Sources from Below: A Rebel Archive Rewrites Maritime History of Peru’s Cuarta Región

Abstract

This paper examines how local archives offer an alternative narrative to the industrial expansion of Peru’s cuarta región: the sea. The rise of Peru’s global fishing economy in the postwar era and the parallel establishment of the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone in 1952 added the sea as a new commercial region beyond the rainforest, mountains, and coast. Over the course of the next two decades Peru’s economy would increasingly depend on a small pelagic fish: the anchoveta (Engraulis ringens). Following the anchoveta collapse of 1973, the national economy struggled to rebound and social unrest clotted the coastline. In response to increasing state violence, scientific opacity, and censorship, one notable archive in addition to several smaller collections, emerged to support a rising tide of labor and environmental activism. Drawing from 12-months of archival and ethnographic research and interviews with key stakeholders this article joins the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on archives to develop the concept of “sources from below”: locally-sourced archives that bolster resistance movements and upend hegemonic ontologies of industrial resource exploitation. I pull from postcolonial work on “sciences from below” and political ecology to offer novel insights into human-ocean interactions in the world’s largest fishery. I conclude with lessons for future scholarship on social movements, environmental knowledge, and resource-dependent economies.