Recent studies on the figuration of the nation in nineteenth-century Hispanic America have used sophisticated analyses of different media to suggest that Indigenous references were progressively excluded from urban public space as national symbols. In these spaces, the creole authorities placed themselves and their ancestors centre stage. However, these studies have neglected a highly representative medium: street names. This article demonstrates that street nomenclature was key in figuring the nation in a capital city and shows a different trend from that established using other media. Specifically, after the 1861 municipal reform of street names in Lima, Peru, the majority of official names were Indigenous and did not celebrate creole or military elites. This article examines this reform and the conflicts it provoked.

In Lima in the seventeenth century, both free and enslaved black women held elected leadership roles in black confraternities (corporate bodies of lay Catholics). These women occupied a public position generally reserved for men; their Spanish and indigenous counterparts did not hold comparable roles. Though their experiences have not been documented in scholarly literature, they were highly visible in their own lifetimes. In ecclesiastical court, they acted as the confraternity's legal agents. In everyday operations, they were primarily responsible for collecting and managing funds. This gave them a large say in how money ought to be spent, whether on festivals, members’ funerals, medical aid, or financial support for imprisoned members. Though black limeños made up a majority of the city's population, other forms of mutual aid were often inaccessible to them. Confraternity leaders in general, and these women in particular, managed one of their community's only officially recognized spaces for civic organization. As the century wore on, men successfully challenged the women's authority in court, and militia officers became more and more central to leadership. Yet even with that curtailment, these positions gave black women in Lima a degree of publicly acknowledged power highly unusual for early modern women.

The market of El Hueco in downtown Lima sits inside a large pit dug out for the foundation of a state building that was never built. The below-ground corridors and crammed vending stalls in this poorly regulated market are usually flooded with shoppers, yet government officials and the media frequently condemn it as a vile and dangerous place. But how and why does El Hueco offend? Through an ethnographic account of a day's events, cast against a discussion of Marxism's “lumpenproletariat” and Hernando de Soto's “informality,” I argue that implicit in El Hueco's challenge of state bureaucracy is a class critique that resists conventional class analysis and that affirms the “lumpen” as a politics in its own right. “Lumpen” here does not refer to categories of people but to a resource that can be appropriated and deployed freely. Linked to the anti-political tactics of President Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s, lumpen as a resource has changed the face of postwar Lima by defying and deforming from within the bourgeois ideals of urban development and bureaucratic form. It has also arguably changed the face of politics and played a role in the revival of fujimorismo during and since the 2016 presidential elections.