Isaias Rojas-Perez

What kind of history of state violence against rural agrarian communities emerges when subaltern survivor-witnesses speak not only of their suffering but also of their protracted struggle for justice? What place do their own archives hold in this history? How is this history central to their efforts to remake their worlds in the aftermath of state atrocity? How does this “history from below” differ from expert-written history as it escapes fundamental assumptions of mainstream historiography, such as state control of the archive and the hegemony of written text? Focusing ethnographically on the 1985 army massacre of 69 Quechua-speaking peasants in the Andean community of Accomarca, Peru, this project looks at how, in their search for “historical reparation,” survivor-witnesses recover their own archives of violence to destabilize “official stories” from within. This “history from below” challenges hegemonic practices through three moves: a) reconstructing the archives of their interactions with state institutions over the years since the massacre; b) expanding the historiographic scope of collected documents through oral histories; and c) outlining a script to tell this history in their own terms. Thus, this project demonstrates how the search for historical reparation entails decolonizing the archive and history of violence in Peru.