In “The Pit”: Architecture and the Power of

the Tellurian in Lima

By
Daniella Gandolfo
Wesleyan University

Resumen
En el centro de Lima, dos estructuras están en proximidad ı́ntima y en mundos aparte.
Una es la torre modernista de la Corte Superior de Lima, erigida en 1954, la otra, el
campo ferial de “El Hueco,” a la sombra de la torre. Los dos sitios fueron concebidos
conjuntamente como parte de un proyecto de modernización del gobierno que nunca se
completó. El Hueco se encuentra dentro de un pozo de construcción inacabado, donde,
bajo los auspicios de su santo patrón, el Señor de los Milagros, también conocido como
el Señor de los Temblores, los comerciantes venden ropa y electrodomésticos junto a
productos pirata y falsificados. Desde su ubicación en el Centro Histórico a su omisión
de leyes comerciales y el código de construcción, El Hueco es un lugar que desafı́a
el legado patrimonial de Lima y la grandeza de la torre al otro lado de la avenida.
En su existencia contra todo pronóstico, ¿qué explica su poder de permanencia? La
investigación archivı́stica y etnográfica nos dirige a las fuerzas telúricas encarnadas en
el santo patrón de los comerciantes y en su potencial influencia contra la planificación
urbana impulsada por el Estado como medio de control social. [Perú, antropologı́a
urbana, economı́a informal, arquitectura moderna, Señor de los Milagros]

Abstract
In downtown Lima, two structures are in intimate proximity yet worlds apart. One is
the 1954 modernist tower of Lima’s Superior Courts, the other is the market of “El
Hueco,” sitting in the tower’s shadow. The two sites were once envisioned jointly as
part of a government modernization project that was never completed. El Hueco is
inside an unfinished construction pit, where, under the auspices of their patron saint
the Lord of Miracles, also known as the Lord of Earthquakes, vendors sell clothes and
appliances alongside pirate and brand-forged goods. From its location inside Lima’s
Historic Center to its flouting of commercial regulations and the building code, El
Hueco is a place that defies Lima’s patrimonial legacy and the stateliness of the tower
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 145–167. ISSN 1935-4932, online ISSN
1935-4940. 
C 2020 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jlca.12466

In “The Pit” 145

 across the avenue. Existing against all odds, what explains its staying power? Archival
and ethnographic research directs us to tellurian forces embodied in the market’s patron
saint and in his potential influence against state-driven urban planning as a means of
social control. [Peru, urban anthropology, informal economy, modernist architecture,
lord of miracles]

February 20, 2016

The market of “El Hueco” is on the news again. An online video reporter informs
viewers that a pirate version of Peruvian singer Yahaira Plasencia’s first hit single
as a soloist—“Siempre Te Amaré”—can now be purchased at El Hueco for two
soles, approximately $0.50. The reporter says that a difficult production process
had been made worse by accusations that Yahaira herself had plagiarized “Siempre
Te Amaré” from Yuri, a well-known Mexican singer. There is outrage and disbelief
in the reporter’s voice about the pillaging of someone else’s pillaging, but I think I
also hear amusement and delectation—a sort of outraged pleasure (La República
2016).
With a hidden camera, the reporter captures a vendor at El Hueco, who asks:
“If she plagiarizes, why can’t I plagiarize?” In big, blocky letters, the statement
flashes several times across the screen:

IF SHE PLAGIARIZES, WHY CAN’T I PLAGIARIZE

IF SHE PLAGIARIZES, WHY CAN’T I PLAGIARIZE
IF SHE PLAGIARIZES, WHY CAN’T I PLAGIARIZE

This is intended to drive home the scandalous quality of the assertion as viewers
begin to get a sense of the kind of curse it is to make it so big in Lima that your
work is pirated at infamous El Hueco—stolen, duplicated, soiled, and put on sale
for a fraction of its market value.1 But Yahaira does not seem to be a person
much concerned with respectability in her sudden ascent to the top. The reporter
goes down a long list of accusations that, in addition to plagiarism, have been
leveled at Yahaira of late, peppering the entertainment websites and news pages
with salacious and hurtful stories about Yahaira’s betrayal of other singers, one of
them her best friend, whose musicians Yahaira lured to her own band. The singer
is under a dark cloud, and the reporter wonders if this is due to the malediction
supposedly placed on the artist by a woman whose husband left her for Yahaira.
Malediction or no malediction, Yahaira’s meteoric rise to stardom is taking place
simultaneously with her meteoric crash into El Hueco’s underground depths.

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 El Hueco: The downtown market that, since 1997, has thrived inside a founda-
tion pit dug out at the intersection of Abancay and Nicolás de Piérola Avenues for
the construction of a state building that was never built. The stalls were arranged
maze-like inside the hole in the ground, which after four decades of neglect had
become known as “Hueco de Abancay.”2 Vendors embraced the moniker with full
irony, with full acceptance of its mocking, pejorative intimations of pit, hole, ditch,
cavity, burrow, or orifice. But the irony, the mockery, seems to be on the artists
whose work vendors pirate en mass, on the brands forged and sold there, and on
us, the shoppers (see Gandolfo 2018).
El Hueco is a block away from historic Parque Universitario at an intersection
for which President Manuel A. Odrı́a (1948–56) once had big dreams. The traces
of Odrı́a’s broken dreams are now etched on the landscape. The market is located
where the wide thoroughfare of Abancay meets Nicolás de Piérola, amid a motley
group of tall and short, time-honored and contemporary but inconsequential
buildings, on the intersection’s southern corner abuzz with sidewalk vendors of
ceviche, hot foods, and peeled fruit. As you descend the ramp into the market,
the smells and the riotous noise dissipate and are replaced by another kind of riot:
one of color, music, and the chatter of HDTV screens as over a thousand vendors
display their wares in booths packed to the brim with electronics, appliances,
clothes, linens, and shoes, and demo their pirated CDs and DVDs at top volume.
On top of the ramp, watching over the entrance from behind his glass-encased
altar, is the market’s patron saint: the Lord of Miracles, inciter and regulator of
earthquakes and tremors. The altar is beautifully kept. The classic image of the
dark-skinned Christ on the cross, head limp over his shoulder, is framed inside a
gold and silver reredos of intricate motifs and adorned with two silver angels and
vases of fresh flowers. The meticulously cared-for lord is a counterpoint to the grim
reputation of El Hueco as the center of Lima’s commercial underworld of pirate
and forged goods, exacerbated by the type of rickety, prefabricated structure that
houses the market’s fifteen hundred vending booths, which is banned from Lima’s
UNESCO-designated Historic Center. But if in the last twenty years, vendors at
El Hueco have had to pay fines, endure shutdowns, and put up with humiliating
inspections, they have also managed to successfully compete against and even shake
the foundations of some of its rivals, including transnational behemoths like the
video rental company Blockbuster (Reuters 2007).3
In thinking about El Hueco, it is important to consider not just its economic
power but also the political and aesthetic impact of its presence on that corner
of downtown, the material act of lowly street vendors taking over a piece of
Lima’s patrimonial heritage and turning it into a showcase of what Denis Hollier,
in relation to Georges Bataille’s writings, describes as “unedifying architecture”
(1998, xi). This is an architecture that fails to affirm order, rationality, beauty,
and decorum and instead is a disturbance to “those fine folk who have reached

