Seeing Peru through Prisms, in the Winter of ’26

^{It is our duty not to ignore our national reality, but we also have a duty not to ignore the global reality.}

^{José Mariátegui}

 

In Lima, the temperature in January is a delightful mid-70s—yet I felt woozy by midday, and drenched in sweat. It rarely rains, yet clouds do not stay in the sky.  They creep in like sea creatures. Sometimes they blanket, and the cityscape disappears. Most times, they slither through a neighborhood, hiding one slice of the massive metropolis, revealing others.  In Cusco, the weather was perfect, cozy in a sweatshirt in the morning and evening, rising to shirtsleeves by midday, but the altitude took its toll. Low blood pressure is dangerous at elevations over 11,000 ft. It was my first time experiencing the illness—a debilitating headache, fatigue, and sleeplessness. On the second-to-last day, we were able to climb to a mirador. We sat atop the city, awed by the view, until lightning cut the sky, and hail came down sideways, pelting our faces as we slid down the mountain.

I was ignorant about Peru’s unique climate. What I did know was filtered through prisms personal and political.

The Prism of Family Ties 

Since childhood, I knew Peru as part of an immigration tale of two German Jewish sisters, born at the turn of the 20th century. One was my grandmother, who escaped Hitler’s reign of terror in 1939, aboard a boat headed for Cuba, three children in tow.  Six months later, they left the refugee camp in Havana for Miami, where my grandfather was waiting. The family settled in Queens, New York. Their escape story was filled with moments of stealth, subterfuge, courage, and the essential aid of non-Jews. While sucessful, there were unspeakable losses and, for my grandma, the permanent separation from her parents.

My Grandma’s sister, Margot’s story was similar, but different. She was separated from her children. They found safety in England through the Kindertransport system. The family that reunited later in Peru included her parents. Today, her great, great-grandchildren still live in Lima.

I saw my Tante Margot five times when she visited the US. A favorite story was her telling my young mom that she was not ill– she was pregnant with me! Margot was loving and interested in me. She sent gifts from Peru—textiles in bright colors. In the 1980s, my partner David and I wanted to visit her and her progeny. I wish we had, but Tante Margot forbade it, saying that it was too dangerous. Now, my Tante, her children, and her grandson Robbie have all passed away. Like my grandmother, she was a forceful person, difficult to disobey.  

That is the polite way of saying it.

My cousin Lily, Margot’s granddaughter, still lives in Lima, and we met for the first time. She looks like my cousin Barbie. She said I looked like my dad’s sister Maja. Lily said Margot was a mean mother-in-law. I told her my grandmother tried to annul my parents’ marriage.  I don’t know if the trauma these women endured made them hard, or if, after protecting their kids from Hitler, no one would ever be good enough for them. We don’t know what kind of people our grandmothers would have been if Hitler had not waged a war of extermination against German Jews. Because of the Nazi regime, because of the stubborn courage of two sisters, because of the aid of people in many countries, who defied immoral laws to aid refugees, I am from the United States, and my cousin Lily is Peruvian. That is how the world was then, and how it is now.

The Prism of Boom/Bust and Empire. 

In 1981, I took a course on the History of Peru and Chile. The story of guano, a 19th-century Peruvian commodity sold as fertilizer in Europe, stuck with me as a quintessential example of imperial extraction and capitalistic greed. The dueńos forced enslaved Afro-Caribbeans to do the grueling labor until Peru abolished slavery. Then they recruited Chinese indentured laborers. The boom lasted two decades. The guano saga is one of cruel working conditions justified by white supremacy myths, fantastic profits for parasitical Europeans, and a swift and permanent end due to corporate greed.

The extractive madness in Peru did not begin or end with bird poop. Spaniards’ 16th-century thirst for gold was legendary.

Then, after guano, US Rubber and oil barons laid waste to the Amazon regions of Peru. And now, in 2026, the government has announced it is investing billions in zinc, copper, lead, tin, silver, and gold mining in the southern desert region. Indigenous ranchers are losing their lands, water sources are being poisoned, and there is no plan for sustainability. Once again, bird shit.

The Prism of Continentalist Solidarity 

Like Bad Bunny at the half-time show at the US Super Bowl, singing an anthem to one America from Chile to Canada, 100 years ago, there was a movement of Latin Americans who advocated for solidarity across the Americas and beyond. They organized against local dictators and—in the era of US Gunboat diplomacy—against US economic and military intervention. I spent my 1990s in graduate school, steeped in the lives of these border-crossing visionaries. As a Jewish child of a Holocaust refugee, distressed by the way some of my cohort had moved from nationalism of the oppressed to nationalism of the oppressor, with their blind support of Israel at the expense of Palestinians, I was interested in studying the trajectory of those who do the opposite, moving from nationalist struggle to a position of international solidarity.

