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Introduction to Peru

The architecture in Peru is unanimously considered to be diverse. Modern day architecture mixes fluently with the country’s diverse history, but still allows for distinctions between the historical periods, and the different cultures associated with them. There are three distinct categories in which the buildings of Peru can be assigned: Pre-Columbian, colonial, and modern (also known as contemporary). While the early history of Peru is best known for the Inca Empire, many civilizations existed before the Inca, including the Norte Chico people who founded the first city in South America in the twenty-sixth century BCE.  Archeological evidence suggests that the inhabitants of the city took part in vibrant agricultural trade and built religious temples and monuments throughout the city. The Inca Empire began with the founding of the Kingdom of Cuzco in the eleventh century. Pre-Columbian Incan works are the typical images that come to mind when one thinks of Peruvian architecture, due to their unique craftsmanship which eliminated the need for mortar, and their airtight structures which allowed for them to be still standing today. These buildings “were rectangular, featuring trapezoidal windows and strong foundations.”The Inca developed a complex series of roads and cities along the western coast of South America. These roads allowed the Inca to create a powerful, interconnected empire that facilitated ample trade along South America’s western coast. Unfortunately, when Hernan Cortez arrived in Mexico in 1519, the roads constructed by the Inca allowed for the measles and smallpox to spread rapidly throughout the population. Within three years. These diseases were ubiquitous throughout the Incan Empire and resulted in economic decline and civil war.

The first Spanish invader in Peru, Francisco Pizzaro Gonzalez, arrived in 1532. The Spanish kidnapped King Atahualpa and then murdered him even after the Inca paid his ransom. The Spanish allied with indigenous groups and members of the Inca population who resented the Incan leadership and held Cusco under siege for ten months before it fell to Spanish control. It took the Spanish a total of forty years to fully conquer the Incan Empire. The Spanish established the city of Lima which became a major port of transport of the silver mined in the nearby mountains. Peruvian colonial architecture showcases the influence of the Spaniards that arrived in 1532 (most commonly displayed in Lima and Arequipa). This style is referred to as “Spanish Colonial'' or “Andean Baroque” and the “hallmarks of Spanish colonial architecture in Peru are a base of perfectly fitted Incan stones, European-style white stucco walls, baroque stonework around doors and windows, and intricately carved wooden balconies.”

The Spanish destroyed much of the existing Incan architecture and replaced it with Catholic Cathedrals emblematic of Spanish cultural dominance. While the majority of Peruvian architecture following Spanish colonization was in the style of the colonizing power, a new style of architecture began to emerge in indiginous communities which combined traditional Incan architecture with Spanish ideas. Traditional Incan architecture never fully disappeared and the ruins of the Incan empire remain scattered throughout Peru in the present day.

Peru gained its independence from Spain in 1826 after a protracted war, as part of the greater decolonization of South America in the early 19th century. Peru remained largely loyal to the Spanish crown during the South American wars of independence, and therefore decolonization was brought about by outside forces led by Simón Bolivar, rather than by Peru itself. In 1839, Peru moved its capital from Cusco to Lima, thereby empowering the coastal elite at the expense of the Sierra and rural and indigenous communities. The new Peruvian government abolished legal differentiations of race, which, while perhaps rhetorically progressive, stripped indigenous communities of their legal status and subsequent protections. Lima embraced international commerce and liberal economics, exporting guano, sugar and cotton. In doing so, Peru entrenched the almost-feudal class divisions of the colonial period, establishing the gamonalismo system which exploited indigenous labor while empowering landowners (gamonals). Revenues from Lima’s ports of international commerce financed the expansion of state power into the Peruvian countryside, where wealthy landowners served as representatives of central authority. The government reinforced the gamonalismo system through economic and political suppression, such as the 1895 Electoral Law which disenfranchised Peru’s illiterate population– primarily rural and indigenous peoples. The indigenous communities protested Lima’s economic exploitation and policies of assimilation throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, eventually gaining some legal protections in 1920 and 1947. However, the strength of the inherently exploitative gamonalismo system precluded real equality, and many indigenous Peruvians sought better conditions by migrating to Lima in the mid-20th century.