In “The Pit” 147

 the point of not being able to stand their own unseemliness” (xiii). Architectural
composition expresses “authority to command and prohibit,” writes Bataille in his
short “dictionary entry” titled “Architecture.” In the course of human history, he
explains, “forms have become more and more static, more and more dominant” of
modes of expression that are “incompatible with social stability” (in Hollier 1998,
47, 53). Bataille’s provocative writings on architecture, which to him opposes “the
logic and majesty of authority against all disturbing elements,” suggest the question
of whether an architecture that does not inspire regulation and domination is
possible (Hollier 1998, 47).
In his study of the quest for a “Peruvian architecture” in the twentieth century,
Augusto Ortiz de Zevallos also writes of a “voluntad formal”—a “will to form”—
driving the desire to materialize “lo peruano” (that which is essentially Peruvian)
through architectural form (1979, 92). Ortiz de Zevallos was writing specifically
about a tension that arose in mid–century Peruvian architecture between the re-
liance on abstract aesthetic principles and on local, historical forms. While the
search for lo peruano produced mostly a series of equivocations (1979, 92),
the will to form its modernist iteration was taken up by the state in its response to
the immigration boom Lima experienced beginning in the 1940s.
How to deal with the massive land “invasions” that brought into being the city
of Lima as it is today was, in fact, the main challenge for architects, urban plan-
ners, and policy makers in the second half of the century, argues Dorota Biczel:
“If the aspiration of the modern state was the total management of population,
then one of the most visible, palpable mediums of such disciplining procedures
was built form” (2013, 4). This state-driven, centrally planned ambition, accord-
ing to Biczel, extended from the 1940s into at least the 1980s, as it “endeavored
to embody and reproduce itself through architecture, whose transparency, lumi-
nosity, and hygiene would organize and order the ostensibly unruly, filthy bodies
[of migrants] and cohere them into a new and improved model social corpus”
(2013, 4).
Biczel writes this apropos of her study of Los Bestias (The Beasts), an anarchist
collective of students of architecture active in Lima during the 1980s, when the
effects of mass immigration were visible in downtown’s streets and in shantytowns
at the periphery of the city. Critical of architecture as an elite, disciplinary practice,
Los Bestias rejected top-down projects aimed at social integration and coherence.
They emulated the derided aesthetic of the poor, self-constructed new barrios,
sharing in what Biczel describes as the “pirate urbanization” quality of their method
of expansion (2013, 1–2). The piratic element in the collective’s reed and wood-
scrap shacks and canopies issued from their illicit encroachment into unoccupied
spaces and plazas as well as their pilfering of architecture’s lofty principles in order
to knock them down so as to strip the discipline of its future-oriented authority

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and affirm instead the “mundane conditions of the appalling present” (2013, 16)
in the shanties.
A decade later, El Hueco emerged as another expression of Lima’s “pirate
urbanization,” intruding into and affronting the city’s patrimonial history and
its formal aspirations for stable and governable subjects in post–armed conflict
Lima. The story of how the market came to be and of its current staying power
is somewhat traceable in archival documents, media accounts, and other sources.
From them, an outline of a narrative emerges that is nevertheless full of gaps and
holes that make room for the unofficial tales and rumors that circulate in the
market, the memories of old-time vendors that jostle other memories, and the
fragile evidence of forces beyond human control. It is such a tenuous, fragmentary,
and disjointed outline, pieced together with those tales, rumors, memories, and
signs that provoke the following story into existence.

July 17, 1954

The new Ministry of Education tower is inaugurated. It is twenty-two stories high,

the tallest building in Lima, and an icon of the modernist spirit that swept the city
in the 1950s.
The building’s concave central body boasted the first steel structure in all of
Peru and was flanked by two side towers of reinforced concrete, one facing Abancay
and the other facing Nicolás de Piérola. The project had been commissioned by
President Odrı́a to Peruvian architect Enrique Seoane Ros, whose final sketch
included a twin tower across the avenue. The two inversely symmetrical structures
would form a semicircle to flank Abancay’s wide, modern boulevard and rotunda,
around which car traffic would be organized.
Pleasing Odrı́a—whose main aesthetic criterion was that verticality was mas-
culine and horizontality was feminine—required countless drafts (Bentı́n Diez
Canseco 2014, 186–89). Seoane’s design indeed privileges the vertical line, and at
eighty-six meters high the building has for sixty years stood out in Lima’s skyline
among lower, more modest and aging expressions of Beaux-Arts, neocolonial, and
other aesthetic trends. The building served as the Ministry of Education until the
early 1990s, when that institution was relocated and the building turned over to
the judiciary power. Today, the Seoane tower houses Lima’s Superior Court offices
and halls.
It is difficult to categorize Seoane as an architect. He was never a member
of the modernist architectural collective Agrupación Espacio, but he was deeply
influenced by it. Agrupación Espacio, founded by architects and students from
the Escuela Nacional de Ingenieros (today the Universidad Nacional de Ingenieros
or UNI), advocated for Lima’s modernization through a specific architecture and

In “The Pit” 149

 Figure 1 Hand sketch of the projected twin towers and boulevard by Enrique Seoane Ros at the
intersection of Abancay and Nicolás de Piérola Avenues. The design project was commissioned and
partially executed by the regime of General Manuel B. Odrı́a.
Source: Bentı́n Diez Canseco (2014, 188). Photo credit: Daniella Gandolfo, 2019.

