Reclaiming Heritage and Citizenship: Urban Pre-Colonial Cultural Heritage Management and Heritage Grassroots Organizations in Lima, Peru

The material-centered cultural heritage management approach does not contemplate ordinary people’s closeness to heritage. Even after colonial relationships ended, colonial conceptions of what constitutes heritage drove national policy choices and state interventions regarding which elements of local history and culture should be valued and preserved and which could be destroyed and abandoned. Government rejection of non-elite populations and their connections to urban heritage resulted in the irrevocable destruction of important sites and traditions. But the rise of what I term heritage grassroots organizations (HGROs) has recently begun to reassert low-income and working-class citizens’ role in the recognition and preservation of heritage. Focusing on the emergence of HGROs in Lima, Peru, this article demonstrates how colonial heritage narratives formed, persisted, and have more recently been challenged by local populations whose daily lives are affected by materialist approaches to heritage. In doing so, these citizens simultaneously claim their rights to the past and to the city.