PRESTADORES DEL SERVICIO DE INTERCAMBIO DE VIDEOS A TRAVÉS DE PLATAFORMA

2.1

Introduction

I saw the slogan that I use as part of the title for this chapter, “el pueblo de Pachacutec unido jamas sera vencido” scrawled in blue paint across the outside of an unoccupied house that I passed by on my way to visit my friend Roberto, the gate-keeper for my research in Pachacutec. This slogan captures some of the main premises that I build on in my thesis very well, as does the unoccupied house where the slogan was painted. Both the graffiti and the unoccupied house are material markers of the tensions between capitalist citizenship and the demands that people make in Pachacutec. As set out in the previous chapters, this thesis takes citizenship as a dynamic process. It follows the following claim placed by scholarship: capitalism functions in such way that it gives priority to the stronger in capital, often neglecting any larger collective labour done in the process. Therefore, certain labours, such as women’s domestic labour at home, remain invisible. I argue that in Pachacutec, there were these kinds of labours that remained invisible and exploited by those with more

money. The result is apparent in the picture above; the unoccupied house is vandalized by someone making a frustrated claim for unity. It was easy for the vandals to victimize the owners of the house with spray paint because no one lives on the premises. No one lives in the house because of idea of accumulation inherent in property ownership. Indeed, the rapid rise in the price of land in Pachacutec had created a panacea around land-ownership and the idea of ‘progress’. Buyers from Lima were taking advantage of the rising prices of land in neighbourhoods like Pachacutec. They were buying up lots but never establishing residency. They were using the land as an investment, waiting for the price of land to rise so they can resell at a higher price.

As recorded in other parts of Latin America, since the mid-twentieth century, land politics have epitomized the struggle for social inclusion as the population of Latin American cities exploded (Holston 2008). The urbanization trend in Latin America was further accelerated through the funding conditions imposed by multilateral agencies and the policies that governments adopted to manage their national economies. The chapter will start by outlining the kinds of government policy that have made Lima the city that it is today. The city’s lay out reflects a very class-based society, attesting to how the history of colonialism in Peru still matters in terms of how ‘rights’ are exercised and executed, as was explained earlier in the introduction. Then the chapter will continue by presenting an example of the problems that the gate-keeper of my research has faced with issues related to land tenure and ownership of the house where he lives in Pachacutec. But there is yet another dimension that is perhaps of most importance, which is the strength of the grey economy and how it functions in its own right. People continued to live and make use of the city all the same, whether the land was legal or not. This shows the importance of the need to pay attention to what happens in the ‘margins’ , as the margins are spaces where new types of citizenship are being reconfigured,

transcending classic distinctions between formal and informal. This may be evidence of the emergence of a new type of demand that transcends some of the more

constraining and disciplining forms of citizenship. At the same time, the conflicts that are present in Pachacutec such as those evidenced in the picture above, demonstrate the unevenness and ambiguity of making new demands.

2.2

The legal and illegal formations of the city

The ‘modernisation’ processes that have characterized the 20^th century led to mass rural-urban migrations worldwide, an experience that was felt throughout the global South (e.g. Davis 2007). This contributed to the formation of settlement towns, also known as shanty towns or slums, in the major cities of the global South or their vicinities. In Peru, all cities have experienced this type of growth (Sanchez &

Calderon 1980), but it is especially so for Lima. The settlements as well as Lima’s notoriously grey and humid weather have inspired several authors and public figures to refer to the capital city as Lima, la horrible, (‘Lima, the horrible’). The name was given to it by writer Sebastian Salazar Bondy, who took the term from a letter written in 1949 by the poet Cesar Moro (Degregori et al. 1986: 264; Martucelli 2015:9).

In Lima the rural urban movement was greater than the capacity of the city to absorb the new residents. At the beginning of 20^th century, Peru’s population was 3 800 000, and Lima’s population was only around 100 000. By 1931, the capital’s size had already more than doubled at 280 000 residents, and the growth continued

steadily. The result is that the population of Lima has multiplied almost 90 times in little over a century. These are the seemingly unbelievable growth figures that are presented by Danilo Martucelli in his book with the telling title: Lima y sus arenas (Lima and its sand). Martucelli emphasizes the way by which the city has been built on unstable premises – the sand dunes surrounding Lima. But while the numbers do appear to be staggering and unsustainable, we have already seen in the last chapter that moving to the capital city constituted a disruption of previously asymmetrical

relations. New social actors began to appear in the spaces of the capital city, as they enacted new types of behaviours and aspired to new objectives (e.g. Golte & Adams 1990; Martucelli 2015). The population that was moving in such high numbers from the provinces to the capital city carved out new niches where a distinct, urban form of citizenship began to emerge for the migrant to Lima, one that was ‘global’ and at the same time ‘local’. The migrant citizens brought to the city elements from the

countryside that fused with the urban elements of Lima to make a sub-culture of a particular kind. This rural to urban process has been well documented by Peruvian anthropology⁴³.