urban planning agenda. In their 1947 Le Corbusier–inspired manifesto, the group

expressed the belief that architecture in Peru would help usher forward the “genesis
of a new man,” with modernism as the irreversible vector of progressive change
(Agrupación Espacio 1947). By contrast, the conservative aesthetic of the so-called
neocolonial style, in vogue at the time, aligned ideologically with the interests
of the upper classes (Ortiz de Zevallos 1979, 91). Against this reactionary aes-
thetic, modernist architects would have to abandon all decoration, all attention to
the accessory as superficial “mystifications” of the past: “The styles of the XVIII
and XIX centuries weren’t but arbitrary combinations and perfectly irresponsible
alterations of the old architectonic beliefs. An anti-art in which that which is deco-
rative, accessory, trivial and superficial served as the basis for vague mystifications
. . . . Contemporary architecture [instead] reacts violently against this thematic of
exteriorisms and this adulteration of ideas and concepts” (Agrupación Espacio
1947).
The group embraced form but only as a symptom of the “interiority” of a
metamorphosis that was to occur in all human planes and that modernist archi-
tecture would make concrete as “the total formula of a new epoch” (Agrupación
Espacio 1947). The new “man” the manifesto proposed lacked class identity and
historical memory; he would be produced via an architecture that was affirmatively
“modern” and thus uncoupled from preexisting traditional forms since “what is
implanted from the outside is better” (Ortiz de Zevallos 1979, 91).
Seoane’s acceptance of these modernist principles was decisive but never total; it
was, furthermore, gradual and much more intuitive than political or “intellectual”

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(Bentı́n Diez Canseco 2014, 112). Thus, he never fully abandoned decoration. In the
case of the Ministry of Education building, Seoane’s embrace of detail manifested
in external side panels with neo-pre-Hispanic motifs that, one surmises, aimed
to channel the substance of lo peruano into the rationalist, universal spirit of
modernity.
Growing up in Lima, I remember learning in school about President Odrı́a’s
vast program of public works, which he carried out over his eight years in gov-
ernment. Odrı́a’s projects rallied architecture’s “transparency, luminosity, and hy-
giene,” Biczel writes, as a means for social renewal and integration (2013, 4).
Coming to power in the wake of WWII and ruling through the Korean War, Odrı́a
benefitted from the growth in the global demand for raw materials—sugar cane,
fish, flour, and cotton—and this boom in revenue bankrolled his construction of
some of the most notable state buildings and public service and housing projects
in Lima. On the one hand, Odrı́a was decidedly pro-business and pro-private
property. On the other hand, he sought to address the demands of the working
classes for better living and working conditions, which he improved through those
large-scale public works and by raising salaries and expanding the structure of
state-mandated worker benefits. These policies were later institutionalized in a
Ministry of Labor and Indigenous Affairs (Chirinos Soto 1977), whose building
was erected during Odrı́a’s last few years in power.
While Odrı́a spearheaded this mid–twentieth century spurt of institutional-
ization of labor and social welfare schemes, he was also at the helm of the first
efforts to afford political recognition to the visibly growing populations moving
into Lima’s shantytowns and illicitly occupying sidewalks and roads in the city
center with a rapidly flourishing street economy. Odrı́a’s regime allegedly colluded
with leaders of land invasions in the periphery of Lima in exchange for their com-
munities’ support (De Soto 1986, 44). This lent legitimacy to his dictatorship and
set the tone for what would be the state’s response from then on to these ways of
occupying space, one of accommodation. At the end of the 1940s, the first decade
of mass immigration to Lima, Odrı́a understood the growing political importance
these emergent sectors would have for anyone in power and became an agent of
what I have described as the deforming power of extralegal business and labor
upon the state and the law (Gandolfo 2013).4 By protecting the private property
of Lima’s elite from invasion, Odrı́a promoted the move of immigrants to shanties
in state-owned land and, by facilitating this process, created incentives for more
migration to Lima, which in turn released some of the mounting pressure from a
hacienda system on the verge of collapse (De Soto 1986, 43).
It is unclear why the Education Ministry’s twin tower across the avenue was
never completed. By 1958, the foundations for the second tower had been dug out
and the building project already abandoned (see Bentı́n Diez Canseco 2014, 186).
The open pit would be left empty for the ensuing decades.

In “The Pit” 151

 Figure 2 Aerial view of the Ministry of Education and the foundation pit for a second tower that was
never built. Some brick and cement edifices can be seen on the corner of the otherwise empty property. It is
likely these are the commercial buildings mentioned in the 1978 letter from the Beneficencia to Lima’s
mayor. 5 In addition to the Ministry, El Hueco is in the proximity of other signature state buildings, such
as the Congress in the top right quadrant of the photograph and the Biblioteca Nacional in the top left
quadrant. The flat, modernist beehive building of the Mercado Central is also visible in the top right
quadrant below Congress. The bed of the Rı́mac River near the top, below the colonial-era Acho bullfight
ring built during Viceroy Amat y Juniet’s government, frames the image. Photo credit: Servicio
Aerofotográfico Nacional, 1978.

Documents at the archives of the state-run, charitable Sociedad de Beneficencia

de Lima shed some light on the history of this corner but also have a way of
deepening the mystery. Down a narrow hallway in the ornate but aging mansion
that houses the Beneficencia today, in a dark, musty room toward the back, I was
handed a tall pile of dog-eared papers related to the property where El Hueco
sits today, which the Beneficencia used to own. From these documents I learned
that the grounds on which the state was planning to build the second tower
originally belonged to the nuns of the Carmelite Convent and Church of Santa
Teresa and to the hospice of Santa Rosa de Candamo. Beginning in 1826, as Lima’s
religious orders dwindled, the convent, church, and hospice forcibly passed under
the management of the Beneficencia. In the 1940s, pieces of this property were
transferred to the city to broaden Abancay Street into an avenue.6 Santa Teresa’s
old baroque church was slated in 1941 to be demolished for this purpose.7 In 1959,

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with the Ministry of Education towering over a wider Abancay and the abandoned
pit, the Beneficencia moved in to reclaim the unused remainder of their corner
property. In a letter to the minister of Hacienda y Comercio, the charitable agency
claims that the property had been “seized” in 1953 without a proper expropriation
or judicial procedure.8 The letter demands that the property be returned to the
Beneficencia. In 1961, the minister responds by informing the Beneficencia that it
could resume full possession since the projected construction of a “Banks of the
State” building on that corner had been canceled in 1958.9
An internal memo prepared by the Beneficencia’s department of works and
signed by architect Fernando Bryce includes a proposal to sell the property or build
a “great commercial building” on the site, propitiously located in front of what it
calls “the future Plaza Castilla”—presumably another project for that intersection
that was mysteriously canceled.10 Also around this time, Seoane designed a new
project for the hollow site that included a bus terminal, offices, and also shops
(Bentı́n Diez Canseco 2014, 190). But from a 1978 letter to Lima’s mayor we
learn that none of these proposals was ever taken up. The Beneficencia’s president
writes that “for a long period of time” the property lay vacant and had been
turned into a “public latrine”.11 The letter details that in order to contribute to
the beautification of this spot, the property had been rented and temporarily
turned into “7 one-story commercial shops” until work for a projected Plaza de
la Reforma could begin. But in 1978, General Juan Velasco Alvarado had been
deposed by a rival general, who had started the process of a return to democracy.
It is thus safe to assume that the plan for a Plaza de la Reforma to be built on
that troubled intersection simply collapsed under the weight of Velasco’s ousting
and the tepid success of his reforms, which the planned plaza ostensibly aimed to
celebrate.
This much can be gleaned from the archival documents. The foundation pit
would remain empty for forty-five years, during which time Lima’s population
exploded as it went from a city of around half a million people to one of seven
million people, congregated mainly in downtown’s old, rundown former mansions
and in the new and swelling shanties around the city’s periphery.
A newspaper article marking the sixty-year anniversary of the inauguration of
the former Ministry of Education building ends with the following note: “It was
painful to learn that the engineers of the project were planning to build another
edifice of similar dimensions in front of this one but only managed to leave ready
the basement. The work could not continue for lack of interest of successive
governments” (Batalla 2016).
“For lack of interest” is a vague phrase that does not help much, but a vendor
at El Hueco who was there since the market’s inception told me that the reason
nothing had been built on this property was that the soil is not suitable for
construction because it is “cursed.” The nuns who had first owned the property,

