Though rooted in different national contexts—southern Chile, the Peruvian highlands, and the valleys of Bolivia—recent books by Thomas Miller Klubock, Javier Puente, and José M. Gordillo, respectively, pursue a common goal: to interpret Latin American history from rural peripheries. In doing so, they challenge a long-standing historiographical tendency to treat the countryside either as secondary to national politics or as a space upon which to act, rather than as a space that has actively contributed to the formation of modern Latin American nation-states. Far from treating the countryside as a passive backdrop, Klubock, Puente, and Gordillo show that rural struggles over land, identity, and authority were fundamental to the construction and erosion of state power and political order in the twentieth-century Andes. What’s more, each author reconsiders moments of rupture—rebellion, revolution, agrarian reform—not as isolated events but instead as expressions of deeper and more enduring conflicts over land and belonging. In the process, these books challenge traditional urban-centric narratives by showing that the fundamental transformations of the twentieth century were forged in rural areas rather than in capital cities.
Klubock’s Ránquil centers on the 1934 massacre of peasants in Alto Bío Bío in southern Chile. Often dismissed as an isolated outburst, this event was, the author argues, the culmination of decades of union organizing and indigenous land claims. Peasants in the Araucanía region turned to armed rebellion to confront Chile’s oligarchic order and the deep inequalities of the countryside. The state’s response—a fierce military crackdown—became one of the worst episodes of repression in Chile before the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Drawing on hitherto unused judicial archives, including trial testimonies and police reports, as well as scattered local documents from frontier communities, Klubock reads these sources “against the grain” to reconstruct the political aspirations of peasant organizers and the violent silencing they endured. An amnesty law ensured that the rebellion was erased from official memory, and this olvido (forgetting), Klubock argues, became the basis for Chile’s democratic stability in the mid-twentieth century—one that relied less on justice than on the erasure of rural violence. By bringing this mechanism of forgetting to the fore, Klubock complicates the widely held image of Chile as Latin America’s most enduring democracy. His account challenges narratives of Chilean democratic exceptionalism by placing the Ránquil rebellion alongside peasant uprisings throughout Latin America. By burying unresolved violence in Chile’s rural margins, forgetting becomes not only a political technology but also a means by which Chile’s democratic image was secured (21).
Puente’s Rural State examines the history of the Comunidad Campesina de San Juan de Ondores, located in the province of Junín, in the central Peruvian Andes. Puente foregrounds the important role of communities in the construction of the Peruvian nation-state. He argues that the construction of the state involved not only administrative expansion but also the incorporation of highland geographies, rural economies, and social relations into an agrarian architecture shaped by capitalism. Puente challenges previous historical narratives that assumed the absence of the state in the highlands, showing instead a century of sustained, albeit uneven, engagement. Puente traces how successive state interventions—from early land surveys to the 1969 agrarian reform to the political violence of the 1980s—reshaped communal authority. The study stands out for its use of local sources, one of which is particularly important: the transcripts of community assemblies. This documentation allows Puente to reconstruct the everyday tools used by the Ondores community to confront external pressures. These sources also demonstrate how ecological knowledge—of pastures, water sources, and migration routes—was fundamental to communal authority and directly challenged the state’s attempts to reorganize the highland space. Drawing on this archive, Puente argues that Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980–2000) was fundamentally a conflict born of unresolved agrarian tensions rooted in the failures and contradictions of the rural state. His analysis highlights the unintended consequences of developmentalist reform, showing how policies framed as inclusive ultimately generated new forms of dispossession that destabilized highland communities on the brink of the country’s internal armed conflict.
