Dénle duro que no siente: Poder y transgresión en el Perú republicano (review)

The influence of Foucault is pervasive in this collection of essays written over the last 20 years. They show great coherence studying the intersections between social history, labor history, and subaltern studies, looking at power through the lens of those who are oppressed by it. No less important is the inspiration provided by Peruvian historian Alberto Flores Galindo, who noted that understanding the way domestic employees and criminals were treated by society was key to unlocking the reasons behind the human rights abuses seen in Peru in the 1980s. The way in which the state reacts is seen as crucial, because if the state becomes an accomplice of this abuse, “excesses” become structural. Crime and punishment are for Aguirre social constructions that need to be deconstructed. By doing that, as well as by studying slavery, he aims to provide a voice to the voiceless in order to build a more inclusive society.

The first section of the book deals with slavery, using a novel approach to a social practice that has received much academic attention lately. This is achieved by locating slavery at the uneasy crossroads between forced labor and incarceration. Herein lies one of the most interesting ideas of the book: the way in which coercion and productivity were so closely intertwined in Latin America, and remained so even after independence, when citizens were being created by including some as much as by excluding many. Indians replaced slaves as servants after abolition, and just as slaves were punished by being forced to work in bakeries, after they were freed, afro-descendants were constructed as dangerous “criminal” types. Hence, both social groups were successfully excluded from citizenship in the same way that Haitians and afro-Peruvians have been excluded from the larger narratives of independence and the struggle for freedom.

The five essays that comprise the second part study crime and incarceration, paying attention to prison modernizers and criminals together with the most often overlooked in these types of studies: children, adolescents, and women. Aguirre approaches them by using both vignettes that illustrate particular cases very fully, and a much larger analytical framework that seeks to illuminate the relationship between individuals and society. It is in this section that Aguirre is most successful at bringing in the faces of those who are so often known only as statistics. He is able to humanize even those who live in the most abject misery, who are denied the most basic rights, and who are conceived as the most evil.

After such a tour de force, the last three essays seem a little of an afterthought. They are solid and invite the reader to think about the connections between the study of work and the study of criminality, but they lack the depth of the previous chapters, which went into such rich detail on the ways in which individuals and the state interact. Useful as it is to have an overview of the study of jail and society in Latin America, or the social history of republican Peru, these essays pale next to the previous explorations of the duel of two famous small-time criminals; how the care of women prisoners was contracted out to nuns, as they were deemed to be less dangerous and potentially more productive as servants; and the way in which children were so ill-served by the very services that were supposed to redeem them. As Aguirre himself mentions, understanding the way in which a society treats its criminals is crucial to understanding power in that society. This is why his book is so engrossing and so timely, because this is a debate that is still ongoing today, when children are still being done a disservice by the justice system, and afro-descendants are still being constructed as criminals.