Content area
Full Text
In this article, I examine an intergenerational communal event I attended during my fieldwork in Villa El Salvador (VES) in 2013. VES is a deprived district on the urban fringes of Lima, Peru. The area where it is now located used to be an inhospitable desert. Today, it is home to a thriving, though poor, community of more than half a million citizens of Andean and mestizo origin. Surrounded by the sierra foothills and the cold, raucous waters of the Pacific Ocean, VES's arid landscape is filled with saline humidity and a constant drizzle that falls throughout the year, especially during wintertime. These environmental conditions render the land mostly sterile for agricultural purposes, but this did not stop the communal efforts of thousands of settlers who arrived to transform the area into a livable city. They went to VES from multiple rural areas across the country in the early 1970s, escaping the extreme poverty and disease that decimated their villages. Settlers believed that by bringing their physical presence to Lima and taking possession of this forgotten land, Peru's central government, based in Lima, would be forced to recognize, and perhaps even address, the migrants' urgent needs that otherwise were largely ignored when they were living in rural locations.
In the winter of 2013, I was doing preliminary research and conducting interviews among cultural activists in VES, searching for possible topics for my doctoral dissertation. One morning in July, I had planned to meet with Dante Abad Zapata, the director of the Center of Documentation of Villa El Salvador, a community-owned institution that administers an archive of documents tracing the origins of VES. As I was riding the bus from metropolitan Lima, my excitement about this meeting with Abad, a civic activist and knowledgeable native historian of the district, took me out of reality for a minute. I suddenly realized that I had missed my bus stop, and I decided to jump out of the vehicle onto an unknown dusty road, trying to orient myself. To my surprise, at that precise moment, a boisterous parade comprised of school-age musicians was marching along the same road.
The marching band was crossing the Avenida Mariategui, one of the district's main roads (see Figure 1). Tidily uniformed teenage musicians...