Gordillo’s Peasant Wars in Bolivia focuses on the revolutionary process of 1952 in the Cochabamba Valleys, where peasants played a far more active political role than traditional accounts of the revolution have acknowledged. Challenging the centrality of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) as the revolution’s main engine, Gordillo emphasizes the agency of rural actors who seized the political opportunities opened by the MNR to form unions, assert land claims, and redefine their own political identities. He shows that some of the most consequential political innovations of the revolution emerged not from La Paz, Bolivia’s political center, but from Cochabamba’s rural valleys, a place where peasants reimagined citizenship and national belonging from below. He traces how peasant identity in the valleys was shaped both by state discourse and years of class-based struggle. Gordillo also maps the uneven terrain of post-revolutionary power, revealing how political alliances were shaped by internal divisions within the MNR, competing visions of land reform, and, after more than a decade of mobilization, peasants’ exhaustion. Drawing on a wide variety of sources—including union records, local archives, photographs, and remarkable oral testimonies—Gordillo analyzes how urban leaders relied on rural militants to assert their power while simultaneously scapegoating them when strategies faltered or conflicts intensified. In his account, the state emerges not as a single, coherent actor but as a crowded arena of officials, brokers, and rival authorities whose decisions shaped peasant lives in uneven and often arbitrary ways. Another important aspect of Gordillo’s book is his exploration of peasants’ daily union politics. What stands out here is the reproduction of patriarchal and gendered systems of authority. By revisiting conflicts such as the Champa Guerra (Champa War)—a violent internal conflict among peasant unions in the valleys between 1959 and 1964—Gordillo reframes rural factionalism not as a deviation from revolutionary politics but as a fundamental feature of how peasants navigated the shifting promises of revolution.
Read alongside one another, these three works move beyond an earlier generation of scholarship that focused on the agrarian question in twentieth-century Latin America, particularly studies framed around state-driven agrarian reform. In that literature, the countryside often appeared as a setting in which reformist leaders—whether Victor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia, Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru, or Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende in Chile—implemented legislation while peasants were depicted as either passive beneficiaries or obstacles to modernization. In contrast, Ránquil, The Rural State, and Peasant Wars in Bolivia offer historically and geotropically grounded studies that emphasize the diversity of peasant actors and the long-term trajectories of land conflicts that both predate and exceed the formal boundaries of agrarian reform. By decentering the state and bringing subaltern agency to the fore, these works show that, far from being marginal, peasant struggles reshaped power relations and redefined the contours and limits of what was politically possible. Thus, these three studies reposition rural politics not as peripheral to national history in the Andes but as one of its main drivers, shaping the trajectories of state power, political violence, and social transformation. The remainder of this essay examines how Klubock, Puente, and Gordillo reframe the study of rural politics in Latin America by highlighting three connected themes: the relationship between peasants and the state; the internal heterogeneity of the peasantry; and the long, unfinished struggle for land. In doing so, the essay highlights how the author’s collective insights reorient key historiographical debates and reassert the centrality of rural politics to understanding Latin America’s past and present.
Rethinking the Peasant–State Relationship
A critical contribution shared across the works of Klubock, Puente, and Gordillo is their rethinking of how rural communities interacted with the state. Each author challenges the conventional binary of the state as either repressive or empowering. Instead, they depict a more ambivalent reality: one in which peasants variously embraced, negotiated, and resisted state institutions, often at great political cost. These authors dismantle the notion that the rural poor were submissive victims of state policy; instead, they portray peasants as historical actors who engaged the state on their own terms—asserting demands while resisting efforts to maneuver or speak for them. Across the three cases, the state appears less as a monolithic entity than as a shifting set of institutions whose coherence depended on rural consent—and whose contradictions became visible in moments of conflict.
In Ránquil, Klubock reveals that rural Chileans viewed the state not only as an agent of repression but also as a potential avenue for justice. Courts, land registries, and colonization agencies were not simply extensions of elite power; they were also institutions through which inquilinos, ocupantes, and indigenous leaders attempted to assert their claims. This dual character of the state—at once violent and reformist—is one of the book’s central insights. Klubock shows how, under the first presidency of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (1927–1931), the Chilean state introduced labor protections and colonization laws that, for a time, enabled union organizing. These reforms were inconsistently enforced and rapidly dismantled after Ibáñez’s fall in 1931, and subsequent governments, particularly the third presidency of Arturo Alessandri (1932–1938), restored landowner privileges and unleashed police repression on rural organizers. The massacre at Ránquil in 1934 was not an isolated incident, but the violent expression of a deeper pattern in which the state’s promises of inclusion gave way to betrayal. In Klubock’s telling, Chilean rural politics were defined by this oscillation between legal recognition and violent exclusion—a cycle that shaped peasant mobilization well into the twentieth century. His analysis suggests that the very instability of state institutions—swinging between protection and repression—structured the repertoire of rural collective action.
