The Lima Reader: History, Culture, Politics.

• Author: Puente, Javier
• Position: LATIN AMERICA - Book review

Aguirre, Carlos, and Charles F. Walker. The Lima Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Lima, the capital city of Peru, is among the most populated cities in Latin America and the world. The city has approximately 11 million inhabitants, more than a third of the national population. Its vast geographical extent, its manifold socioeconomic identities, and its entangled cultural practices express a combination of political centralization, economic disenfranchisements, and racialized segregation as dominant features in the making of contemporary Peru. Editors Carlos Aguirre and Charles F. Walker offer a much-needed overview of the creation of this most important coastal city of the Andes. The Lima Reader presents a series of unpublished or not previously translated primary sources and excerpted literature that reveal the multiplicity of forces that converged to shape this contemporary metropolis.

The book follows a fairly conventional structure that parallels the standard periodization of Peruvian history: pre-Columbian, early colonial, late...