Crisostomo Meza, Mercedes Amalia; (2023) Women in the Peruvian Revolutionary Left: Militancia and Post-Militancia in Cuzco and Ayacucho. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The histories of the women who participated in Peruvian revolutionary parties during the 1960s and 1970s are absent from the historiography of the Peruvian and Latin American Left. The prevailing scholarly focus on the failed Peruvian guerrilla groups of the mid-1960s, on the radical Maoist party Shining Path, and on ideological splits and internal conflicts of the Peruvian New Left has meant that women’s engagement in other important revolutionary projects has been neglected. Likewise, left-wing narratives have not recorded female participation because of the clandestine nature of leftist activism and a persistent tendency to document only the actions of male leaders. This thesis seeks to fill this gap in the historiography by studying urban and rural Peruvian women who joined and built social movements and leftist parties with the aim of bringing about a revolution. In contrast to dominant narratives about the Peruvian Left that accentuate limeño, middle-class, urban, and male experiences, this thesis takes a different perspective, viewing the history of the Peruvian Left through the eyes of female militantes in Cuzco and Ayacucho, two crucial regions during the most radical decades in Peru’s twentieth-century history. Drawing on theoretical perspectives on leftism, revolution, militancia as well as gender and memory studies and using historical and anthropological methods including archival research, oral history, and ethnography, I examine the factors, motivations, and processes that led to women’s participation in revolutionary parties. By looking at female leftists’ everyday militancia and post-militancia in Cuzco and Ayacucho, this thesis contributes to making women visible as historical and political actors and to rewriting the history of the Peruvian Left. It sheds light on how local, national, and international mobilisations for change were translated and circulated by male and female militantes from different social settings. The thesis also underlines the diverse legacies of militancia in women’s current daily live. This thesis sheds light on the heterogeneity of the Peruvian and Latin American Left and offers new insights into women’s varied experiences of militancia and the narratives about politics, the state, and the nation that they helped to construct.

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