From comunero to campesino: the “short twentieth century” in the Peruvian countryside, 1920-1969

Abstract

Based on the georeferentiation of spatial regimes that emerged from the process of land grants for indigenous communities in Junín (1921-1969) and the transformation of these same communities into campesinos during the process of agrarian reform (1969-1971), this article describes the changes in the communal condition as a territorial experience. While land titles for indigenous communities, produced within the lapse of three decades, generated a disperse occupation of the department of Junín, with several communities occupying the different ecological floors of this zone of the central highlands, the agrarian reform and the formation of Sociedad Agrícolas de Interés Social (SAIS) triggered a spatial reconfiguration that led to the agglomeration of communal properties and the concentration of the territorial settlement of communities as they became campesinos