“Te van a contar lo que han escuchado, pero no lo que han vivido”: The queer politics of memory in the era of human rights

• In Event: Pensando lo “queer” y el “Perú”

Abstract

How do notions of rights shape how communities remember and interpret violence? What are the effects of queer accounts of violence that circulate alongside officially sanctioned narratives? To commemorate the homophobic violence that occurred during Peru’s internal armed conflict, and to advocate for hate crime laws that include sexual orientation and gender identity, development, human rights, and LGBT organizations across the country annually hold activities on May 31 for the “Day Against Homophobic Hate Crimes.” This date was chosen because the Final Report of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission includes an instance of violence that occurred on this date in 1989 in the city of Tarapoto when the MRTA group assassinated eight gays and travestis. In interviews I conducted during ethnographic fieldwork in Tarapoto in 2014-2015, I was told multiple accounts of this particular instance of violence, ranging from claims that it never occurred, to that the victims were not gays and travestis but the heterosexual men they socialized with, to that the violence was merited because the victims were drug addicts. Instead of aiming to “uncover the truth” of what really occurred, I analyze the social effects of these multiple claims and the circumstances that make possible their persistence. Are they merely allegations and counter-productive to the practice of human rights? I argue that this tension between human rights efforts to commemorate and queer efforts to contest represent different approaches to the politics of memory. While the former construes a truth by marking it off from the present, the latter shows that such truths continue to be reinterpreted and remade.

Author

• Justin Perez, University of California/Irvine