Carlos Aguirre, one of Peru’s leading historians and a professor at the University of Oregon, brings together in this anthology a representative cross section of his substantial body of work over the past decade or so. It is an illuminating focus on subaltern groups — slaves, domestic servants, and prisoners — whose profiles and agency have been in the lens of historians in recent years. His work takes its cue from the notion that society reveals much about itself by how it treats its powerless, transgressing, and poorest classes. The theoretical underpinning for Aguirre’s analysis of these groups is drawn from the work of Michel Foucault, particularly on the negative exercise of power on the local, individual, and micro level of society.
The title Dénle duro que no siente aptly sums up the author’s scrutiny of various practices involving domestic service, the maltreatment of children, and those caught in the...