The state’s view towards settlement formation was ambiguous from the start, both in terms of policy and practice, and Lima’s class structure has been instrumental in determining the layout of the city. The first migrants from the provincial areas however were not the poorest from the countryside and smaller towns, but they belonged solidly to the middle-classes and they were lured by the cosmopolitan features that Lima promised. It was only from 1930 onwards that social scientists from Lima started to refer to the emigrations from rural areas by the term ‘invasion’.

Through the early decades of the 20^th century, the class based dichotomies that were first edified during the colonial era continued with little challenge in Lima, and when the migrants started to appear in numbers they were seen as a ‘problem’ and a

‘menace’ that generated chaos and disorder. The new migrants threated the

infrastructural capacity of the city (Calderon 2005). Julio Calderon documents how the increasing presence of people from the provinces pushed some people from the upper classes to move away from the centre of Lima towards the southern reaches of the city, where they could build gated communities and maintain their networks of power. The elites who moved out of Lima subdivided their property in Lima and the traditional large houses became callejones (‘big streets’) and started renting them out to the newcomers. Owning a callejon became a mark of affluence. The residents of the callejones shared a toilet and a shower, and in some instances the facilities were used by as many as a hundred people. A single room was usually home to between 4 to 7 people. The landlords of the old houses and the callejones paid little attention to the upkeep, and the callejones in the city centre and surrounding neighbourhoods soon deteriorated and were referred to derogatorily as ‘tugurios’, the contemporary

43 e.g. Degregori et al. 1986, Golte & Adams 1990, Matos Mar 2004, Montoya 2010, Martucelli 2015, Sandoval 2012

English equivalent perhaps being ‘the slum’. From the 1940s to 1950s, these spaces absorbed the first migrant influxes (2005).

The large earthquake that struck Lima in 1940 that destroyed many of the callejones and poor resident areas of the city centre was a further deterring factor that worked against any initiative for public housing. There was no effort to rebuild the areas that housed the poor. The destroyed tenements were cleared out only slowly and replaced with other sorts of, mostly commercial, development. Therefore, the people who lost their houses formed barriadas, where they re-established themselves by self-building houses on the edge of the city, or to areas like Callao (Lobo 1982)⁴⁴.

Calderon explains the barriada is a mechanism to access land where market and non-market principles pre-dominate. In most cases, the land that is eventually occupied to form a barriada is lived-in, the owners do not rent the properties to others. In the juridical system, in most cases, creating a barriada is illegal (2005). Barriada is also a term used in the Peruvian social science literature. However, in everyday and common speech the term barriada has a derogatory meaning because of its association with makeshift housing and run-down neighbourhoods and it is often accompanied with the ideas of ‘violence’ and ‘disorder’. Calderon explains how part of newly arriving migrants continued to find housing in the existing tugurios, while another part of the migrant population started to form more barriadas in order to meet their housing needs. With time, the sand dunes or arenales surrounding Lima became a more attractive alternative as there had already been some attempts to establish barriada communities there. In the past the government had disregarded public housing projects as too expensive⁴⁵, but the tugurios had begun to reach their capacity to absorb more new arrivals to the city. Roughly from 1950s onwards the amount of the barriadas began to grow rapidly and by the end of the century, the amount of people living in tugurios was less than those in barriadas (2005).

Although the housing needs of the people migrating to the city were addressed inadequately from the start, the mass migrations of the mid-20th century disrupted the

44 Prior to the earthquake, between 1913 and 1939, during the modernisation process, only 14 barriadas were formed. While there is no certainty of when the first barriadas were born, some estimates give the years 1908, 1910 and 1913 (Calderon 2005:85). The first official name, Barrios Marginales, to these neighbourhoods was given during the second government of Manuel Prado (Sanchez & Calderon 1980:78).

45 Calderon records several attempts of providing public housing in the first half of 20^th century in Lima that however were weak, and sometimes too expensive for people to afford. There seemed to be always some negotiation of whether providing public housing belonged to the state or not (2005).

asymmetrical relations nonetheless, as documented in the introduction. As Holston notes in regards to similar processes occurring in Brazil, the experience of the city subverted the old regime of citizenship even as it perpetuated it in new forms of spatial and social segregation. Residents gained political rights, they became property owners and also modern consumers. They achieved a right to the city by creating new spheres of participation (2008). Similarly in Peru, the 1940s was seen as an era characterised by political struggle, struggle that was even heroic at times. The governments of Bustamante and Rivero used a lot of inspiring rhetoric calling for social change and measures that would disrupt the existing dichotomies of a strongly class-based society. The mass migrations had the effect that the elite began to be seen in a different light, they seemed less untouchable and it seemed more possible for the new migrants to invade their private property and assert their right to also live in the city. The first invasion of private property was made in 1946 (Calderon 2005: 90).

Hence, there was a threat of subversion in the heroism that was emerging at the time, and in Peruvian social sciences this era of burgeoning activity on the part of the new migrants has been coined the ‘rise of masses’, ascenso de masas (Matos Mar 2004). A Limeña anthropologist Daniella Gandolfo explains how the newly built areas or barriadas, were always ‘off-limits’ to her as she was growing up. As explained in her own words, for Lima’s longstanding and better-off residents, the barriadas are surrounded by “an aura of mystery…of fear of the unknown… at the same time keeping alive the fantasies and anxieties of an Indian invasion” (2009: 4)⁴⁶.