Among prominent Continentalists were the Peruvians Magda Portal, Victor Raúl Haya de La Torre, and José Carlos Mariátegui. All three were exiled at one time or another by the Leguia dictatorship (1919-1930). Their forced travels broadened their perspectives and deepened their resolve to work for liberation within and outside of Peru. Raúl Haya de la Torre and Magda Portal met in Mexico City, where they cofounded the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana in 1925. APRA still exists as a calcified political party in Peru. At its founding, however, it was to be a movement without borders. De la Torre would become a corrupt nationalist in his old age, but in the 1920s, he and Portal shared a radical vision of borderless solidarity.

 

Magda Portal was a renowned poet who connected with other feminists, workers’ rights activists, and anti-imperialists in Cuba and Mexico. Unlike Haya de la Torre, she remained an anti-imperialist, which led her to quit APRA in 1950. She would continue her writing and activism until she died in 1989, the same year as my Tante Margot. Walking the streets in Barranca, where Magda lived, I understood why so many of her poems feature the sun and the sea. 

José Mariátegui lived a short and brilliant life. Like the Cuban José Martí, he learned as much outside of his homeland as in it. He was a socialist who was rejected by the Soviet Comintern for advocating a vision of liberation for the Americas that incorporated an Indigenismo built on the examples and ideologies of Peruvian Indigenous leaders like 18th-century Tupac Amaru 2,  and a Latin American understanding of empire. He also disagreed with Stalin’s nationalism. Like Portal, he also opposed converting APRA into a political party. Mariátegui did not live long enough to lose perspective like Haya de la Torre, and his works, like the Bible, have been interpreted in radically different ways.

The home he rented in central  Lima is now a museum and cultural center. The painting, below, is from the Museo de Arte de Lima, 

The Prism of Public History: Ochentas and their Retelling 

Unfortunately, a group that claimed to follow Mariátegui in the 1980s—the Sendero Luminoso—devolved from liberating ideology to terror. A litmus test for their illegitimacy is that those most often victimized by their political violence were rural, Indigenous, poor, or rival radical groups and trade unions.  

In the museums that tell the story of what Peruvians call the lost decade, or los ochentas, essential pieces of the story are untold or glossed over. 1. the inequalities, especially regarding access to land and living wage jobs, and lack of cultural sovereignty that led people to look for radical alternatives, 2. The terrorism of government forces and paramilitaries in the 1980s, who treated all peasants as potential militants. 3. The massive corruption and state violence that ensued in the aftermath of the 1980s, under the Fujimori regime. 4. The role of the United States, which funded and trained government forces. (Fujimori’s primary henchman, Vladimiro Montesinos, was—in addition to being a drug dealer and torturer—a CIA agent). 5. The role of drugs, which corrupted all parties, and the complex culpability of the US government and drug consumers in making this so. 

It was because of this civil war that my Tante Margot did not want us to visit in 1987.  

We visited two historical exhibits on the Ochentas. The first was in a mammoth building on the beach in San Isidro that juts out to the sea. In The Space of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion. We descended four flights and then took in the exhibits from bottom to top. Like the House of Memory in Colombia, the collection of personal testimonies is invaluable, but in the Lima exhibit, there is less context. The other Ochentas exhibit in the Minister of Culture building was even more searing, and a little better at documenting the violence of the regime and paramilitaries, but also did not leave you with any understanding of why people were drawn to groups promising radical change.

The woman who gave us a tour of the Ministry of Culture said the Ochentas were in many ways a religious war against the syncretic Indigenous/Catholic practices of rural people. It got me thinking about the Northern Ireland struggles in the 1980s, which participants told us appeared to be religious, but were really about housing and jobs, and the movements in Central America in the same decade that embraced liberation theology. I have so many questions. These exhibits—important as they are—did not answer them. 

 

The Prism of Current Peruvian Politics 

Coalitions of People Power Against the Current Madness 

My cousin Lily said, “You should have come in the 80’s. It is more dangerous now.” I never found out exactly what she meant, but I know this: In the winter of 2022-2023, President Boluarte sent in her police forces to quell protests in the Indigenous highland towns of Apurímac and Ayacucho, north of Cusco and Puno, to the south. In just those weeks, 49 people were murdered by police.

When I made my reservation in September of 2025, the country had the distinction of having a president with the lowest approval rating in the world. In October, the people, led by a coalition of families of those killed in winter 2022-2023, and Gen Z activists, deposed her. José Jerí, President of the Congress, became the interim leader of the Country, the 8th president in ten years. 