Approaching the second half of the 1950’s, Lima saw a great migration of Indigenous Peruvian peasants who had been victims of the exploitative gamonalismo system of land ownership. This wave of mobilization brought about a decrease in the gamonalismo, in addition to the dwindling need for land owner support from Lima politicians. Also during this period, Peruvian politicians were becoming increasingly tolerant of class-based representation, much to the disagreement of the local Sierra elites. As education expanded and improved, urban-rural relationships increased, and anti-oligarchical ideologies began to be diffused, the view of the old political regime began to be criticized and, in 1965, Peru saw a return to electoral democracy. By the beginning of the 1960’s, tensions were high and none of the presidential candidates received sufficient votes to win. This allowed for military forces to briefly seize control of the government while a decision was being made. From 1963 to 1968, the Popular Action party, led by Fernando Belaúnde, took office. Belaúnde was forced to resign in ‘68 by the military, who maintained control until 1980. An election was finally held in May of 1980, resulting in Belaúnde returning to office before a long period of economic turbulence in Peru. During the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, Peru has endured many major political shifts, military coups, and changes to the constitution. The current government and constitution were established in 1993, maintaining a five-year term for each president to serve as the head of the government and chief of state. Modern day or contemporary architecture can be seen on the rise in Lima, matching the pace of the country’s growing economy. All of Peru’s skyscrapers reside in Lima, located in the San Isidro district (non-historic sector), showcasing another development in Peruvian architecture.

Link to Introduction with Citations here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nZteUiHLa1h2f1JrXQxUrf-I_k5C6PnSKoblafj4Gcg/edit?usp=sharing

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City of Clowns graphic novel

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Lima, Peru

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Lima, Peru

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Lima, Peru

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Lima, Peru

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Engineering and Technology University - UTEC, Lima, Peru.

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Please, signal boost this!

I’m from Peru and we’re in the middle of our worst crisis in years. Riot police are using bullets and teargas to disperse peaceful protesters.

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Lima, Peru by Szymon Vasquez

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Machu Picchu, Peru by Fábio Hanashiro

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Ethan’s texts: Marginalization in Lima

Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s “Terra Incognita” (1975) is about a reclusive professor who goes out into the city of Lima when his wife and daughters are out of town. The professor, Alvaro Peñaflor, studies the Classics and prefers to remain in the comfort and safety of his hilltop home and its library. He describes his home as a “refuge” for “literary solitude,” (1). He is struck by an internal voice telling him to “go out, get to know your city, live,” (1). Alvaro cautiously ventures from his ivory tower into his native city, which “he knew almost nothing about,” (2). His exploration is both daunting and disappointing, as Alvaro finds himself unable to form a connection with the city or its people, and struggles to discern the nature of his desires. Growing increasingly dejected and feeling excluded, Alvaro continues wandering, trying and failing to “give meaning and order to his surroundings,” (4). Alvaro finally forms an unlikely human connection with a drunk, working class Black man at a bar. Alvaro nicknames him Aristogiton, after an ancient Athenian hero, due to the man’s “heroic… masculine magnificence,” (7). Despite the incongruity of their conversation, Alvaro and Aristogiton hit it off, and the professor invites the worker to his home after the bar closes. The two continue their drunk conversation in Alvaro’s library, where sexual tension builds but fizzles out as Aristogiton passes out. Alvaro hurries the man out the next morning for fear of getting caught by the maid. As he returns to his books, Alvaro reflects on the image of himself, which has irrevocably changed. 

The way the idea of the home, and the privacy it entails, dominates Alvaro is comparable to Laura Podalsky’s analysis of “Casa tomada,” by Julio Cortázar (1). However, unlike Cortázar’s character, Alvaro attempts to break out of this self-imposed isolation by exploring his city. Alvaro’s venture into Lima is a series of “unsettling encounters” that provoke his bourgeois anxieties (Podalsky, 3). Alvaro’s desire for something beyond the confines of his academic, bourgeois and heteronormative life incentivies him to enter working class spaces, despite his uncomfort, and eventually invite Aristogiton back into his home. By bringing the city into the privacy of his home, Alvaro creates an intensely vulnerable, uncomfortable and revealing experience, which forever changes his conception of self and his sexuality. However, despite this near-epiphany, Alvaro ultimately chooses to return to his cloistered existence, representative of upper class detachment from society (Podalsky, 4-5, 7). 