This ambiguity about the settlement towns was also present at the time I did my fieldwork. It was formed by the power struggle people in the city were

experiencing, who struggle both in terms of ‘inclusion’ as well as ‘autonomy.’ At times these two ideas were at odds. The narrative of ‘inclusion’ was more inclusive in terms of class relations, while the narrative of ‘autonomy’ emphasised the

distinctiveness of these spaces, and their right to exist alongside the formalised class-structure. Thus, in the coexistence of these narratives we see a tension between the individual and the collective, as ‘inclusion’ promised gains more at an individual level, and ‘autonomy’ was directed more at the collective. At first, the process of settling in a neighbourhood like Pachacutec is a collective effort. This collective

46 These fantasies were fed already by the early 20^th century Indigenismo tradition. Writer and anthropologist Valcarcel had proclaimed that one day the Andean people would take over the city (in Calderon 2005:110).

dimension is reflected in the faena, a public exchange of labour commonly used in the settlement neighbourhoods that involves the community as a whole as well as some local and state institutions. The word faena is a short hand for faena comunal, a term used for labour performed in the Andes that involves no money. The pobladores are required to attend meetings about the settlement organization and to take part in faenas in order to contribute labour to projects like making roads and building schools. The exact projects to be enacted are decided upon as a collective in the settlement meetings. Clearing out the sand in order to build houses and make roads is the first duty carried out in faenas as soon as a settlement is formed. In addition, in Pachacutec, the parents helped the school by providing labour for maintenance work in the form of a faena.

There are historical roots to the systems of exchange, reciprocity and redistribution the faena represented. Incas used mit’as in order to extract large

amounts of labour from the population, but the labourers were provided in a way that was typical in their communities’ exchange systems. Billie Jean Isbell discusses reciprocity in Andean agricultural societies in terms of private and public spheres.

Private reciprocity is manifested in the concept of ayni and minka, obligatory exchange of labour between parties. A person might ask relatives or friends to help clear a new field for crops. The request for the labour is minka, and the requested friends are said to ‘lend ayni’⁴⁷ by coming to work (in Malpass 2016:10). In Klaren’s description of the use of mit’a by Inca society, the mit’a was always performed in a festive manner, although it was also an obligation that served important ends to the Inca state. It provided not only a labour force for construction but also it strengthened the state’s military and administrative power. Communities were also obliged to assign a part of their land to the state religion, and that land was worked through the mit’a as well (2004).

What is certain is that these systems of exchange were exploited when they came in contact with Spanish rule. As it was recorded in the introduction, the Spanish Crown gained labour in mines via the forced labour system of mita thus using the practice that was already used by the Inca society in order to mobilise labour.

Likewise, faena was a form of labour exploitation first used by the large estate owners, the hacendados and, later the faena was a labour form also adopted in some

47 Ayni also means in ancient Quechua ‘vengeance’, the principle being ‘the one who was exploited later exploits’ (in Gago 2017).

cases by the state. As it was a form of tribute, it was efficient in terms of mobilizing a substantial workforce for public construction projects (Borg Rasmussen 2015:189).

Michael Malpass describes mit’a and faena as public exchanges of labour that involve the community as a whole and some institution. Faena is work that the community does on a common project, such as building a road while mit’a is the rotating work that members of a community in turns for another institution, such as a church or a state government. An important component of these labour exchanges, both public and private, is providing the labourers with food, drink and coca leaves that are chewed to relieve physical discomfort, or cigarettes, in exchange for their labour. It is the obligation of the person or the institution asking for the help to provide these things, and if they are not provided, the workers can refuse to do the labour (2016:10).

Peasant communities have also adopted this form of labour mobilization in order to carry out projects that benefit the community, and faenas have come to constitute an important part of the community identity and politics (in Borg Rasmussen 2015, Gose 1994). In the way that pobladores spoke of the faenas, however, faenas were

envisaged as temporary things, disappearing when settlements became more established. The younger generation certainly were not concerned about being required to participate in faenas anymore.

2.3 Three-wheel motorcycles are used for transportation in sand.

As we can see in the example of faenas, the relationship between the state and citizenry has long, ambiguous history that operates with an established dynamic through the labour of citizens given in exchange for concrete results. During the early days of my fieldwork I was still perplexed by the different uses of space and labour in neighbourhoods like Pachacutec. One day I pulled aside Miranda, the school janitor’s wife to see if she could explain how people came to Pachacutec and what were their main concerns. She was a very friendly woman in her forties whose husband was performing a type of pastoral work at the school. Miranda had just taken part in a new invasion. Miranda explained to me how an invasion is made when a group of people with a similar need for more space come together and organize. The process of planning for a new invasion can take around a year, as the invading group needs to be

‘strong enough’, meaning that it has a sufficient number of people, comprising a group of at least 300 people according to Miranda.

The process of invasion is coordinated with state officials. Investigation done

The process of invasion is coordinated with state officials. Investigation done