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This paper adopts a legal mobilization approach in analyzing the varying strategies developed by indigenous communities resisting development projects in Peru and Guatemala. Both countries, like most countries in Latin America and some in other regions of the world, have ratified Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization, the main international law protecting indigenous rights. ILO 169 commits states, among other things, to ensure that indigenous communities have the right to a "consultation" in the event of a proposed development project affecting tribal lands. The Convention, and in particular the right to consultation, are much celebrated by indigenous rights advocates. The precise meaning of the right, however, is left vague and undefined in the text of the law, and indigenous peoples and others have interpreted it in markedly different ways. This paper describes and analyzes, within a legal mobilization framework, the ways in which three indigenous communities, two in Peru and one in Guatemala, have developed different strategies for pursuing the right to consultation. The communities surrounding the Marlin mine in Guatemala have appealed to the right of consultation in national and regional courts, as well as World Bank fora, and have held a community-led consultation not recognized by the state. The communities surrounding the Rio Blanco mining project in Peru have also held a community-led consultation, but have not initiated any court proceedings. The communities surrounding the Yanacocha mine, also in Peru, have not held a community-led consultation or pursued litigation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early modern Spanish empire was one of history's most litigious societies. It welcomed lawsuits by subjects of conquered nations, as a means for indoctrinating Native people, enriching European lawyers, and channeling resistance into institutions that supported the empire. Within just a few years of the Spanish conquest, indigenous communities sued one another and European settlers over land boundaries, tribute obligations, and other claims. They even sued the crown itself, for restitution for the violence and disappropriation of the Spanish conquest. Through a multi-level appeals process, some cases went all the way to Spain, where Native litigants both won and lost politically charged cases.This paper begins by addressing three general questions about Spanish colonial Native litigation. First, why did both Native peoples and Spanish settlers collaborate in the process of indigenous litigation? Second, did native litigation allow Native legal concepts to be expressed within the colonial system, making it a vehicle for what we might call "legal pluralism"? Fourth, and last, did Native litigation offer a real tool for challenging colonialism itself?The paper then offers a case study of how Native technologies of documentation were integrated into Spanish procedure. In Peru, the Incas and other Andean peoples did not have graphic writing but instead recorded information in a complex code of knots in long ropes of spun llama wool, called khipus. I examine the agency and conflicts of indigenous elites and Spanish jurists in working out a strategy for using khipus as legal evidence. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the impact of global human rights conventions on the implementation of gender violence laws in Peru. My study of contemporary family violence laws in Peru examines the ways that poor, urban women have begun to adopt feminist human rights discourse to defend themselves against violent partners. It describes the translation of relatively narrow conceptions of "rights" such as autonomy and/or bodily integrity and their deployment in contemporary family violence cases. I argue that legal reform is a critical part of the process of indigenization of global human rights, as "rights" are contested, interpreted, and negotiated by local actors in civil society. My goal in studying the multiple interpretations of rights is to understand the ways that global recommendations for legal reform are transformed through local processes of accommodation and resistance at the grassroots level. In reviewing the impact of global human rights discourse on Peruvian family law, this paper contributes to the increasing interest in examining family law as a critical component of gendered ideology that is informed by, and reinforces a set of norms, values, and assumptions about the ways family life should be organized. I explore the ways that modern rights discourse has been grafted onto, and is deeply rooted in a colonial discourse of female honor and vulnerability. Finally, the paper raises questions about why a secular discourse of rights, and more broadly, a discourse of citizenship envisioned by the human rights corpus has enjoyed such uneven success in Peru. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Andean highlands of Peru have known centuries of territorial struggle under different political regimes and involving a variety of actors, such as colonial authorities, hacendados, indigenous communities, and state agencies. This paper starts with a short overview of the role of the law and legal procedures in territorial questions in various epochs. This is followed by a detailed study of the history of territorial claims of Usibamba, a comunidad campesina in the central highlands of Peru. We show how territorial struggles involve state attempts to control populations and look at the role of the law and legal procedures in these processes. We also look at the ways in which notions of territory are linked to definitions of indigenousness and how this is expressed in the history of Peruvian legislation. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork and the analysis of archival material on land disputes and court cases. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of race in twentieth century Peru is best understood as the struggle for political inclusion within the practice of the law, or within its legal culture. That is, the idea of race in Peru is particularly embedded within the creation of penal codes that were shaped by debates over liberalism and positivism, but also ideas of proper womanhood and marriage. This emerges most cogently in the legal and popular understandings of difference (race) that are negotiated by litigants in court cases concerning rape. In fact, this special relationship between race, gender, and the law is the most salient force in shaping racial categories in Peru, as well as sustaining the social inequalities that still haunt this region. This paper is an examination of archival and ethnographic data collected in Cusco, Peru and will highlight the ways in which women use racial languages and the "poetics" of violence as strategies in court. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the independence of Peru from the Spanish Crown at the beginning of 19th century, the victorious of the contest met in the need to found an imaginary political society which would give a juridical sustenance to the ' Peruvian nation ', it might seem that only the original nations or indigenous peoples might have filled this need. Nevertheless, due to the political depletion that the indigenous groups had suffered after the wars of independence, the Creole/western social pre-eminent group developed a process of national construction based only on its cultural and political precepts. The constitution of republican Peru as a political society is founded on the post colonial reality of the Peruvian history, and on the juridical relegation of the ethnic/national difference that crosses the whole society in favour of the enthronement of the Creole as political 'normal' model of citizen. This relegation has taken form of seventeen constitutional documents that have governed the life of republican Peru. This article exposes, from a socio juridical perspective, the treatment that the Peruvian Constitutional law has given to the multiculturality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]