In “The Pit” 153

 feeling bitter about the eviction from their convent and the expropriation of their
estate, had placed a curse that causes the soil to simply cave in, as if violently stirred
by an earthquake.
At issue here, in light of the absence of other evidence, is the role the disgruntled
nuns and their activation of a tellurian power against all architecture played on the
fate of this corner property. Was Odrı́a’s and Seoane’s statist, modernist, “total”
expression of Peru’s “new man” stopped in its tracks by ghosts? Had it been cursed
and eviscerated into the unseemly Hueco de Abancay?

May 14, 1997

Thousands of evicted vendors, who until two months before held fixed spots on
the streets around Lima’s Central Market Mariscal Ramón Castilla, attempt to
take their spots back and restore the decades-old street market. It is the latest in
a string of confrontations where Molotov bombs rain on the municipal police,
lighting on fire some of the surrounding buildings, and tear gas rains back on the
vendors defending the squalid market. But news spread that the evicted vendors
are organized in associations and cooperatives and acquiring property to relocate.
Statements about this in the media are imprecise at best and seem intended to
convey that the vendors have money, that they are benefiting from the usurpation
of the city’s public spaces, and that they are not exactly victims of the mayor’s
attempt to recover control of downtown Lima’s sidewalks and streets (Caretas
1997; Narro 1997; see also Gandolfo 2018).
An April 1997 memo—housed in the Beneficencia’s archive and written by
one of its lawyers a month after the vendors’ eviction from the streets—states that
more than seven thousand square meters of its dug-out property on the corner of
Abancay and Nicolás de Piérola had been sold to vendors from the Central Market
back in January 1989.12 This occured toward the end of Peru’s armed conflict
(1980-1992), when downtown property values were at an all-time low. The sale to
street vendors of a piece of land imagined by many as the anchor-site of the most ad-
vanced urbanism in Lima raised some eyebrows and was interpreted as a desparate
act of populism from Alan Garcı́a just as his disastrous first government ended
(1985–1990).
Vendors did not move in, however, until 1997. Perhaps the problem was that
a year before the sale, in 1988, the limits of UNESCO’s Historic Center had been
drawn to include the site of the old, colonial-era Carmelite convent, of which
there was no trace left anymore. The building code inside Lima’s historic dis-
tricts became particularly restrictive, and vendors would have had to build a solid
structure to outfit the site for the market. Or perhaps it was because the sale of
the property was fought in the courts. One reason there are so many documents

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about this piece of land in the archives is that its ownership has been a con-
tentious issue because of its provenance from a time before modern bureaucracy.
A report in the archives describes an attempt to settle a new dispute by descen-
dants of a person surnamed Espejo, who in 2001 claimed ownership of the now
million-dollar property. The claim was denied by the report’s writer in no ambigu-
ous terms. The report further added that more of the Beneficencia’s property—
2,679 square meters—was sold to the vendors that year for over 1.3 million
dollars.13
In 1997, fearing turmoil, the city government allowed the roughly fifteen
hundred evicted vendors from the Central Market to relocate, building or no
building, into the hollow corner where the ambitious plans by Odrı́a and Seoane,
Bryce, and Velasco Alvarado (and who knows how many others) failed to be
realized. The vendors’ move was at once the birth of the market of El Hueco and the
definite death of the twentieth century’s modernist dreams for this intersection of
downtown.
This story picks up again inside El Hueco at vending booths H-20 and P–14,
owned and manned, respectively, by señora Emilia (seller of towels, bathrobes,
socks, and underwear) and by señor Vilca (seller of shoes). Their accounts of El
Hueco’s beginnings intersect: the fear about the threats of eviction from the streets
of the Central Market, the good fortune of procuring a premium piece of downtown
land, the struggles to secure the lot and prepare it for occupation, and the way
nothing about El Hueco had seemed fated and yet miraculously was there. Señor
Vilca was present at the earliest meetings with the government. Alan Garcı́a himself
feasted the prospective buyers at the Presidential Palace, with food—“ceviche and
everything else,” he said—and once again after the sale was sealed, with “whiskey
to the point of getting tipsy.”
The vendors were efficiently organized into a cooperative, said señora Emilia,
but they could not manage to get the market going in the new site. There was
perpetual discord among the vendors. The heavy machinery brought in to level
the ground inside the property broke down on contact. Señor Vilca remembers
finding an old burial during the excavations: “A dead person,” he reminisced, “her
bones, maybe a nun. Who knows?” He also spoke of vendors’ hostility toward
one another as well as of leaders who misused the funds raised for work needed
on the rough, neglected terrain. Thirty one thousand dollars were gone before
anything had been built. It took eight years and the political time bomb Lima’s
mayor set off by expelling thousands of vendors from the streets of the Central
Market for El Hueco to open its doors. By then, most of the relationships among
founding members of the cooperative, including señora Emilia and señor Vilca,
had completely soured.
Sitting on stools in her tiny booth, I was going on and on with my ques-
tions to señora Emilia about so-called informality, about vendors’ apparent

In “The Pit” 155

 defiance or reluctance to conform to the city’s relatively cheap and simple
commercial laws. I was working hard to get to the bottom of it. Do the vendors
at El Hueco want to legalize their business or not? That’s when señora Emilia said to
me:

“This place is cursed.”

“Cursed?” I probed.

