The Lima Reader: History, Culture, Politics by Carlos Aguirre, Charles F. Walker (review)

Lima, the capital city of Peru, is among the most populated cities in Latin America and the world. The city has approximately 11 million inhabitants, more than a third of the national population. Its vast geographical extent, its manifold socioeconomic identities, and its entangled cultural practices express a combination of political centralization, economic disenfranchisements, and racialized segregation as dominant features in the making of contemporary Peru. Editors Carlos Aguirre and Charles F. Walker offer a much-needed overview of the creation of this most important coastal city of the Andes. The Lima Reader presents a series of unpublished or not previously translated primary sources and excerpted literature that reveal the multiplicity of forces that converged to shape this contemporary metropolis.

The book follows a fairly conventional structure that parallels the standard periodization of Peruvian history: pre-Columbian, early colonial, late colonial, the national period, and the contemporary years. However, a more detailed observation reveals two important interventions in the history and historiography of Lima. First, The Lima Reader makes a fleeting but evocative mention of the pre-Columbian past of the city, challenging a dominant assumption that associates the “foundation” of Lima with the arrival of the Pizarros from Spain. The valley of Limaq preceded the Ciudad de los Reyes and provided an enduring name for centuries to come. Second, the book also refers to competing discourses—one nostalgic, the other young and iconoclastic—that are used to contrast the city’s romanticized past with its decadent present. Every section of The Lima Reader includes carefully framed introductions that provide context for the primary source documents.

Considering the ambitious aim of this volume of summarizing more than five centuries of historical developments in a few hundred pages, it might be pointless to mention omissions of any sort. However, a few editorial choices deserve more scrutiny in the spirit of constructive criticism. Aside from a brief reference to the pre-Hispanic legacy of Lima, the first section presents an image of an early colonial city that was almost exclusively propelled by religious affairs. Friars and nuns become the protagonists of a foundational period that merged political formations, social destructuration, demographic decimation, and every other imperial dynamic that integrated the Americas with the rest of the world. Pre-Colombian peoples are noticeably absent from the documents. In comparison, the diverse selection for the late colonial period—Bourbon Lima—offers a glimpse of the ethnographically sensitive discourses that measured, described, and portrayed Lima during the eighteenth century.

The selected readings for the late colonial period, however—titled “The Many Limas”—seems to be a medley of every historical development after the desborde popular, the transformation of Lima through internal migrations and displacements. Seemingly buying into the traditional argument of Peruvian anthropologist José Matos Mar, whose seminal work is excerpted, this section considers the dramatic changes of the 1940s as attributable to a historical demi-urge that shaped outcomes as diverse as the construction of working-class neighborhoods, the invasion of peripheral lands and the rise of pueblos jóvenes, the emergence of evangelism as a pivotal cult, the urban unfolding of the Internal War on Terror, and the ambivalent contemporary dynamics of segregation and cultural nationalization. This section ultimately blends developments from very different decades of the city that could have been further parsed in a number of ways. One obvious possibility would be to use the 1968 military coup led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado as a turning point in the history of the city.

The vast majority of documents included in The Lima Reader have not been available in English before. Most of them have been elegantly translated by Jorge Bayona, whose linguistic and historical sensibility proved to be essential for this volume. While every document seems to have been carefully selected, several of the editorial choices are curious. The selection from Margarita’s Wedding Dress, by Ricardo Palma, a romanticizing author whose work could perfectly fit in the section on nostalgia, sharply contrasts...