Between the liberators and deactivators: Place, power and protest in Lima’s memoryscape

Late 2020 saw a wave of civil disobedience in Peru, with young protestors calling for radical change in public spaces heavily coded with militaristic, colonial, patriarchal imagery. Yet this nothing new in Lima. Despite attempts by the government and tourism industry to culti-vate an image of Lima as the historic and gastronomic centre of South America, artists, activists and social movements have regularly used public space as a battleground in which to contest this image through acts of protest, civil disobedience and commemoration of Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980-2000). In this article, I examine the historic symbols and narratives embedded within Lima’s memoryscape, and how these are contested and undermined by acts of protest. I will then draw on two examples of public commemoration of the internal conflict, demonstrating how competing narratives of political violence are prioritised differently in Lima’s public space, while pointing to ways that protest and commemorative acts can reinforce, or undermine, competing narratives of Peruvian nationhood.