New Books In Critical Theory

Now Peru is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist (Duke University Press, 2016), tells the remarkable story of a campesino and indigenous political activist whose career spanned much of Peru’s twentieth century and whose achievements at the local and national level transformed Peruvian peasant politics. Structured as a testimonial biography co-authored by the activist Manuel Llamojha Mitma himself and framed by historian Jaymie Patricia Heilman, this book is a valuable document of both pre-Shining Path indigenous activism and the history of Cold War Peru. Born into a poor Quechua family in a small community in Ayacucho, Llamojha became one of the most powerful peasant activists in the country, responsible for the expansion of the Confederación Campesina del Perú to the national stage in the 1960s and integral to the debates that shaped Peru’s left before the rise of the Shining Path. Although he was a contemporary of Shining Path founder Abimael Guzmán and a participant in Maoist peasant movements,