her show in the Scottish Pavilion, at the Venice Biennale 2013, “The Foxes.” Finally, as always, I owe an unredeemable debt for her insights and tolerance to Winnie Lem who, for her sins, urged me to write this reflection. Photographs were by the author except where stated.

Funding for research was received from the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada.

Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

   Gavin Smith

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gavin Smith.

Competing interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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From a distance one sees our country with sadness and tears [from a pamphlet produced by and for Huasicanchino/a migrants, Milan. 2012]

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