Alvaro feels the gaze and judgement of the city upon him both on the streets and in the privacy of his home. In Lima itself, Alvaro feels as if he does not belong, as he is excluded from social interaction and unable to make connections. In his home, Alvaro feels Christian guilt that represses his instinctual attraction to Aristogiton. He fears the presence of Edelmira, his maid, who could report Alvaro’s activities (or suspected activities) to the public at large, which would further isolate him. Alvaro’s attraction to Aristogiton wavers when he sees the man’s scapulary. Aristogiton attempts to convince Alvaro, in drunken eloquence, that “religion is one thing and faith is another,” but Alvaro’s internalized homophobia wins out. Alvaro’s fear of societal stigma suggests that the city has invaded his private space and threatened his individuality, forcing him to perform heterosexuality as if he was in public. 

Julio Ramón Ribeyro, “Terra Incognita,” in Marginal Voices; Selected Stories by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, 1-9, trans. Dianne Douglas, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).

Laura Podalsky, “Introduction,” Specular Cities, 1-27, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).

No se lo digas a nadie (Don't Tell Anyone) is a Peruvian film directed by Francisco José Lombardi, released in 1998. The film revolves around Joaquin, a white, closeted gay law student in Lima who grapples with his sexuality and the stigma of homosexuality in the public eye. The city Joaquin lives within is dominated by two structures, Christianity and hegemonic masculinity, both of which stigmatize homosexuality. The film opens with a young Joaquin at a Christian summer camp, where the boys sing a song about God’s message of unconditional love. That night, Joaquin makes a move on his friend, who rejects his advance. Joaquin quickly begs him, no se los digas a nadie. The film then cuts to the confessional, where the priest pries to see if Joaquin has sinned sexually. Shortly after, the film introduces the viewer to Joaquin’s father, who criticizes his son for acting like a “f*ggot” and a “fairy” when Joaquin refuses to fight him. Joaquin is forced to perform hegemonic masculinity and heterosexuality in his activities with the church and in the privacy of his home, where the public’s prying eye and homophobic expectations intrude upon his personal space. As a law student, Joaquin begins dating Alejandra, who promises to turn him “into a normal guy.” Despite this, he secretly begins seeing and falls in love with his friend Gonzalo. Joaquin’s parents praise him for dating Alejanda, and Joaquin gets to experience a sense of normalcy, hegemonic masculinity and societal approval. However, he hates lying to Alejandra, so he decides to break up with her and ask Gonzalo to date him. Gonzalo refuses, fearful of societal stigmatization. Both men feel emasculated after being outed, and attempt to reclaim their masculinity by violently asserting themselves on women. Joaquin grows to hate Lima and its judgemental gaze, asking “why did they pick Hiroshima and not Lima?” He leaves for Miami and lives with a man, but eventually meets with and kisses Alejandra, who persuades him to return to Lima. The film ends with Joaquin’s graduation from law school, where the viewer learns he is engaged to Alejandra. Shrinking away from the praise of his family, Joaquin shares a brief and interrupted kiss with Gonzalo before going for a photo. As the photographer snaps a group photo, Gonzalo touches Joaquin’s cheek, and the two gaze at each other across Alejandra.

The concept of hegemonic masculinity, which is characterized by heterosexuality, violence and homophobia, is closely tied to colonialism in the film. Characters in the film, including the priest, Joaquin’s father and the wealthy Alfonso assert that proper masculinity is white, urban and Christian. As Rama argues in “The Ordered City,” Lima– like many other Latin American cities– is a center of “civilization” and a colonial imposition upon the land (11). By the colonial conception, the cities were outposts, representative of whiteness, civilization and masculinity, which “civilized” and exploited the non-white, backward and effeminate people of the country (Rama, 12-13). As Rosemary Thorp and Maritza Paredes argue in Ethnicity and the Persistence of Inequality: The Case of Peru (2010), the growth of the city of Lima reinforced a system in which the white and mestizo urban population dominated and exploited indigenous communities in the countryside (108). In No se lo digas a nadie, the countryside is a masculinizing space for men of Lima to hunt and kill animals and dominate “weaker” and therefore effeminate indigenous peoples. Early in the film, Joaquin’s father takes him hunting to make a man of his son. Joaquin makes a move on an indigenous boy, Dioni, who rejects this advance, saying “men don’t do that,” and attempts to run off to tell others. Joaquin beats up Dioni to ensure his silence. His father sees this and subsequently praises Joaquin, saying “First you kill a deer, then you beat up Dioni...you’re a man.” As they leave, the father accidentally hits an indigenous biker with his truck and says “I didn’t shoot anything but at least I killed an Indian.” Lima’s dominance extends deep into the country, such that white city dwellers can kill rural indigenous people with impunity. 