All the troubles they had faced in the opening of their market, señora Emilia
attributed to the nuns, who were angry at the expropriation of their convent
and church. The property, she said, had to be exorcised and a supreme sovereign
put in charge and regularly feasted for things to work. She and another ven-
dor decided that the Lord of Miracles, patron saint of earthquakes and all
things tellurian, would be the only one able to offset the force of the nuns’
curse.
In the bustle of the market it can be easy to overlook its presence, but as
you walk down into El Hueco, the recognizable figure of the Lord of Miracles is
invariably there inside his glass and purple wood-framed case. The platform on
which the painted canvas sits is a smaller, simpler replica of the original Lord
of Miracles litter, kept at the Convent of Las Nazarenas just a few blocks to the
north. Every October, the painting at Las Nazarenas is the protagonist of the
largest religious procession in the Americas. The canvases at El Hueco and at Las
Nazarenas are oil reproductions of an image of Christ crucified, said to have been
painted in Lima in 1651 on an adobe wall by an enslaved “Angola” man. History
books as well as lore explain that the wall where this image was originally painted
miraculously survived—intact—the ravaging earthquakes of 1655, 1687, and
1746.
Marı́a Rostworowski argues that much of the power and authority this New
World image of Christ accrued over the centuries came, in fact, from its association
with native Pachacámac, the mighty, pan-Andean deity of earthquakes (1998, 349).
For the last millennium before the Spanish conquest, Pachacámac and its shrine,
located in the Lurı́n River Valley south of Lima, were the most important huaca
(sacred mound) of the Peruvian central region. In the early years of the conquest,
the administration of the Lurı́n Valley went to a Spanish encomendero, who also
owned property in the center of Lima. He sent groups of indigenous people from
his possessions in Pachacámac to work his plot of land in the city. The section
of Lima where the Pachacámac laborers settled to live and work was dubbed
“Pachacamilla.”
The Lurı́n Valley underwent a virtual demographic collapse due to disease, war,
and violent displacement. In Pachacamilla, however, the displaced community of
indigenous laborers endured and comingled with enslaved Africans who were
owned by the same encomendero in a kind of “symbiosis,” says Rostworowski,

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that set off “the special transformational phenomenon” (1998, 348) by which the
commanding Pachacámac became a dark-skinned, crucified Christ. It is argued
that the Jesuits promoted the origins of Pachacámac as “pre-Christian”; they
were quick to recognize that taming insurrection through evangelization worked
better than any type of physical punishment (Ramón Mujica quoted in Sánchez
Rodrı́guez 2002). Around the painted image of this Christ of Pachacamilla, as the
dark-skinned Christ came to be known, the cult of the Lord of Miracles would
gain force throughout the seventeeth century as the protector of Lima against
earthquakes, its sovereign power enabled or authorized by the autochthonous deity
who could both unleash and restrain them. The first chapel for this Lord was built in
Pachacamilla (sheltering the wall with the original painting), whose worshippers
included the growing number of Africans and Afro-descendants in Lima and
whose veneration deepened after the earthquake of 1655, when entire churches
and homes crumbled to the ground, including the Pachacamilla chapel’s roof, but
not the wall that bore the sacred image, which was left whole (Rostworowski 1998,
350–51). Later, this image, presumably repainted or at least refurbished a number
of times, would come into the purview of the Convent of Las Nazarenas, which
was established by royal decree in 1771 on the site of the Christ of Pachacamilla,
worship and which is today located along busy Tacna Avenue.
But the cult of the Cristo Moreno—the “Black Christ,” as he is also known
today—and the cofradı́as (brotherhoods) that formed around him, were officially
banned for much of their early history. Rostworowski reports that on Friday nights
Africans and Afro-descendants would gather near the painted wall for clandestine
(but nonetheless noisy) celebrations that mobilized church officials to destroy the
cult (1998, 351), which they obviously never achieved. Susy Sánchez Rodrı́guez
says that if these rowdy nocturnal feasts offered a reason for the cult’s repression,
they also made it public, contributing to its dissemination and popularity (2002).
Authorities feared the Cristo Moreno’s power not only for its links to indigenous
tellurian forces but also for the hybridizing spirituality of the enslaved Africans,
who reportedly began their rituals following proper Catholic form but ended with
dances and music in praise of their own African deities. The Jesuit historian Rubén
Vargas Ugarte’s account of this cult states that the brotherhoods celebrated their
“loud feasts [zambras] which, many times, had not a trace of devotion or uplift . . . .
Given the inclination of these people and their rudeness, it isn’t surprising that
their devotion wasn’t but a disguise for debauchery” (1957, 5).
I had been visiting El Hueco for months (if not years) before I realized the real
implications of the devotion vendors have for the Lord of Miracles. When señora
Emilia first told me that the Lord of Miracles was El Hueco’s patron saint because he
would be an effective force against the cursed soil, averse to all construction; when
I first learned that the market foots a large bill every August for a procession of its
own altar to celebrate the market’s anniversary; when I initially heard incredulously

In “The Pit” 157

 that one October the massive, citywide procession of the Lord of Miracles had made
an improbable stop to meet El Hueco’s devotees at the market’s entrance: I heard
what people were telling me if not quite listening. But when I learned of Odrı́a’s
failed modernization efforts for this corner of downtown, the entanglement of the
Lord of Miracles with the past and present history of El Hueco became undeniable.
In grappling with Odrı́a’s truncated plans and with El Hueco’s defiance of the state
and the bourgeois aesthetic ideals projected onto Lima’s Historic Center, I could
not avoid looking into the mysterious alignment there seems to be between the
nuns’ curse and the Lord of Miracles’ power, both mobilized in relation to the
disciplinary authority of urban planning and architecture.

October 28, 1746

A devastating earthquake hits Lima. The Port of El Callao, west of the city, dis-
appears under a tsunami. This disaster inaugurated a period in the city’s history
known as “the ruin of Lima,” which would span the entire second half of the
eighteenth century and manifest not only in fear and dread of tellurian forces but
also in fear and dread of violent social unrest against the upper classes (Sánchez
Rodrı́guez 2002).
There were good reasons for this: In the days after the earthquake that shook
Lima to its foundations, the city’s “plebeian masses”—as the working-class, en-
slaved, and poor sectors of Lima’s society were known at the time—irrupted in
a looting spree that targeted the ruined as well as the still-standing homes of the
rich, adding significantly to the destruction of the city through the plundering
of valuable possessions inside the homes and of wood beams, doors, window
frames, and other reusable building materials. Having altered the daily rhythms
of social cohabitation, Sánchez Rodrı́guez argues that the earthquake brought to
a climax existing acute tensions among the city’s classes and castes, and “it was
predictable that given the alteration of the physical pillars of power, la plebe [the
plebeians] would go wild” (2002, 75). At the time, these plebeian masses were made
up primarily of the city’s Afro-descendant population, whose numbers, Sánchez
Rodrı́guez notes, reached its peak by the middle of the seventeenth century, making
up about 50 percent of the city’s residents, with the “Angola caste” as one of the
major ethnic groups (2002, 67).
There are striking similarities, both conceptually and affectively, in comparing
descriptions of eighteenth-century perceptions of plebeian Lima with descriptions
of the so-called informal sector in the twentieth century, including the vendors
from around the Central Market in the 1980s and of El Hueco in the 1990s and
2000s. Alberto Flores Galindo (2001) notes that the term plebe, in itself, had
strong derogatory connotations, which, nevertheless, did not seem to suffice when

