Introduction

Abstract

After the armed conflict in Peru, I returned to Tarma, a provincial capital in the Central Andes, to work on a research project about schoolteachers. I talked to teachers from wide-ranging backgrounds about their professional lives and, if the conversation allowed, their memories of the reform years of the 1970s and experiences during the internal war of the 1980s and early 1990s. One group I got to know well were the teachers taking the professionalization course at the Instituto Pedagógico Gustavo Allende Llavería, Tarma’s teacher training college. They had many years’ experience, and by attending classes during the long vacations, they could gain formal teaching qualifications. The teachers of the fifth year invited me to sit in on classes they organized themselves. In return, I offered to hold seminars on Tarma’s history, drawing on research I had done 20 years before in the local archives.