Symbolic Disobedience: performance, participation and politics at the end of Fujimori’s dictatorship
by Victor Vich

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This essay’s goal is to interpret the role played by street performance in the fall of Fujimori’s regime in Peru. Taken in context with the political parties real crisis and, above all, the regime’ s manipulation of information, the essay contends that these performances produced powerful symbols that resignified the sense of the communal and the political. The piece analyzes the three most popular performances: “Wash the flag,” “Put the trash in the trash can,” and “The wall of shame” and concludes with a theoretical meditation about the political efficacy of these performatic acts, reflecting on their continuity and intermittency. One of the central conclusions of this article is that it is crucial that these symbolic interventions are carried out in conjunction with many other revolt strategies.

Victor Vich has a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Literature from Georgetown University. He currently lives in Lima, Peru were he works as a professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and as a researcher at Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP). He has published three books: El discurso de la calle: los cómicos ambulantes y las tensiones de la modernidad en el Perú (2001), El caníbal es el otro. Violencia y cultura en el Perú contemporáneo (2002) y Oralidad y poder (with Virginia Zavala, 2004).