Emilia Curatola Fernández – Cultural production, ideology and struggle in Peru, 1950s-1980s

The research explores the role of cultural productions at a time of increasing unionisation and politicisation of workers’ movements during the 1950s-80s in Peru. Through the study of a group of working-class intellectuals, poets and artists active during those decades, the project examines how their visual and poetic productions contributed to the circulation and discussion of radical political ideas, to the development of a class consciousness within the workers’ and grassroots movements and, ultimately, to the construction of an image of the worker and, therefore, of the Peruvian working class.

The project is framed in a specific historical context characterised by the strong presence of social movements that many scholars have periodised as the ‘global sixties’ (or the ‘long sixties’). This new moment blossomed in Latin America with the economic, political and cultural implications of the Cold War, the impact of the Cuban Revolution (1959) and the expansion of the guerrillas and began to close with the fall of the socialist experience of the Unidad Popular in Chile (1973) and the violent entry of neoliberalism in the world. In Peru, this period was also marked by peasant land invasions in the Andes, the radicalisation of the workers’ movement and the consolidation of its trade unions, as well as by the structural reforms implemented by the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975). The reforms broke with the old oligarchic order and indirectly contributed to the growth of the New Left and a left-wing political culture in the country.

Emilia Curatola Fernández is a sociologist from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) and holds a master’s degree in visual arts from the Università IUAV di Venezia. She is currently a PhD student at the Institute of the Americas, University College London (UCL). Her doctoral project focuses on a chapter of the history of the Peruvian labour movement at a time of growing unionisation, politicisation and radicalism (1960s-1980s) through an approach to its cultural productions. Her fields of research are related to the visual studies and Latin American political, intellectual and cultural history. She has worked as a researcher, curator and lecturer, teaching modules of history, art history and communication theories.