Ugly Stories from the Peruvian Agrarian Reform

Enrique Mayer
Yale University

Enrique Mayer's talk will review people's memories of the reform process then, and now, on an expropriated hacienda in Cusco, Peru, which became a cooperative that has since then collapsed. What do people remember and how do they remember is one theme? Another is how the reform process created heroes and villans and what people think of them today. A third concern is how the reform process may have failed to find suitable expressions in the arts of Peruvian society.

Enrique Mayer is an anthropologist with more than twenty years of professional activity in Peru, Mexico and the United States. He was born in 1944 in the highlands of Peru in Huancayo. In 1960 in England he studied economics and anthropology at the London School of Economics. He did his graduate work at Cornell University in New York State from 1966 to 1974.

Prof. Mayer's professional career as a university teacher began at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Lima, Peru (1970-1978). As Coordinator of the Masters Program in Anthropology he helped form an early generation of Peruvian social scientists. In 1979 he moved to Mexico City where he was the head of the Department of Anthropological Research at the Interamerican Indian Institute. This Institute is part of the OAS and is concerned with promoting programs and policies towards the 30 million Indian peoples of the Americas. His tasks were long-range research and administration. He developed position papers and projects, as well as organized international conferences, workshops and congresses. He was also editor of the Instituto's prestigious journal, América Indígena. In 1982 he joined the faculty of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a joint appointment in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Prof. Mayer was appointed Director of the Center in 1985, a position he held for eight years. In 1995 he was appointed Professor at the Department of Anthropology in Yale University. He has just published a book
"The Articulated Peasant: Household Economies in the Andes" published by Westview Press, 2002.

When: Thursday, April 3 at 5:00 P.M.
Where: Room C204
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
(Between 34th and 35th Street)

To reserve, send e-mail to bildner@gc.cuny.edu or leave message at (212) 817-2096