With great euphoria, Peru inaugurated an elected president on July 28, 1963. The next morning, San Pedro de Cajas, an “Indigenous Community,” started to improve rural life. Organized by ex-service men into militia-tike units, comuneros rode and marched onto corporate hacienda lands adjoining their high-altitude ranges. These comuneros set off what may have been the largest national peasant direct-action land tenure redistribution movement in Latin America since 1910.
Handelman’s book is important because it calls attention to this Indian peasant protest against Spanish Creole social, economic, and political domination. After three background chapters, this book peaks in narrating “The Peasants Take Their Land,” and “The Growth of Peasant Federations.” A political scientist, the author attempts to examine four dimensions of the invasions as instances of rural political mobilization: (1) factors that precipitated this “eruption,” (2) its effects on highland socio-political structure, (3) its effects on peasant political behavior and attitudes, and (4) national government reactions. A chapter analyzing information obtained by interviewing leaders of forty-one indigenous communities is Handelman’s worst. He at least indicates honestly the shortcomings of his statistically analyzed data.
Two chapters attempt to relate Peruvian events to general theories of political mobilization; their worth lies in demonstrating how much political science theory fails to explain Andean peasant behavior. In 1972, Handelman composed from secondary sources an epilogue about agrarian reform under the military regime that seized power while he was conducting his 1969 study.
Precisely because the land invasions constitute such an important historic phenomenon, I regret to report that Handelman’s analysis is seriously out of focus. By analyzing only indigenous community “recuperations,” Handelman excludes small-holders from his operational definition of peasantry, and slights workers tied to haciendas. Possibly he gained analytical leverage by comparing communities in only Cerro de Pasco, Junín and Cuzco departments. Disregarding “recuperations” elsewhere diminishes, however, the utility of his narrative to the historian and spoils the precision of his analysis. By ignoring such pertinent studies as Susan C. Bourque’s Cholification and the Campesino: A Study of Three Peruvian Peasant Organizations in the Process of Societal Change, Handelman weakens his narrative and analysis. Bourque at least recorded Church rural mobilization that Handelman ignores, as he does the army’s crucial role as Peru’s main educator-trainer of comunero conscripts.
Handelman defines “Mestizo” oddly enough to ignore the “New American Race” created by matings between Europeans and Native Americans. Indeed, ignoring population pressure upon a finite arable land base prejudices Handelman’s entire analysis of rural political mobilization.
