In this post, Sandra Rodríguez Castañeda, a PhD student at the UCL Institute of the Americas discusses a project of archival recovery in northern Peru. 

Peasants, Bureaucrats, Archivists? The Living Archive of the Rondas Campesinas of Chota, Cajamarca 

Sandra W Rodríguez Castañeda 

“Te buscas tu muerte” (You are looking for your own death), reads a carved inscription on the fleshly leaf of a penca (Agave cordillerensis). Widely used as fencing material in the Peruvian Andes, this plant also serves as a surface for anonymous handwritten messages scratched with its pointed thorn – usually love notes, but sometimes threats –like this one. It is common to find such messages along communal paths where pencas double as fences and public boards. A photocopy of this leaf appears as bio-evidence (see image above) within an acta de constatación (minute of findings), produced after a “visual inspection” carefully carried out on Eufemio B.’s property. The minute confirms the destruction of a pajuro tree and incorporates photographs of additional death threats: one written on the accuser’s door, and a medium-size cross drawn in oil on the entryway floor. In 2003, Eufemio B accused Demóstenes T. of taking possession of a piece of land he claimed as his own. Despite its formal language and legal tone, this file was not produced for a court of law. It belongs instead to a folk-legal system devised and administered by peasants in the northern Peruvian Andes over nearly five decades: the justice system of the rondas campesinas.  

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