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Figure 3 Anniversary celebration of the foundation of the vendors cooperative at El Hueco with the Lord
of Miracles as guest of honor. The platform with the Lord’s image is also paraded every year during Lima’s
Lord of Miracles festivities in October, when the Lord’s official image at the Convent of Las Nazarenas
presides the massive procession. Photo credit: Daniella Gandolfo, 2018. [This figure appears in color in the
online issue]

speaking or writing about it. References to the plebe were often accompanied by
debasing adjectives, such as vile, lowly, trifling, injurious, and abject. Flores Galindo
reviews two censuses in which Lima’s plebeian population, afflicted by poverty
and unstable employment, is broken down by occupation into four categories:
servants, artisans, slaves, and vagrants. He notes that this last category must be
understood to encompass ambulant and street vendors, who, merchandize in hand,
walked around the streets of Lima or settled in a plaza or church atrium. Their
reputation was bad because of what was thought to be a disloyal competition with
formal retailers and a lack of scruples regarding payment of taxes and the sale
of substandard, contraband, and stolen goods. Flores Galindo cites government

In “The Pit” 159

 efforts, uncannily similar to contemporary ones, to displace, legalize, and control
these and other plebeians (2001, 75–77).
In sustaining a complex parallel economy in Lima, the plebe was actually a “siz-
able and heterogeneous mass,” Flores Galindo explains (2001, 79). It overlapped
and blended with the city’s enslaved population, whose social and physical prox-
imity to other plebeian sectors heightened its perceived threat of instability. The
term plebeian was thus, in itself, unstable, slipping even to cover Lima’s “lumpen
world,” in Flores Galindo’s anachronistic reference to the Marxist term lumpen-
proletariat, which he characterizes as “(bandits, thieves) and the organization of
everyday life at the margins of current conventions” (Flores Galindo 2001, 79). In
eighteenth-century Lima, plebeians increased in number, engulfing also impover-
ished sectors of the middle class. Reflecting the racism and racial insularity of the
aristocracy, the category “plebeian” sometimes also became an all-embracing term,
says Flores Galindo, meaning “indians, blacks, mestizos, and castes,” all equally
assumed to represent “a rebellious, anti-establishment culture” and to possess an
insurrectionary spirit—“un ánimo levantisco” (2001, 79–80).
After the 1746 earthquake and uprising, Sánchez Rodrı́guez says that the Bour-
bon Regime’s strategy to recover some semblance of social order in the city relied
heavily on reconstructing and improving the built environment, on architectural
projects aimed at controlling street life. Since the late baroque period, the edifica-
tion and reconstruction of churches and other buildings had been used as a mode
of social control, but evidence suggests that this was done with some ambivalence.
In 1671, fear of a black rebellion in Lima called for the reconstruction of the chapel
of the Cristo Moreno by some of Lima’s best architects (Sánchez Rodrı́guez 2002)
while the cult of the Cristo Moreno itself, whose devotees were perceived to be al-
ways on the verge of an uprising, continued to be largely repressed. But as the rising
popularity of the Lord of Miracles began to garner the support of those in power,
state-driven architecture and the Cristo Moreno became elements in a double-
pronged state tactic to keep the plebe in check. Hence, Sánchez Rodrı́guez’s article
subtitle: “The architects of the public fame of the Lord of Miracles (1651–1771)”
(2002; my emphasis). Whether through reinforcement of the foundations of the
shabby shed that roofed the Lord’s painted image, the building of new churches,
or other works in plebeian neighborhoods, the state’s politico-religious strategy
went hand in hand with the erection of architectonic works with which the ruling
classes sought to control the “marginal barrios considered dangerous by virtue of
the population that lived in them” (Sánchez Rodrı́guez 2002, 70–71).
By 1753, the procession of the Black Christ through the streets of Lima had
been instituted as an annual event. This was, for Sánchez Rodrı́guez, as much a
response to the fear of earthquakes as “a response from those in power to the
terror unleashed by the marginal sectors” of the city (2002, 82). Their religious
devotion, sanctioned by those in power, represented the plebe on its best behavior:

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“Blacks,” explains Sánchez Rodrı́guez, “ceased being thieves and became faithful.
From having a conflictive relationship with authority, they now occupied a definite
and stable, but above all controllable, position” (2002, 83).
It was thus Viceroy Manuel de Amat y Juniet—known for his key contribu-
tions to the Bourbon project of “ordering the city” through public works, like
the construction of several new plazas and boulevards—who in 1771 cinched the
fame of the Lord of Miracles by means of a full reconstruction of the Church of
Las Nazarenas, behind which was still the wall with the original painting. The
reconstruction of the church was an effort to limit the autonomy the brotherhoods
of Afro-descendant devotees had to manage the form of the cult. It signified the
regulation of what Sánchez Rodrı́guez calls “an extreme space,” a space indistin-
guishable from a population that threatened the city’s status quo (2002, 84). The
reconstruction of Las Nazarenas thus took place at a point in time when both the
architectonic and the political foundations of the capital city were felt to be weak
(Sánchez Rodrı́guez 2002, 78).
It is the historical trajectory of the Lord of Miracles that is relevant and im-
portant here: from the Christian representation by an enslaved “Angola” man of
indigenous Pachacámac in the image of a Black Christ to its repression by colonial
authorities due to its association with African praise and ritual; from the coop-
tation of the image’s power and cult for social control of Lima’s Afro-Peruvian
population to its broad popularization by the city’s plebeians; and from its roots
as the patron saint of a black brotherhood to its embrace by Lima’s new plebeians
at El Hueco as a protective—and maybe even political—tool to counter the curse
placed by the ghosts of Catholic nuns on their property and, perhaps, ultimately,
to subvert the state’s modernist vision for this corner of downtown.

