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Peru Rural Family and Household
The Andean peasantry, often maligned by those who
discriminate against them as being lazy and poor workers,
are the
reverse of the stereotype. The peasant family begins its
day at
dawn with the chores of animal husbandry, cutting the
eucalyptus
firewood, fetching water, and a plethora of other domestic
tasks.
Field work begins with a trek to the often distant
chacras, which may be located at a different
altitude from
the home and require several hours to reach. Where
chacras
are very distant from the home, farmers maintain rough
huts in
which to store tools or stay for several days. Andean
peasants of
all ages and both sexes lead rigorous lives, hustling
about steep
pathways carrying loads of firewood, produce, and tools on
their
backs.
Although horses and mules are of greater market value
than
burros, they are more expensive to maintain, and thus
burros are
the most common beasts of burden in most of the highlands.
Native
Andean llamas and alpacas are commonly found in the
central and
southern Andes, where they are still widely used for
transport,
wool, and meat. Peasant women and girls, although carrying
a
burden, perpetually keep their hands at work spinning wool
to be
hand woven by local artisans into clothing, blankets, and
ponchos. Although there are few who approach full selfsufficiency in the Andes (and none on the coast), the
Andean
peasantry make, repair, invent, and adapt most of their
tools;
they also prepare food from grain they have harvested and
animals
they have raised and butchered.
Although modern amenities and appliances have found
their way
into most nonfarm households, the rural poor by necessity
must
conduct their affairs without these instruments of
pleasure and
work. Even though consumer items--such as electric irons,
blenders (especially useful for making baby food),
televisions,
and radiocassette tape players--are keenly desired,
surveys have
shown that 25 percent of all Peruvian households possess
none of
these things. The great majority of households (more than
50
percent) lacking modern appliances were in the rural areas
of the
Andes. The contributions of many hands, therefore, are
vital to
the rural economy and household. The same survey by Carlos
Aramburu and his associates also showed that the poorest
and most
rural areas were also the provinces that in demographic
terms had
the highest dependency ratios (the largest number of
persons--the
very young and the aged--who were only limited
participants in
the labor force). Consequently, the loss of youth to
migration
cuts deeply into the productive capacity of hundreds of
families
and their communities. In those districts in the central
highlands especially, where the Shining Path has been
active
since the early 1980s, the absolute decline in work force
numbers
has left a third of the houses empty, fields in permanent
fallow,
and irrigation works in disrepair, losses which Peru could
ill
afford in view of its declining agricultural production
and great
dependency on imported foodstuffs, even in rural areas.
These demographic changes also threaten other community
and
family institutions like the use of festive and
exchange-labor
systems (minka and ayni, respectively) that
have
been such an integral part of the traditional peasant farm
tradition. The minka involves a family working side
by
side with relatives and neighbors to plant or harvest,
often with
the accompaniment of musicians and always with ample basic
food
supplied by the hosts. On some occasions, invited workers
may
request token amounts of the harvest. Exchange labor, or
ayni, is the fulfillment of an obligation to return
the
labor that someone else has produced. The communities of
peasant
farmers, whether native or cholo, utilize these
mechanisms
to augment family labor at critical times. Minka
work
crews, however, are often inefficient and overly festive,
and
their hosts are unable to keep activities task-oriented on
a late
afternoon. As a consequence, farmers who are mainly
concerned
with monetary profitability, tend to utilize paid
temporary
workers instead of the minka, whose ceremonial
aspects are
distracting. On the other hand, the purpose of the
minka
is obviously social and communal, as well as economic.
Family
economic activity in rural communities has invariably
relied
primarily on unpaid family labor, augmented by periodic
cooperative assistance from relatives and neighbors to
handle
larger seasonal tasks.
Data as of September 1992
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