The new President was no better. They removed the figurehead but were unable to remove the system she represented. Under the current temporary President, Jeri, Peru suffers mass extortions, a corrupt congress and police, and a crackdown on those who stand up and protest them. On top of it, Jeri has been accused of rape and business corruption. The county is as politically divided as the US, but the current President and Congress are hated across the political spectrum for being corrupt and ineffectual. The election, scheduled for April 12, has 34 candidates from 34 political parties.

After their one-day strike, the transportation workers announced they would join Gen Z in a day of protest on January 28. Joining these two sectors were the family members of those killed by police. 

On January 28, we were enroute, coming back to Lima after a week in Cusco. We walked across Cusco to the airport, missing the protests there, and arrived in Lima when the mobilization of tens of thousands had ended. Roads had been blocked off in the capital city, and tourists were told to stay in their hotels. The protesters demanded the resignation of President Jeri. They called for reparations and justice for the families of those killed during a protest in December 2022-23. The authorities were most concerned about prolonged protests in Cuzco, where a disruption in tourist traffic could cripple the economy, as it did in 2022-23. 

The geography of solidarity for the Gen Z activists is broader than that of the Continentalists. The Peruvian youth are not just connected to their elders but are also inspired by youth in Nepal, Morocco, and Madagascar. 

If there were justice, the Quechua-speaking people of this land would be the wealthiest and most powerful of all. It is their land from whence the guano, rubber, oil, and zinc come, and it is their culture that attracts the visitor to Peru, to pet llamas, and climb Machu Picchu. The extraordinary cuisine of Peru is due to the Indigenous farming and cooking techniques. The Larco Museums in Lima and Cusco, and other history museums, display the astonishing beauty of ancient pots, textiles, the genius of stone buildings of the Nazca, Mochica, Chankay, Chimú, Tiawanko, Wari, iQuollao, Pukara, and Inka people. 

As it is, many eke out a living selling on the street to tourists like us who come with our backpacks and no home to fill with souvenirs. We did our best: Dave bought a sweater and a belt. I bought a journal, earrings, a scarf, and a tiny carved obsidian whistle that plays four notes.

Immigrant streams are safety valves of extractive economies. In Latin America, people divested of their land, their water, their culture, their economic security, might begin a walk across borders. Some end up in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In the winter of 2026, I see Peru through the prism of the Minneapolis ICE Occupation

I can’t extract the ICE Occupation of Minneapolis in the winter of 2026 from my memories of Peru. I was sitting in a cafe in Lima, eating the menu del dia. I looked up at the TV and saw Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, and long-time Minneapolis activist Jess Sundin–larger than life.

We heard about the second murder by an ICE agent in our Minneapolis neighborhood while walking through the village of Pisac, outside Cusco. As with Renee Good, before we heard who it was, we imagined every 37-year-old we knew—one year older than our child, and the same age as so many of our students. One of us would sob, and then the other, as the reality of the ongoing terrorism on the streets we knew so well penetrated our consciousness. In the middle of that, a woman handed Dave a baby llama, indicated that I should take a photo, and that we should then pay her. And so we did.

We didn’t know Renee Good or Alex Pretti, but then, like everyone else, we got to know them. I thought about how both of them—like George Floyd, like so many immigrants and refugees, and like myself—came to the Twin Cities to start a new life in a place that seemed to have the space for survival and reinvention. We humans move to find a home, something we all have a right to. The fascists with their guns, their camps, their racist legal systems, have no right—only might.

My grandma and Tante Margot, as young mothers, were like the parents of Liam Conejo Ramos, the parents with their children at Dilley detention camp, and those imprisoned in the Whipple Building in the Twin Cities. If these children and parents come out on the other side, in safe places, able to live and grow, there will still be repercussions–that is what trauma does. There is enough of that kind of thing in a normal life: accidents, deaths, divorces, and bad relationships. State-sponsored terror needs to recede to the bin of history, where we can peek at it once an eon to make sure we don’t ever go there again. If we humans need drama, there is always climate change and pandemics. We have work to do, taxing the rich, giving to the poor, and creating sustainable economies for the next generations. The coalitions coming together in Lima—youth, transportation workers, Quechua mothers—and Minneapolis—unions, students, churches, neighborhood groups, established organizations, and new formations—can lead the way.

Though my emotional ties to Minneapolis have tightened since the ICE occupation, I am also more unclear about where home is for me. Like Mariátegui in Italy, and Portal and Haya de la Torre in Mexico, I saw Peru through a prism of my homeland. Mariátegui said our duty must be global and local. In Peru, I wasn’t sure which one was which. And maybe that was good. Both are both.

Twenty-eight months on the road, I know only this: wherever I am, I have a duty to make some noise for justice. I’ve got my little black four-note obsidian whistle now, so I’m ready