October 20, 1914

José Carlos Mariátegui, founder of Peru’s Socialist Party, chronicles the procession
of the Lord of Miracles of 1914 in Diario La Prensa. Mariátegui could appre-
ciate the aesthetic, mystical, and political implications of the fervor performed
during the massive procession in which thousands of devotees, led primarily by
Afro-Peruvians from the working class barrios of the city, filled up Lima’s narrow
streets—moving, swaying in unison. Feeling himself vulnerable to the devotion
expressed by the ardent multitude, Mariátegui notes that despite the plebeian ori-
gins of the feast, its power of attraction was so great that “the most aristocratic
and elegant ladies” could not help but join in. Dominant and seductive, oppres-
sive, affecting, and irresistible: all adjectives used by Mariátegui to describe the
unique authority wielded by the effigy. The brotherhoods, greatly expanded in
number and composition since the seventeenth century, appeared to reconcile for

In “The Pit” 161

 Mariátegui the disparate individual and collective willpowers of limeños into a
kind of social consensus, incarnate in the choreographed, mystically enraptured
crowd.
Mariátegui (1914) also remarks on the rather unchanging structure of the
procession itself, which year after year repeated the same route over the two days
when it took place. “The procession,” he writes, “follows a route that is always the
same. It has followed it for many years.” It covers the entire “old city,” avoiding
the “suburbs” (parts that today are decidedly inside downtown). The procession
leaves Las Nazarenas and returns to Las Nazarenas, Mariátegui reports, with a
lunchtime break one day at the Church of La Concepción and the other at the
Church of Santa Catalina. “In the punctuality and fixity of that route one feels the
intense heartbeat of tradition. Nothing modifies them. Nothing upsets them. The
platform [carrying the image of the Lord] goes from one church to the other with
an invariable exactitude. And the devotees always know, more or less, in what place
it can be found at this or another hour.”
As the twentieth century progressed, however, the route of the procession did
change. Julia Costilla (2016) documents the ebb and flow of the process by which the
undeniably popular procession became not just tolerated but incorporated into the
institution of the church and by which different governments gradually embraced
it as “symbolic capital” for political purposes. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the
government and church adopted a populist attitude toward it, with mandataries
and archbishops paying tribute as the Lord of Miracles advanced through Lima’s
main plaza (Stokes 1987). Estranged during the 1970s military dictatorship, there
was rapprochement between cult and government under Alan Garcı́a, fueled by
the 1999 ascendance as archbishop of ultraconservative Cardinal Juan L. Cipriani,
who embraced the Lord of Miracles as part of his defensive strategy against the
bleeding of parishioners to the ranks of new Protestant Churches established in
Peru (Costilla 2016).
Today, the procession takes place over five days: The first Saturday in October,
the 18, 19, and 28 of the same month, and its last, very short procession from the
Sanctuary to the Monastery of Las Nazarenas, on November 1. In its five outings,
the Lord of Miracles covers a much larger area of the city than before in routes
that vary year by year, visiting not just the former “suburbs” of downtown but
venturing further east to the limits of El Cercado and south into the district of La
Victoria.
The Lord of Miracles’ crowds are now more massive than ever. Hundreds of
thousands of followers participate every year, surrounding the heavy platform as it
inches down its route almost lost in a sea of devotees dressed in all hues of purple,
women donning white lace head coverings, as a cloud of incense and an affect-
ing aura of languid, processional music played by large bands engulf the crowd.
The Lord of Miracles is taken to visit sites both of undisputed religious and of

162 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

undisputed political power. The route includes Lima’s Cathedral Church, Arch-
bishopric Building, and multiple downtown churches as well as the Presidential
and Municipal Palaces, the Congress Building, the Constitutional Tribunal, the
National and Central Reserve Banks, and the Palace of Justice. Along the way, it
stops to receive the tribute of the Central Command of the Armed Forces and the
National Police. The effigy is also often paraded by the Ministry of Economics and
by public hospitals and includes in its route sojourns to private or commercial
institutions, like the Club de la Unión as well as Importaciones Hiraoka and the
supermarket chain Metro, both retail powerhouses in Lima, whose political clout
is undeniable.
Mariátegui, in speaking of the procession as a force capable of forging a sort
of social consensus, was actually pointing to yet another reversal, another instance
of what Rostworowski describes as the “special transformational phenomenon”
(1998, 348) by which a sovereign entity prompts a carnivalesque reassembling
of hierarchies: in this case, elevating plebeian hybridity to the highest spheres of
power in order to compel the most avowed institutions of the nation, the military,
and the Catholic Church to bow to it. It is this very consensus that would make
it possible for devotees to then summon the material, chthonic forces the Lord
of Miracles represents against the will of those in power, a move all the more
commanding because it appeals to a cult now shrouded in the mantle of the elite’s
own “tradition.”
El Hueco, to be sure, is not listed as a stop in the official trajectory of the Lord of
Miracles, published every year in the city’s major newspapers. However, the maps
show that on at least four occasions the Lord of Miracles passed right in front of
the market (the Superior Courts, housed in Seoane’s building across the avenue,
are listed as an official stop). Media and official reports might be silent on the
issue, but vendors at El Hueco reported in their yearly newsletter that in 2009 the
procession, then led by the eleventh cuadrilla (or section) of the Hermandad de
Las Nazarenas, made a twenty-minute stop in front of the entrance to El Hueco “to
bless all the faithful, devotees, and vendors of our commercial center.” The feat was
accomplished after a couple of months of negotiations with the directorate of the
brotherhood, who, after “several coordinations,” accepted El Hueco’s request. On
the day of the visit, vendors and brotherhood exchanged flowers and other gifts.
To honor the Lord of Miracles, vendors set up a stage where a musical band played
criollo music in his honor. Vendors also laid out an elaborate, twenty-four square
meter-carpet of flower petals dedicated to him in front of El Hueco’s entrance
(COOPSE El Hueco 2010). Vendors’ 2014 newsletter reports again that El Hueco
was “lucky to have the Sacred Image of the Lord of Miracles of the Church of Las
Nazarenas visit” the market on October the prior year, which “obviously thrilled
vendors, who did their utmost to justly welcome and pay homage to the Lord of
Pachacamillas” (COOPSE El Hueco 2014). The official map of the procession’s

In “The Pit” 163

 trajectory that year has, indeed, the eleventh cuadrilla leading again and in charge
of porting the heavy image just when it passes in front of El Hueco’s entrance.
When the procession of the world-famous Lord of Miracles stops in front of
the entrance to a disreputable hub of piracy, contraband, and forged goods—what
in Sánchez Rodrı́guez’s language might be described as an “extreme space” in
today’s city (2002, 84)—so that vendors inside can pay their respects, the reality
of the market’s political power comes distinctly into focus. But the clarity of this
moment is fleeting and partial, sparked by the instants in which the highest of
the high and the lowest of the low come into contact, exposing an alliance whose
modus operandi, nevertheless, remains obscure. In the carefully choreographed
meeting of opposites, Lima’s maximum Lord stoops down to bless El Hueco and, we
surmise, by extension, its sabotage of urban planning as a statecraft tool, drawing
out a complicity that is embedded in the history of the Lord of Miracles. The
connections between vendors and brotherhoods, unstated in the Hermandad’s
publicized official route, are there for all to see, openly performed in Lima’s most
public of public feasts, as the powerful sacred image stops on its way to Lima’s
most influential political venues. But since wherever there is power there is secrecy
(Taussig 1999), a mystery is fortified in the revelation. How far down into the hole
and how far up into the highest spheres of power the influence of the Lord of
Miracles goes in support of the defiant vendors of El Hueco might never be for us
to know.