Rama argues that the city does not just impose order upon the countryside, but enforces a hierarchy within its limits (Rama, 1-5). Joaquin experiences the patriarchal aspect of this ordering system through the institution of the church, media consumption, interpersonal interactions and the watchful eye of the city itself. The patriarchy positions women and anything feminine in a subordination to hegemonic masculinity. The homophobia Joaquin experiences stems from the categorization of homosexuality as a femine behavior/identity, something a “real man” would never do. Later in the film, a character conflates “trashy” (i.e. open, non-closeted) homosexuality with indigenous peoples. The exclusionary hierarchy of Lima oppresses and alienates Joaquin until he chooses to remain closeted, and therefore benefit from the appearance of belonging to the dominant group.

No se lo digas a nadie, dir. Francisco José Lombardi, (1998).

Angel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996)

Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s “Alienation” (1975) is a cautionary tale about the life of Roberto López, from his youth to his early death. Roberto is extremely cognizant of his status as a fair-skinned “mulatto” with kinky hair in the “colonial city” of Lima (57). Roberto seeks to distance himself from his Black and idigenous identities and “take on the look of a blond from Philadelphia,” (57). The anonymous narrator describes this as the act of “killing the Peruvian in himself,” and “extracting something from every gringo he met,” (57). Over the course of the text, his name changes from Roberto, to Bobby to Bob. Throughout the text, Roberto’s racial consciousness aligns with class and social status. Roberto’s childhood crush rejects him on the basis of his racial identity, spurring the boy’s lifelong quest to assimilate to whiteness. Societal marginalization reduces Roberto to a mere spectator on the periphery of Lima’s youth culture. He concludes that whiteness would allow him to plan his life “with confidence in this gray city… [and] effortlessly reap all the best fruits the land had to offer,” (60). Roberto bleaches and straightens his hair, whitens his skin, mulates gringo behavior and learns English. He and a like-minded friend adopt pretentious mannerisms and begin to scorn their friends, family and city: “the city, which had always sheltered them, had turned into a dirty rag they covered with insults and scorn,” (64-65). Eventually, they make it to New York, which “tolerated them for several months, complacently, while it absorbed the dollars they had saved. Then, as if through a tube,” expelled them (65). Facing homelessness, Roberto and his friend joined the U.S. military and shipped out to fight in Korea, where the latter is maimed and Roberto dies. 

Through “Alienation,” Ribeyro criticizes the racial hierarchy of Lima and the world under American hegemony. By referring Lima as a “colonial city,” Ribeyro points to both the Spanish founding– which accounts for the racial stratification and hierarchical ordering of the city– and contemporary, neo-colonialist American influence– which accounts for Roberto’s feelings of cultural and economic inferiority. Written in 1975 but taking place in the early 1950s, “Alienation” highlights changing Peruvian conceptions of race and ethnicity in the middle of the 20th century. During this period, mestizo transitioned from a racial category to a “cultural and class-based process of acculturation,” where non-white Peruvians could associate themselves with whiteness through behavioral practices (Thorp & Paredes, 124). Whiteness was associated with the cities, especially Lima, with its large white population. However, Roberto is cognizant of a global structure of whiteness, and understands Lima as merely a colonial outpost within a greater American hegemony. Unlike Lima, which– at the time– was making space for cultural mestizos within the city hierarchy, the United States (the metropole, in a colonial sense) has no place for Roberto. In his attempt to escape his place as a subject in a colonial hierarchy, Roberto is drafted into an American colonial war and carelessly disposed of. 

Rosemary Thorp & Maritza Paredes, Ethnicity and the Persistence of Inequality: The Case of Peru, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Julio Ramón Ribeyro, “Alienation,” in Marginal Voices; Selected Stories by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, 57-67, trans. Dianne Douglas, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).

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Eli Goldberg

“Simple Heart” by Augusto Higa Oshiro