UC Davis

My dissertation, Urban Battleground: Survival in Lima’s Shantytowns during the Peruvian Armed Conflict, examines how shantytowns became a focal point of collective struggles for survival and basic human dignity in Lima during the Peruvian armed conflict (1980-2000). Scholars conventionally perceived shantytowns as either bastions of grassroots resistance or cradles of insurgency. As such, shantytowns influenced the Maoist Shining Path and the Peruvian state’s strategies in the capital. Yet, as I demonstrate, shantytown leaders challenged, subverted, and reshaped insurrectionary politics, making conscious decisions to organize and safeguard their self-managed community. By placing leader agency at the center of my analysis, the thesis reveals that shantytown leaders found a third path to combat the insurgency, negotiating the creation of public works and demanding the fulfillment of the promise of decent housing and services. Through oral interviews and archival sources, I trace the creation of the socialist housing project Huaycán, its mass mobilizations, and its leaders’ collaboration with the state in declaring war against the Shining Path. My work illustrates the intertwining histories of urbanization and citizenship within a context of the armed conflict, revealing the motivations for political participation and the gradual disintegration of popular politics. I integrate Lima’s marginal urban residents in the indigenous and campesino-centered human rights scholarship. Shantytown leader’s testimonies illuminate an untold story of insurgent citizenship and their strategic uses of memory in the present advances new welfare policies in the enduring struggle to create a life with greater dignity.