The cover to this pamphlet from the 1960s depicts a dramatic example of the exploitative relations that are described in 75 pages of text and comic-strips. Authored by a Colombian workers’ collective, the booklet aimed to teach workers about their exploitation by bosses who own the means of production. The bosses are shown, historically, as colonial slave owners and feudal lords, and, today, as landowners and industrialists (including North American partners). The workers are shown as enslaved Africans, Indigenous serfs, peasant farmers and industrial labourers. 

The cover shows an 1879 French engraving, “The Ascent of Agony” by Émile Maillard based on a sketch by French traveller Édouard André. To cross Colombia’s mountain passes, travellers like André hired silleros (porters), who were Indigenous or mestizo (mixed-race) men, renowned for their strength and sure-footedness. The exploitative relationship is highlighted by the imposition of a comic-strip speech bubble in which the sillero exclaims “¡Basta ya!” (enough already!): the juxtaposition of visual regimes from the 1870s and the 1960s dramatises racial injustice. But the white passenger was also totally dependent on his/her dark-skinned porter. One slip could mean death. Personal service creates an intimacy different from the more impersonal relations between, say, landowner and peasant farmer. 

Peter Wade

Miguel Det’s Novísima corónica… I mal-gobierno is inspired by Guamán Poma’s book Primera Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno, a seventeenth-century critique of Spanish colonial rule. Starting with creation stories and moving through Peruvian landscapes and customs to the social and political conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Det’s book sits within a Latin American epic tradition. Though this book might appear to sit at the periphery of what constitutes a comic, its aesthetic, composition, and use of image-text justify its inclusion here. Det creates a visually complex series that works diachronically and synchronically to highlight injustices in Peruvian society. The mistreatment of Indigenous peoples, and Peru’s structural racism recur throughout. This image depicts the massacre by state forces of those protesting extractivist incursions into ancestral lands in the Amazon. By drawing on both Poma’s aesthetic and on the critique embedded in his work, Det emphasises the trans-temporal nature of violence against Indigenous people. 

James Scorer

This zine is a commission of the CORALA project. The first part of this zine deals with the Chinese migration, also known as "culí" migration to Peru, which began in the mid-19th century and lasted for decades.  Large numbers of people arrived in Lima on ships, and in many cases, upon arrival, they were "assigned" to landowners, while others were "auctioned off" to those interested in exploiting their labour. Between 1840 and 1870 alone, over 100,000 Chinese arrived, many of whom worked in guano extraction or railroad construction.  In the second part of the zine, the drawing takes a different direction, turning towards the contradictions perceived in the present and the experience of inhabiting a body in an urban space.  "Pasta para wantán" is the story of the impossibility of situating oneself in a specific place. For Zavala, the current situation of the younger generations of Chinese migrant children or those of Nikkei origin in Lima is unique. Like her first narrative, this is a shared memory within her closest affective communities. It is the story of moving between two worlds where you belong to neither and where it seems you don't belong anywhere. 

Malena Bedoya

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