The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village’s Way with Writing

Seven: Village and Diaspora as Deterritorialized Library

seven d Village and Diaspora as Deterritorialized Library In the dusty flea markets of central Lima, some low-end book dealers offer stacks of obscure publications from the country’s provinces, towns, and villages. These catchall volumes of local lore come from job printers in central Lima. They are contracted by villagers or townspeople who promote them as festival souvenirs, civic publicity, or political campaign favors. Such print productions exist at the farthest edges of the global print sphere. They rarely show copyright information. They usually have no isbn numbers, no recognized publishers, and no entries in union catalogues . Most never appear in ‘‘proper’’ bookstores. Libraries— even the greatest Latin Americanist collections—have only samplings of such literature. Scholars cite them sparingly if at all. Librarians refer to them as ‘‘gray imprints.’’ But they are treasures in the communities whose lives they depict. In this chapter, we will consider a range of print works which reflect the orbit of vernacular and provincial writing so closely that many of its contents are hard for outsiders to understand . Just about all Andean provinces generate such print∞ —with Huarochirí perhaps slightly more productive than most because proximity to Lima makes presses accessible—and all set high value on them. Rural villages, of course, do not have printing facilities of their own. But since migration of villagers into the city of Lima began after the Second World War, and especially since city-bound migration surged from the 1960s onward, villages have ceased to live 262 | Chapter 7 as remote, self-sufficient territorial enclaves in the mountains. Every highland village, Tupicocha being quite typical in this regard, now consists of its resident peasantry plus an elastic web of its ‘‘children’’ who have worked their way into the city of Lima and then cities abroad. Indeed, villages might not even be able to sustain themselves were it not for the fact that virtually every family has members in the capital able to help sell products, remit cash, speak for kinspeople in the orbits of business and officialdom, and guide children toward opportunities better than the economically retreating agropastoral economy can provide. And ex-peasant families in the city in turn depend upon their home villages to supplement what may actually be less than living wages, by furnishing shipments of food. They also depend on their at-home relatives to keep using and thereby defend their inherited land rights. Since the 1980s ex-villagers and children of villagers have increasingly taken off for richer countries in the Southern Cone, North America, and Europe. Today, the web stretching from any high-altitude herding village is likely to reach Buenos Aires, Madrid, Milan, Dallas, or Sydney. This partnership between a core Andean territory and a durable web of diaspora ‘‘children’’ established in urban space gives birth, village by village , to ‘‘provincial societies.’’ These clubs provide structures of leadership and fiduciary channels linking country and city. Their number is unknown but probably in the thousands. Certainly they rank among the main civil-society achievements of modern Peru. They range in scope from small societies which band together the ‘‘children’’ of a single village (like the above-mentioned Tupicochan society, currently called the Association of Tupicochanos Resident in Lima), through provincial societies proper, to large bodies named after whole departments. They are formal corporations which write internal statutes, elect officers, and hold treasuries . Their festive fundraising gatherings include bullfights, ‘‘folkloric’’ dances, and soccer matches and chicken barbecues in the outer boroughs. The larger the scale of the society, the more its leadership tends to embrace and reproduce the homeland’s elite stratum of wealthy landholders, merchants, and professionals. To some degree (for example in sporting tourneys), smaller-scope societies federate within larger-scope ones to produce segmented pyramidal organizations. But in a society riven by bitter class differences, as well as horizontal rivalries among villages, many village-level societies keep a distance from the palatial clubs of those who were seen as oppressors in the times before Agrarian reform (that is, up to Village and Diaspora as Library | 263 the early 1970s). The provincial societies are not exempt from exploitation , of course; some villagers suspect that the traders who sponsor village events profit more by them than the village does. Yet no village thinks it can do without them. For innumerable ex-peasant families, the small homeland is precious in several ways. To...