Javier Puente

Javier Puente is a scholar of Andean peoples and places trained at Georgetown University, whose research and teaching examine the social, political, and environmental histories of Latin America. His work has focused on the trajectories of agrarian reform, campesino land struggles, and, more recently, the experiences of socioenvironmental suffering across the Andes. At Smith College, he currently serves as chair of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies Program. He previously served as co-chair of the Indigenous Justice Working Group (2024–25), faculty liaison to the Phoebe and John D. Lewis Global Studies Center (2023–26), and as chair of Faculty Council (2025–26).

Javier Puente’s first book, The Rural State: Making Comunidades, Campesinos, and Conflict in Peru’s Central Sierra (University of Texas Press, 2022), examines how rural populations in Peru’s central sierra confronted the expanding powers of state and capital throughout the twentieth century while sustaining enduring struggles over land, subsistence, and autonomy. Through this history, the book uncovers the often-overlooked role that Andean rural communities played in shaping the modern Peruvian nation-state, offering a reinterpretation of how the Andes became la sierra, how pueblos became comunidades, and how indígenas became campesinos. The book received the 2023 Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize from the New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS). In 2024, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos published the Spanish-language edition, El Estado rural: indígenas, comuneros y campesinos en la sierra central.

Javier Puente is currently completing a second book-length project, Boom! An Explosive History of Peru, which traces the material and political history of dynamite in the transformation of the Peruvian Andes. Framed as a history of explosive modernity in the Anthropocene, the project examines how dynamite enabled the nineteenth-century construction of railroads across the Andean region, facilitated the expansion of extractive mining into deeper and higher-altitude environments, intensified ecologically destructive fishing practices in the rivers and lakes of the sierra, and, ultimately, became central to the violent strategies of late twentieth-century insurgency. Through the history of a single technology, the book explores the intertwined histories of infrastructure, capitalism, environmental change, and political violence in modern Peru.

Javier Puente’s teaching interests span Andean and environmental history, the agrarian question in Latin America, revolutionary and insurrectionary processes, and the intersections of industrial transformation, ecological change, and sociopolitical conflict. More broadly, his work as a teacher and a mentor is animated by an interest in the centrality of Latin America’s rural worlds to the making of Western modernity and in the ways global forces reshape agrarian societies and environments. In 2022, the Student Government Association at Smith College honored him with the annual Faculty Teaching Award for junior faculty members.

Javier Puente’s research has been funded and supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Lehigh University, the Program of Latin American Libraries and Archives at Harvard University, Georgetown University’s Center of Latin American Studies, and the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History. Outside Smith, he serves as a contributing editor of NACLA, the North American Council on Latin America.

Books

PUENTE, Javier. The Rural State: Making Comunidades, Campesinos, and Conflict in Peru’s Central Sierra. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022.

PUENTE, Javier. El Estado rural: indígenas, comuneros y campesinos en la sierra central. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2024.

Edited Volumes & Special Issues

Modelando Regiones Naturales: Capitalismo, Medio Ambiente y la Geografía del Perú Pos-Colonial. Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña, 12:3, 2022.

The Environmental and Ecological Impacts of Guerrilla and Irregular Warfare. Global Environment, 14:1, 2021.

Articles

PUENTE, Javier. “Peru’s Antisystem Impulse,” in: NACLA Report on The Americas, 55:1, 2023, pp.15-19.

PUENTE, Javier and Adrián LERNER. “Modelando Regiones Naturales: Capitalismo, Medio Ambiente y la Geografía del Perú Pos-Colonial,” in: Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña, 12:3, December 2022, pp. 20-27.

PUENTE, Javier. “Monumentos de papel: la narrativa histórica del Gobierno Revolucionario de la Fuerza Armada,” in: Grecia Barbieri and Gonzalo Benavente, eds. La revolución imaginada, pp. 45-50. Lima: Debate/Penguin Random House, 2021.

PUENTE, Javier. "Irregular Conflicts, Disrupted Ecologies: The Environmental Impacts of Unconventional Warfare in the Global South,” in: Global Environment, 14:1, pp. 7-14.

PUENTE, Javier. “The Enduring Climate of Conflict: Drought, Impoverishment, and the Long Aftermath of Civil War in Peru,” in: Global Environment, 2021, 14:1, pp. 146-179.

PUENTE, Javier. “De comunero a campesino: el ‘corto siglo veinte’ en el campo peruano, 1920-1969,” in: Investigaciones Históricas, 40, December 2020, pp. 9-26.

PUENTE, Javier. “Tierra para el que la trabaja: El Proyecto 206 y la circulación de conocimiento agrario en América Latina, 1964-1974,” in: Fernando Purcell and Ricardo Arias, eds., Circulaciones, Chile: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2020, pp. 229-254.

PUENTE, Javier. “The Military Grammar of Agrarian Reform in Peru: Campesinos and Rural Capitalism,” in: Radical History Review, 133, January 2019, 78-101.

PUENTE, Javier. “Una guerra de ocupación: la territorialización del Conflicto Armado Interno en Perú, 1981-1986,” in: Revista Folia Histórica del Nordeste, 32, May - August 2018, pp. 175-197.

PUENTE, Javier. “Making Peru’s Sendero Luminoso: The Mega Niño of 1982-1983,” in: Age of Revolutions.

PUENTE, Javier. “Livestock, Livelihood and Agrarian Change in Andean Peru,” in: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, February 2018, 30 p.

PUENTE, Javier. “La ‘masacre’ de Ondores: reforma, comunidad y violencia en la Sierra Central (1969-1979),” in: Revista Argumentos, 4:10, pp. 23-30.

PUENTE, Javier. “Second Independence, National History, and Myth-Making Heroes in the Peruvian Nationalizing State: The Government of Juan Velasco Alvarado, 1968-1975,” in: Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 23:3, December 2016, pp. 231-249.

PUENTE, Javier. “Archivos Campesinos: San Juan de Ondores, Actas Comunales e Historias Rurales en el Perú, 1937-2012,” in: Carlos Aguirre and Javier Villa Flores, eds. From the Ashes of History: Loss and Recovery of Archives and Libraries in Modern Latin America. North Carolina: A Contracorriente Press, 2015, pp. 267-306.

PUENTE, Javier. “El Problema del Museo como Espacio de Representación: de Benedict Anderson al Lugar de la Memoria en el Perú,” in: Juan Andrés Bresciano, ed. La Memoria Histórica y sus Configuraciones Temáticas. Montevideo: Ediciones Cruz del Sur, 2014, pp. 565-582.