November 20, 2015

Lima’s municipal government announces that, with its assistance, vendors at El

Hueco have signed a contract to build a new seven-story structure with the aim of
“modernizing” their establishment. The new building will house fifteen hundred
stores, twelve square meters each (as opposed to the approximately four square
meters each booth currently measures). But there’s more: The building will have a
designated area for banks, a food court, offices, an auditorium for events, and two
parking lots with capacity for 560 cars (El Comercio 2015). The city uploads a video
to the web. It features a digital model of the exterior: a gigantic, concrete-and-glass
mall and adjacent tower that is ten stories high, not seven. Both mall and tower
are crowned with photoshopped bold, black letters that read: Centro Comercial
El Hueco. The backdrop to the building’s digital image is a luminous blue sky
daubed with downy white clouds.
As if to make the announcement more official or legitimate, a seal of the
Municipalidad de Lima hovers in the upper right hand of the frame throughout
the whole two minutes and fifteen seconds of the video, as the digital images shift
from the exterior façade to the mall’s light-drenched interior of open, spacious

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distribution areas, wide, sleek corridors, escalators, and generous parking garages.
The images are collated with scenes from the signing of the contract and with
clips of speeches by the mayor and by the president of El Hueco’s cooperative,
which are exhortations to complete the building as the vendors’ ultimate sign of
success.
But the announcement is followed four days later by a media commotion
that brings the construction plans to a halt. It is revealed that the design of
the building’s exterior publicized in the video is identical to—meaning it is
a plagiarized model from—a projected mall soon to be built in Colombia, a
fact confirmed by the Colombian construction company, which said it would
sue Lima’s municipal government (Perú 21 2015a, 2015b). Failing to bring
the “extreme space” of El Hueco under control through the construction of
a modern commercial center, the project is mocked by viewers online for its
intention to transform Lima’s ultimate hub of piracy with a plagiarized design,
letting the tall, sleek structure metaphorically sink into El Hueco’s quicksand of
discredit.
In late August 2019, the Lord of Miracles was back out of its glass case
again at El Hueco and given pride of place in yet another anniversary celebra-
tion. Above the clearing at the bottom of the ramp, a large piece of thin cloth
had been tied with strings to the edges of the corrugated roofs to shield peo-
ple below from the fine, relentless drizzle that falls in Lima during the winter
months. The makeshift cover could have been one Los Bestias used in their works
honoring self-constructed structures like El Hueco; it could have been the one
prompting Biczel to note the similarity to the outline of a storm-battered pirate
sailship (2013, 1). In the manner of El Hueco’s ironic embrace of its name, Los
Bestias’s projects had self-deprecating titles—“Des-hechos en architectura” and
“Lima: Utopı́a mediocre”.14 The names alluded to the material and unedifying
appearance of the works—“ripped, twisted, flawed geometries tied with a string”
(Biczel 2013, 1)—and, at the same time, amplified the group’s critique of architec-
ture as a discipline indifferent to the desperate situation of Lima’s sudden urban
explosion.
The words desecho, deshecho, and mediocre—like hueco—are never reducible
to their meaning. Like the crude aesthetic adopted by Los Bestias to put down
architecture, these words are not defined by what they mean but by what they do,
by the effects they induce (Hollier 1998, 29). This is what Bataille called the “job”
or “task” of some words, which is not to communicate or represent but to bring
down the status of things—architectural form, for example, and, in the case of El
Hueco, also the bourgeois deference to Lima’s colonial patrimony—by generating
a reaction of disgust with their “explosion of affective potential” (Hollier 1998, 30).
When the vendors took up the moniker of “El Hueco” and when they recruited
to their side the tellurian powers of the plebeian Lord of Miracles, now infiltrated

In “The Pit” 165

 in the highest spheres of power, to support their specimen of “pirate urbanization,”
they deployed the affective force of antiarchitecture against an idealized past and
a utopic future in order to affirm, with defiance and gusto, the “conditions of the
appalling present” (Biczel 2013, 16). This is the same force behind the outrage and
pleasure that, like in the video about Yahaira Plasencia, accompany the utterance of
the market’s name—a name that, as Hollier would put it, is “not merely pronounced
but spat out, flung in [the] face” (1998, 30). It is also the one you feel in your gut
as you go down the market’s ramp and steal a glance at the Lord of Miracles, and
on a large, printed banner tied to the tin ceilings you read: Bienvenidos a El Hueco.
Indeed, “Welcome to The Pit.”

Notes

1 All translations from the Spanish are mine unless otherwise indicated.
2 Memorandum prepared by Dr. Federico Isasi Cayo and dated April 10, 1997, Beneficencia de
Lima.
3 El Hueco is often discussed as the main hub of retail and wholesale pirate CDs and DVDs in

Lima, sometimes alongside Polvos Azules: the “empires of piracy.”

4 See also Bataille’s (1998) critique of the will to form.
5 Letter signed by Teniente General FAP Eduardo Montero Rojas and dated July 13, 1978.
6 Informe [Report] prepared by Flor de Marı́a Acevedo Zavala and dated August 23, 2001. This

transference seems to have been a convoluted, protracted process involving expropriation, payment
based on value, and/or trading for other properties. Certificate prepared by José Jiménez Borja and
dated November 18, 1959, Beneficencia de Lima.
7 Informe [Report] from the Sección Judicial signed by J. L. Llosa Belaúnde and dated July 9, 1941,

Beneficencia de Lima.
8 Letter signed by Oswaldo Hercelles and dated September 7, 1959, Beneficencia de Lima.
9 Letter signed by Antonio Icochea Aguirre and dated May 23, 1961, Beneficencia de Lima.
10 Memo signed by Arquitect Fernando Bryce and dated January 26, 1966, Beneficencia de Lima.
11 Letter signed by Teniente General FAP Eduardo Montero Rojas and dated July 13, 1978, Benefi-

cencia de Lima.
12 Memorandum prepared by Dr. Federico Isasi Cayo and dated April 10, 1997, Beneficencia de

Lima.
13 Informe [Report] prepared by Flor de Marı́a Acevedo Zavala and dated August 23, 2001, Benef-

icencia de Lima.
14 Meaning, respectively, both “Garbage in Architecture” or “Architecture Undone” and “Mediocre

Utopia.”

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