Professor of Latin American History, Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, has been awarded a grant by the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) at the British Library to fund her latest research project which aims to preserve and make available historical documents produced between the sixteenth and the twentieth century in landed estates around Peru and collected during the 1969-1973 agrarian reform.
Professor Sobrevilla Perea explains, “This is an extremely exciting project to commemorate the Peruvian bicentennial for independence this July. The agrarian reform of the 1960s transformed the country in ways we have yet to understand because this material has been hitherto inaccessible to researchers. The support from the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library and our collaboration with the National Archive in Peru will have a big impact in how the Peru’s past is seen.
The documents are held in parlous conditions at the National Archive of Peru – currently largely uncatalogued and out of circulation – and include diverse materials from land titles to documents on workers, crop production animal husbandry, alongside many other types of agrarian records including photographs that were all produced before the1960s, with the majority from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The National Archive is precariously housed in the windowless basement of an old crumbling building; even though new premises have been promised, this is not likely to happen in the next five years or more, and the collection remains under the growing threat of rodents, leaks, fire and eviction. In the past decade the physical situation of these materials has continued to deteriorate. The Archive does not own the building and it is possible that the boxes could end in the street. This is extremely dangerous because if the documents are moved before there is a record of what is contained within them, it is very possible that some of them could go missing. The risk is high because these materials tell the story of land tenure in Peru and have information that could be politically difficult for those who have aimed to reverse the achievements brought by land reform.
These documents ranging from the 1620s to the late 1960s preserve the specific history of how land was used in Peru before the agrarian reform. Fifty years later there is a widespread belief that the agrarian reform was a watershed moment and land tenure continue to be a contentious political and social issue. Access to these documents for research on agrarian history is crucial for the country’s development, as studies that can truly show what these changes meant have not been conducted, so far, for the simple reason that the archives have not been accessible to researchers. These materials are unique are there are no comparable archives that will be able to tell the story of land tenure and land usage in Peru. If they were to be lost permanently the damage would be incalculable, but in a sense, they are currently lost because it is impossible to access them.”