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135 I n the 1990s, political demonstrations were no longer held in downtown Lima, especially at the Plaza Mayor, which was not reclaimed by civil society until 2000 during the movement to bring down Alberto Fujimori. The absence of demonstrations reflected the control over the internal war achieved by Fujimori ’s civil dictatorship, as well as a process of “depoliticization of politics” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001) promoted by his government. Fujimori’s 1990 campaign slogan was “Honesty, Technology, and Work,” which he dramatically applied in 1992 when he shut down the congress on the grounds that the political class had proven itself inefficient and ought to be replaced by the regime’s new generation of technocrats. Work on the restoration of Lima’s Historic Center (Centro Histórico), begun during this period, also contributed to the depoliticization of public space. The restoration was part of a project by the city government undertaken in the context of UNESCO’s declaration of Lima as a Cultural Heritage Site in 1991. The heritage designation of the city center also brought developments in public policy intended to solve the problems of urban decay, overcrowding, crime, and pollution, and to create a modern infrastructure to administer, sustain, and protect the center. Moreover, the project was conceived in the context of economic policies promoting tourism as a way out of underdevelopment. It was not, however , part of a process of deindustrialization such as often figures prominently in studies, in urban anthropology, on the social and economic life of the city in the context of globalization (Low 1999, 12–14). Since Lima never was an indusPerformingCitizenship Migration,AndeanFestivals,andPublicSpacesinLima gisela CánePa I young and holmes text-5.indd 135 11/1/10 10:08 AM 136 — gisela cánepa trial city (see Golte and Adams 1987), it is difficult to argue that it has undergone a process of deindustrialization, even if there are clear signs that its recent cultural and economic development correspond to late capitalism. Having become itself an object of consumption, Lima is above all a city oriented to a consumer economy. This process implies its objectification as “scenographic sites” (Boyer, quoted in Low 1999, 16) and its conversion into heritage as an identifiable public property. In the terms of cultural capitalism, the city has been turned into an object over which players such as the state, the church, private enterprise, and cultural organizations claim symbolic or economic rights or the right to protect and oversee. Formulated in the discourses of hygiene, public safety, and cultural authenticity , the restoration project ran the gamut from the elimination of itinerant vendors to the renovation of colonial and republican buildings and the resurrection and promotion of criollo cultural traditions and festivities. The language of restoration appealed to the feelings of nostalgia among the traditional Lima elite, who had watched their city transformed by the presence of migrants, mainly from the Andean provinces, who had been arriving for the past half century. As a heritage and consumer asset, the Historic Center became a field of discourse and action through which a traditional criollo population expressed the desire both to recover the criollo or limeño character of a city overrun and transformed by migrant masses, and to guarantee their own status as original inhabitants. As part of the recovery, the square hitherto known as the Plaza de Armas was renamed the Plaza Mayor on the grounds that this was its original name. At the same time, some of the design of the plaza was restored and many streets regained their colonial names. By laying claim to a past written in the walls and streets of the center, the criollo segment of the population sought to represent itself as the native population of Lima and as the legitimate depository and custodian of the city’s heritage. However, these objectives overlooked the exclusion and marginalization of a broad migrant population that also aspired to make the city its legitimate place of residence. In this respect, the restoration project resorted to technical means to deal with what in reality was a political problem: the struggle of groups of differing origins to legitimately occupy, manage , and serve as the custodians of public space in the city. During the same period that political demonstrations were banned from the center of Lima, the Plaza Mayor and the streets surrounding it were periodically occupied, although not without first overcoming certain difficulties, by processions and parades of dancers put on by Andean migrants to honor the...

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