Like Klubock, Javier Puente underscores the enduring presence of the state in rural life, albeit in a different geography and focused on a distinct temporal arc. In The Rural State, Puente challenges the common view that the Andean highlands were abandoned by the state. Instead, he portrays a century-long process of incorporation as unfolding through episodes of contact, collaboration, contestation, and conflict. Through a detailed study of San Juan de Ondores, Puente shows how the consolidation of the nation-state required both administrative expansion and the transformation of rural geographies and social relations of production. While early twentieth-century state interventions often left room for local negotiation, this dynamic shifted dramatically under General Velasco Alvarado’s 1969 agrarian reform. Framed as a progressive intervention, the reform introduced the Sociedades Agrarias de Interés Social (Agrarian Societies of Social Interest, SAIS), a cooperative model through which community lands were expropriated and brought under centralized state control. Elected communal authorities were displaced by state-appointed administrators, and production decisions were removed from local hands. While members of a comunidad campesina, known as comuneros, initially engaged cooperativization strategically, hoping it would support their long-standing claims to the Atocsaico hacienda, the reform ultimately sidelined local voices and eroded community autonomy. In this account, the state became more present—and intrusive—than ever before. Puente thus reframes Velasco’s reform not as a break with the past but as part of a longer trajectory in which the state’s expanding footprint repeatedly collided with communal forms of governance.
In the same vein, Gordillo recasts the revolutionary state as a contradictory and fragmented force in Bolivia. Focusing on the Cochabamba Valleys during and after the 1952 revolution, Gordillo rejects the notion that the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, Revolutionary Nationalist Movement orchestrated a coherent project of rural transformation. Instead, he portrays the state as a terrain of factionalism and manipulation—populated by rival elites who alternately empowered and undermined peasant actors. Gordillo argues that while agrarian reform created unprecedented openings for political organizing and land redistribution, it also subjected peasants to new forms of control. Urban party leaders regularly imposed clientelist arrangements, created parallel unions aligned with their personal factions, and disparaged peasants as immature or disloyal when they resisted these overtures. The author’s analysis offers a portrait of a revolutionary state whose authority fractured in rural spaces, where competing actors constantly tested its limits.
Peasants, however, were not passive participants in these dynamics. Gordillo shows how they asserted their agency through unionization, public protest, and legal mobilization. They leveraged their new political visibility while navigating the tensions produced by party manipulation, elite condescension, and growing internal divisions. By the early 1960s, the contradictions of the revolutionary project had reached a breaking point. The Champa Guerra signaled both the depth of grassroots politicization and the limits of state-directed revolution. When the MNR was overthrown in 1964, peasants entered the post-revolutionary period both empowered and profoundly fatigued. Gordillo reveals that rural mobilization did not always produce unity; it also generated internal rivalries and fractures that weakened peasant coalitions and reshaped the state’s authority in the countryside. In sum, these three books reveal how rural communities were drawn into shifting political configurations that combined reform with repression, inclusion with discipline, and recognition with paternalism.
The Peasantry as a Heterogeneous Category
A second major contribution of these three works is their refusal to treat the peasantry as a homogenous social category. Rather than reproducing a flattened view of the “peasantry” as a generic rural subject, Klubock, Puente, and Gordillo insist on the internal diversity, shifting identities, and contested meanings embedded in this term. Through legal status, region, ethnicity, and naming, they show how peasant identity was shaped from both above and below, and why those classifications mattered deeply in moments of political struggle. By foregrounding this heterogeneity, all three authors reveal how political mobilization depended on the ability of rural actors to navigate, manipulate, and sometimes reject the categories available to them.
