My closest peer among the Peruvian church members was Eduardo Ramos. He was about my age, with a younger sister named Raquel and an older brother and sister whose names I forget. The Ramoses were not new arrivals from the countryside, like most of their neighbors. Eduardo’s mother, Consuelo, was related to Chinese immigrants, which was not unusual. Chinese people had been settling in Peruvian cities since the 18th century and had mixed pretty thoroughly with the rest of the population by the 1960s. Almost every family had a kid the others would call “Chino” or “China” for any feature slightly more Asian-looking than the rest of the family’s.
Eduardo and his family had been among the first occupants of one of the barriadas on the southern side of the city, the sand dune region. Their zone was named Emmaus at first, after the city in the story from Matthew, but in the patriotic fervor that took hold after the Velasco coup it was renamed Mariano Melgar, for a hero in the war on independence from Spain.
Being in the first wave of settlers gave the Ramoses a small edge over the later arrivals, and their house showed it because it was located in the first few blocks off the main road and large parts of it were built of brick instead of straw mats. Everyone seemed to put every spare cent they earned into their houses, putting up walls of red brick or cinder block as soon as they could, then replacing the sand floors and then the straw or zinc roofing with poured concrete. Crews of 20 or 30 men would put up a roof together by first building a thick forest of vertical poles inside the house to hold up the wet cement, then laying rectangular forms made of wired-together rebar across the top. They would build a yard-wide wooden ramp from the street in front of the house up to the roof level, with a switchback or two if needed, nailing scrap boards across it a step or so apart for traction. They would mix a giant batch of cement in the street, using the sand that was there for the taking. Then each man would fill a square bucket, about 12 inches on a side and two feel deep, hoist it on a shoulder and haul it up the ramp, ant-like, to dump it over the wood and rebar. After a few days of drying, the lumber supports would come out and there would be a new brick-and-cement bunker, lacking only water and electrical service to be a regular middle-class homestead.
The big political struggles, in fact, seemed to be over water and electricity. The highly organized character of the invasions spilled over into the struggle to get the authorities to deliver services to what were, despite their gritty reality and their dire need, still just illegal squatters’ settlements to the official world. “Invasores” would set up roadblocks with picket signs demanding a water pipe to their neighborhood, stage sit-ins at government offices, and so on. All the standard techniques of popular mobilization, either invented on the spot or adopted from India or the southern United States.
By 1969 or 70, these great masses of desperate people perched at the rim of the capital city had to be costing the local rulers some sleep. This was the time when revolutionaries elsewhere were preaching abut surrounding the cities from the countryside, and even though this particular surrounding was not instigated by any conscious method, a glance at a map would tell you it was a quite thorough surrounding. But I can’t imagine that there wasn’t someone elsewhere in government who recognized that having masses of poor people focused on such workaday development matters as water and electricity would inevitably divert their attention from the underlying, more or less permanent, and ever starker inequalities in power and wealth.
Someone must have learned something about the value of material concessions in gaining people’s acceptance of the larger economic and political status quo. That may be why the local ruling class allowed the Velasco group to throw out the feckless Belaunde and rule for a few years. Velasco’s achievements included a lot of symbolism, such as a rhetorical commitment to restore the native Quechua language as the country’s official language, but mainly he bought time for the class system in Peru, still almost as rigid and cumbersome as it had been under the viceroys, to adapt to the new conditions. After a few years, a group of more moderate generals got the nod to throw him out. They managed things for a few years and then turned it back over to Belaunde.