Peru's indigenous peoples played a key role in the tortured tale of
Shining Path guerrillas from the 1960s through the first decade of
the twenty-first century. The villagers of Chuschi and Huaychao,
high in the mountains of the department of Ayacucho, have an iconic
place in this violent history. Emphasizing the years leading up to
the peak period of violence from 1980 to 2000, when 69,000 people
lost their lives, Miguel La Serna asks why some Andean peasants
chose to embrace Shining Path ideology and others did not.
Drawing on archival materials and ethnographic field work, La Serna
argues that historically rooted and locally specific power
relations, social conflicts, and cultural understandings shaped the
responses of indigenous peasants to the insurgency. In Chuschi, the
guerrillas found indigenous support for the movement and dreamed of
sparking a worldwide Maoist revolution. In Huaychao, by contrast,
villagers rose up against Shining Path forces, precipitating more
violence and feeding an international uproar that took on political
significance for Peru during the Cold War.
The Corner of the
Living illuminates both the stark realities of life for the
rural poor everywhere and why they may or may not choose to
mobilize around a revolutionary cause.