In the case of Ránquil, Klubock interrogates the category of campesino, underscoring the heterogeneity and fragmentation of rural society in southern Chile. Far from being a unified group, the rural poor were divided by legal status, labor regimes, and patterns of mobility. Inquilinos lived on large estates, working in exchange for access to land for crops and pasture, while estates supplemented this resident labor force with seasonal workers known as gañanes, who migrated between estates, across the Argentine border, and—until 1930—to Chile’s northern nitrate mines. Many gañanes came from nearby Indigenous Pehuenche communities or were the children of more permanent inquilino laborers. The Pehuenche, historically a distinct Andean Indigenous group later culturally and linguistically integrated into broader Mapuche society, inhabited the Alto Bío Bío region and maintained a transhuman way of life based on seasonal movement, livestock herding, and trade. These labor categories were unstable and overlapping rather than fixed. Inquilinos could become ocupantes by claiming the plots they worked, while ocupantes frequently entered into sharecropping arrangements with large estates as a means of gaining access to land (7). Through these shifting practices, rural workers moved back and forth between legal identities and labor regimes, blurring social boundaries in frontier territory. Klubock’s attention to these gradations shows how rural society in the Araucanía operated without fixed social categories, and how this instability both constrained and enabled political organizing.
What’s more, Klubock roots this history in the broader context of colonization and military conquest, particularly the “Pacification of the Araucanía” (1861–1883), which laid the groundwork for large estates and displaced both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. In this recently colonized region, land tenure was tenuous across the board—even colonos (colonists) recognized by the state lived with the constant threat of eviction. Legal ambiguity enabled landowners and officials to weaponize categories, classifying people as inquilinos, who were subject to landlords’ authority, or ocupantes, who were entitled to land under colonization laws, depending on the political moment. These shifting legal designations were not minor bureaucratic details but instruments of power that structured access to land, labor, and certain protections.
Crucially, Klubock shows that land disputes were also expressed in disputes about identification and who had the right to name. Were claimants settlers or workers? The answer influenced whether they were granted land, expelled, or violently repressed. Competing discourses of land rights abounded. While many relied on the liberal legal frameworks established under Carlos Ibáñez or the colonization law, others—especially Pehuenche communities—claimed rights based on customary law and ancestral occupation. According to Klubock, identity itself was part of the struggle for land, which was itself a contested terrain where state categories, local claims, and indigenous norms overlapped.
In The Rural State, Puente extends this analysis of rural heterogeneity by turning to the politics of language. One of the most analytically sharp aspects of his book is the examination of how terms like “comunero” and “campesino” function not only as descriptors, but as tools of statecraft. In mid-twentieth-century Peru, the state increasingly reclassified comuneros—members of legally recognized indigenous communities—as campesinos. This move facilitated the mapping, governance, and economic restructuring of rural life. As Puente argues, this was far from a neutral change. The campesinización of comuneros meant much more than a nominal change (21). The new term aligned rural actors with developmentalist goals and erased their historical connection to land, custom, and collective memory. This institutional relabeling allowed the state to collapse diverse communal histories into a standardized agrarian subject suitable for planning and intervention.
Puente is equally attentive to the agency of rural actors. He describes how comuneros deliberately shifted their language to align with the discourse of agrarian reform. Instead of framing their claims as demands for restitution, they adopted the terminology favored by state authorities—an adjustment that, rather than signaling surrender, reflected strategic adaptation. Still, this adaptation came at a cost. The term “campesino” allowed the state to reimagine communities as productive units, not historical or cultural collectives. It reshaped subjectivity, detaching identity from place and memory. Puente thus shows how language became a site of negotiation in which rural actors balanced strategic accommodation with the preservation of communal identity.
