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TWO: To Venture Out: Intercommunity Relations and Conflict
- The University of North Carolina Press
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c h a p t e r 2 To Venture Out Intercommunity Relations and Conflict I was researching in the Regional Archive of Ayacucho when I got an urgent call from Julián. He said that he had checked on seating for the Chuschi combi (shuttle), which we were supposed to take the next morning. Since Fiestas Patrias (Independence Day celebrations) were around the corner, the seats were filling up fast; we needed to get our tickets right then and there. I dropped everything and caught a cab to pick up Julián at his CEISA (Center for Social Research of Ayacucho) office. When we arrived at the station—a small garage big enough to fit one van, Julián nudged me and nodded toward the lone graffiti on the wall: “Ojecuna.” It took me a moment to register that the writing on the wall was an alternative spelling of the Quechua word Occekuna, meaning “darkies.” Occe was the word that kept coming up in the written historical record whenever the Chuschinos wanted to insult the Quispillacctinos . The word has a double meaning. The salt that is native to Quispillaccta is known for its murky tint. But as many a Chuschino would tell us with a wry smile, the Quispillacctinos were simply more dark-skinned than they, an observation that my own eyes could never quite confirm. For the Chuschinos, then, the Quispillacctinos were a people as darkly complected as the salt that crystallized in their own mountains.1 This chapter explores the sources of intercommunity conflict in mid-twentieth-century Ayacucho. The first section overviews the historical context in which these conflicts took place. The second section reconstructs the historic rivalry between Chuschi and Quispillaccta, a conflict understood by indigenous villagers to be an interethnic struggle for control over land, livestock, women, and religious symbols. Turning from Chuschi to Huaychao, the final section shows that the Iquichano to venture out • 63 village did not have such a clear-cut rival. Instead, Huaychainos were involved in ephemeral conflicts with inhabitants of several nearby communities , never focusing their aggression on a single foe. When conflicts did emerge between Huaychainos and other Iquichanos, they often occurred within the culturally legitimate space of the village fiesta. This, combined with the strong kinship and social networks that tied Huaychainos to other Iquichano villages, mitigated the kind of intercommunity conflict that took shape in Chuschi. But peasant communities mobilized not only against one another during this period. Indeed, these village rivalries can only be understood in the larger context of peasant mobilizations that took place in Peru and elsewhere. Peasant Mobilization and the Land Movement The mid-twentieth century was a period of drastic change for peasants around the world. In response to mounting population pressures and capitalist penetration in the countryside, the rural poor in many agricultural nations began mobilizing at an unprecedented rate.2 While these mobilizations varied in their goals and tactics, a common motivation was the issue of land. One of the earliest and most profound peasant mobilizations during this period took place in Bolivia in 1946 and 1947. There, peasant organization took two forms. The first involved conflicts between serfs and their landowners; the second involved highland communities’ massive land invasions of neighboring haciendas.3 Bolivia’s peasant movement took on new force in the wake of the 1952 revolution. By the end of the year, peasants across the countryside had attacked virtually every aspect of the traditional land-tenure system and were posing a serious threat to the stability of the new regime.4 Over the next thirty years, movements of this kind materialized throughout Latin America. In 1958, for example, 3,000 Mexican peasants invaded 20,000 hectares of irrigated land in the state of Sinaloa.5 The following decade, some 500 peasant land invasions took place in Venezuela as the nation attempted agrarian reform.6 In Chile during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mapuche Indians allied with nonindigenous peasants to carry out massive land grabs throughout the countryside .7 Nor were these peasant land movements unique to Latin America. In 1959 and 1960, Hutu tenants revolted against their Tutsi overlords in an effort to transform Rwanda’s land-tenure system.8 A similar development [18.117.196.217] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 06:07 GMT) 64 • to venture out occurred in India, where a land invasion in the village of Naxalbari sparked a peasant movement throughout Bengal, with peasants throughout the region carrying out violent...