Chusmeros: narratives on the memory of peasant’s agency

Abstract

This paper explores how processes of social mobilization and property parceling framed in the Agrarian Reform National Plan —involving an ample sector of tenant farm laborers in an Andean Nariño large estate between 1958 and 1963— appear, nearly five decades later, as objects of moral interpretation and appraisal. It analyzes the significance assigned in accounts to the agency of actors involved (peasants, landlords and state); variations in such assigning are connected to the moral frameworks they call on to interpret their past; and their origin is traced back on the various subalternization experiences they faced. I suggest that, when turning out to different sources of moral appraisal, the existence of manifold subjectivation forms makes itself evident depending on their relations to different forms of authority (landlords, church, state), and that they come with various alternative standings face to their past.

Keywords

• Moral economy of remembrance
• agency
• narratives
• peasant movement
• agrarian reform