The author further develops these insights through his attention to memory and identity, grounding his analysis in the violent confrontation that erupted in 1979 in Peru’s central highlands. In that year, comuneros from San Juan de Ondores occupied lands under the control of the SAIS Tupac Amaru, prompting a brutal state response that culminated in what local communities remember as the massacre of Ondores. Puente shows how agrarian reform had already disrupted communal understandings of land and belonging, as the cooperative model imposed by the state overwrote older histories of dispossession and self-governance. Yet memory endured. When comuneros rejected the cooperative structure and reclaimed land in 1979, they were reasserting a communal history that the state had attempted to erase. Even the violence that followed became part of a renewed collective memory. In this way, identity and memory were not docile inheritances but fields of struggle, shaped and reshaped through conflict with the state. Puente’s approach reveals how the very categories meant to rationalize rural life collided with older forms of belonging, producing new forms of political consciousness grounded in historical memory.
Gordillo’s Peasant Wars in Bolivia challenges the still predominant literature on the Bolivian revolution that sees the term “campesino” as merely a label imposed from above by the state and the MNR’s nationalist project. In contrast, Gordillo shows that rural villagers—amid agrarian reform, peasant mobilization, and confrontation with landlords—began to adopt the term themselves. “When people in the valley began calling themselves campesinos,” he writes, “they implied their belonging to a class-like group of rural folks who work the land and were locked in an inherently conflictive relationship with large-scale landowners and other dominant social groups” (228). For Gordillo, then, campesino identity emerged not through state imposition but through grassroots struggles to articulate a position within a stratified social order. This bottom-up construction of identity stands in tension with Puente’s account, underscoring how the same term could become a vehicle of state power in one context and a tool of collective assertion in another.
Although Gordillo’s approach contrasts with that of Puente, it coincides with that of Klubock by resisting rigid conceptual models that obscure the fluid and shifting nature of ethnic identity. His analysis of ethnic fluidity in the Cochabamba Valleys shows that campesino identity was always provisional, emerging through the interplay of political discourse and lived rural experience. Gordillo demonstrates that rural identity in post-revolutionary Bolivia was less a stable label than a political project continually redefined through conflict and negotiation.
Peasant Politics and Peasant Struggles for Land
A final thread that runs through the works of Klubock, Puente, and Gordillo has to do with the historical depth of peasant struggles over land. Each author rejects the idea that these were spontaneous reactions to short-term crises. Instead, they demonstrate how rural communities engaged in long-term political projects—through legal action, union organizing, and land seizures—that were rooted in regional histories and broader ideological currents. Across their narratives, land emerges not simply as a material resource but as a political language through which rural actors articulated claims to justice and belonging. These works challenge the modernization narrative that predicts the steady marginalization—or disappearance—of rural societies. Instead of fading from political life, rural communities in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia became increasingly central to national conflicts as state reforms, development projects, and expanding markets intensified existing agrarian tensions rather than solving them.
In the case of southern Chile, Klubock reframes the 1934 rebellion in Ránquil as the culmination of years of militant organizing by the Sindicato Agrícola Lonquimay. Led by figures with ties to the Communist Party, the rural union advanced claims through both legal strategies and collective actions such as strikes, protests, and land occupations. When land reform promises under President Carlos Ibáñez collapsed and repression under Arturo Alessandri escalated—through evictions, arrests, and violence during the harvest season—the rebellion broke out. By situating the rebellion within decades of organizing, Klubock reveals how rural conflicts were embedded in broader struggles over labor rights, state legitimacy, and the meanings of citizenship in a frontier region.
Puente’s Rural State offers a complementary view from Peru’s central highlands, where the San Juan de Ondores community engaged in a century-long struggle for land and autonomy. Long before Velasco Alvarado’s 1969 agrarian reform, the comuneros had already combined legal petitions and land seizures to assert their historical claims. The reform, however, imposed a cooperative model, which undermined communal authority and brought production under centralized state control. Initially embraced by the community, the reform soon revealed its limits when it failed to secure ancestral land rights. In the aftermath of this confrontation, Puente writes, “Since the massacre of Ondores of 1979 repression against campesinos and campesino politics became the norm,” and “violence became the new language between the state and comunidades, whether Indigenous or campesinos” (157). For Puente, this crisis demonstrates how state-led agrarian reform, while promising redistribution and justice, deepened historical antagonisms by reorganizing rural space without attending to communal histories and territorial practice.
