Parker VanValkenburgh

“Building Subjects” is a study of how people, places, and politics were transformed by one of the largest waves of forced resettlement in human history—the reducción movement of late sixteenth-century colonial Peru. Drawing on eight years of archaeological fieldwork in Peru's Zaña valley and documentary research in Peru and Spain, it examines reducción’s concrete effects on indigenous people in one corner of the viceroyalty and its consequences for colonial political institutions. In the process, it locates this movement within the longer term history of displacement in the early modern world and explores its resonances with contemporary experiences of migration and resettlement.