Puente also contends that Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980–2000) was fundamentally an agrarian struggle—in its origins, nature, political dynamics, and consequences (161). Rejecting portrayals of rural Peru as a power vacuum exploited by insurgents, he locates the roots of violence in enduring tensions between the state and rural communities. Both the state and Sendero Luminoso, he argues, overlooked the deep, historically rooted significance of land and communal life. Comuneros maintained fluid ties to grazing lands, valley farms, mining towns, and even urban centers, like Lima. In response to violence, they organized rondas campesinas (peasant patrols), but these autonomous efforts were eroded by state and insurgent forces alike. By tracing a century of evolving state–peasant relations, Puente underscores the central role of unresolved agrarian tensions in shaping Peru’s political violence. In Puente’s telling, the civil war cannot be disentangled from the failures of agrarian reform, making land not a backdrop to the conflict but one of its central causes and arenas.
In his analysis of the Bolivian case, José Gordillo rejects linear readings of the 1953 changes, arguing that there was not one, but many programs of agrarian reform born from the struggle between peasant initiatives, party projects, and state discipline. Gordillo demonstrates that land redistribution emerged alongside the parallel processes of “making the revolution” through political action and “thinking the revolution” through public discourse—dynamics already present among Cochabamba’s peasantry before the state intervened (11–12). Crucially, he shows that the peasantry was not a unified, ideologically homogeneous bloc. In the Valle Bajo, peasants were generally willing to adapt to the official, state-managed agenda. In contrast, peasants in the Valle Alto sought a more autonomous “agrarian revolution” characterized by direct union control and local collective authority. These fissures on the ground were mirrored by fractures in the political sphere. The MNR itself was split between conservative and left-wing sectors competing to capture peasant support. While parties to the left of the MNR—particularly the PIR and the POR—played an important role in criticizing the governing party and pushing the revolutionary agenda leftward, Gordillo argues that neither was willing to engage seriously with peasant visions of autonomy. Instead, both parties operated within Marxist frameworks that categorized peasants as “petit bourgeois,” a conceptual blind spot that limited their ability to recognize the peasantry as autonomous political actors and to grasp the political meaning of agrarian mobilization in Cochabamba (60–61). Gordillo then traces how these competing visions of land, party power, and peasant autonomy unfolded over time, as shifting political alignments reshaped rural conflict during the revolutionary decade.
Specifically, Gordillo traces the evolution of peasant land struggles through three stages of the revolution. In the first phase (1952–1954), the left wing of the MNR promoted redistribution to peasants and mine workers, sparking a surge in union organizing. In the second phase (1954–1958), the party’s right wing reversed course by reformulating populist policies to benefit former landowners, weakening rural unionism by installing political mercenaries, and centralizing power in urban organizations at the expense of peasant autonomy. These shifts provoked new tensions—not only between workers and peasants but also between campesinos and the urban revolutionary establishment. In the third phase (1959–1964), such tensions culminated in the Champa Guerra, a violent conflict between peasant militias from Ucureña and Cliza. Though rooted in intraparty rivalries, the confrontation also reflected deeper social and territorial divides between peasants and townspeople (vecinos). Throughout, Gordillo shows that land was never just an economic resource; it was the central terrain upon which political battles over autonomy and revolutionary meaning were fought. His analysis reframes the revolution not as a unified process but as a series of rural conflicts that exposed the limits of MNR authority and the volatility of peasant alliances.
Whether in southern Chile, the highlands of central Peru, or the valleys of Bolivia, these three important works ultimately demonstrate that rural communities undertook sustained struggles over land and the terms of their inclusion into national politics. They invite a reconsideration of state formation, revolution, and political change in Latin America from the vantage point of rural actors. By placing the countryside at the center of the narrative, they show that conflicts over land and authority were not marginal episodes but structuring forces in the twentieth century. Critically, they also point to the endurance of these tensions; disputes over territory remain unresolved and struggles over autonomy and representation continue to shape political life across the Andes. These studies do more than recover peasant history. They demonstrate how rural struggles have long set the parameters of national debate.
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