Pop Achorado (Peruvian Agrarian Reform Posters)

• Photograph the peasants yourself, in their own setting, then redraw each photograph by hand as a comic-strip figure with heavy black contours and flat fills.
• Fill skin, grounds and even headline letters with enlarged halftone dots, and push other photographs to hard contrast or solarise them on the process camera.
• Use op-art line fields, concentric grids and graded dot fields as grounds or to build emblems: in '190 años después…' Túpac Amaru II's face swells out of parallel lines, and the sheet repeats in a second colourway.
• Set one upright figure at the centre, in some sheets a defiant campesino, ringed with a white halo or echoed in rainbow contours, against a dot, line or sunburst ground.
• Run the slogan across the top in heavy slab or flared-serif capitals, sometimes in a framed band, inside a multi-line coloured border around the whole sheet; often add a short explanatory paragraph beneath it, and mark every reform sheet with the reform's Túpac Amaru seal.
• Design for mass offset: flat colours that survive cheap newsprint, a 100 × 70 cm sheet, and tens of thousands of copies to paste on walls across Peru, often sent ahead to the places where Velasco came to hand over land.

Lima, Peru: the Dirección de Promoción y Difusión de la Reforma Agraria (DPDRA), set up in 1969 under Efraín Ruiz Caro to publicise Juan Velasco Alvarado's agrarian reform law of 24 June 1969. Jesús Ruiz Durand (born Huancavelica, 1940) designed most of the posters, working with the writer Mirko Lauer, alongside the writer José Adolph and the designer José Bracamonte, who also worked as a pair. Dates follow the Reina Sofía holdings (1969–1975); the agrarian-reform core is 1969–1971, before the office was absorbed into SINAMOS, and the last dated sheet, the Reina Sofía poster 'Minero, Perú cumple con el pueblo peruano' (September 1975), promotes the Ilo–Moquegua copper refinery, not the reform. MALBA and Sánchez Flores's chapter give 1968–1973 for the series; the chapter counts 23 posters, and his thesis 24 from 1969 to 1971. Sánchez Flores argues that the artist's 1984 label fits only one subset of the posters.

1. Miguel Sánchez Flores, 'El afiche como fetiche: de los espacios gubernamentales a los espacios museísticos. El caso de los afiches de Jesús Ruiz Durand para la reforma agraria del gobierno de Juan Velasco Alvarado', in Giuliana Borea (ed.), Arte y antropología: estudios, encuentros y nuevos horizontes (Lima: Fondo Editorial PUCP, 2017), pp. 365–371, doi:10.18800/9786123172275.035 (the chapter counts 23 posters and dates them 1968–1973; DPDRA created in 1969 under Efraín Ruiz Caro; Ruiz Durand with Mirko Lauer, José Adolph and José Bracamonte; posters meant to be pasted on walls in different cities of Peru, and 'muchas veces' distributed in advance where the president came to hand over land; 50,000 copies on newsprint and about 2,000 on bond paper, c. 98 × 70 cm; most posters based on Ruiz Durand's photographs; pop art, op-art patterns and solarisation; aimed at campesinos of the northern coast and of the central and southern Andes; 'Pop achorado' named by the artist himself, for the link to American pop and the supposed insolence of the campesinos in some of the posters; the Túpac Amaru seal credited to Ruiz Durand by Leopoldo Lituma, 2011): https://repositorio.pucp.edu.pe/index/handle/123456789/188992
2. Miguel Antonio Sánchez Flores, 'Más allá del pop achorado: una propuesta de relectura de los afiches de Jesús Ruiz Durand para la reforma agraria del gobierno de Juan Velasco Alvarado' (MA thesis, PUCP, 2017; 24 posters, 1969–1971; the label coined by Ruiz Durand in 1984 and, the thesis argues, fitting only one subset): https://tesis.pucp.edu.pe/handle/20.500.12404/7756
3. Jesús Ruiz Durand, 'Afiches de la Reforma Agraria: otra experiencia trunca', U-tópicos 4/5 (1984), as cited by Sánchez Flores (not consulted directly)
4. Nanda Leonardini, 'Identidad, ideología e iconografía republicana en el Perú', Arbor 185:740 (2009), 1259–1270, doi:10.3989/arbor.2009.740n1089 (Ruiz Durand, unasked, drew the first image the government adopted for the agrarian reform campaign, a synthesis of the school-textbook effigy in which the hat brim forms a T and the hair an A, joined to pop art; fig. 4 dates '190 años después…' to 1970, offset, though its caption reads 'está ganando la batalla' where the poster says 'guerra'): https://arbor.revistas.csic.es/index.php/arbor/article/view/393
5. Anna Cant, ''Land for Those Who Work It': A Visual Analysis of Agrarian Reform Posters in Velasco's Peru', Journal of Latin American Studies 44:1 (2012), 1–37, doi:10.1017/S0022216X11001106 (abstract: about 20 posters, 1968–1970, in editions of 50,000 to 200,000; 'vibrant representations of the agrarian reform's ideological aspects'; aesthetically sophisticated propaganda and symbols to encourage social participation in the reform): https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/101321
6. MALBA, 'Jesús Ruiz Durand sobre su serie de afiches Reforma Agraria' (2016; Reforma Agraria, 1968–1973, 15 posters and 15 photographs, 100 × 70 cm each, acquired 2014; flat colour and comic-strip technique, every poster based on his own photographs of peasants, street posters 'rústicos, de gran tiraje'; Ruiz Durand: '¿Por qué no usar la técnica de la historieta?, me dije entonces', the grounds for the american-comic-book influence, and 'el pop estadounidense e inglés era nuestro pan de cada día'): https://malba.org.ar/jesus-ruiz-durand-sobre-su-serie-de-afiches-reforma-agraria/
7. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, collection records for Jesús Ruiz Durand, series Reforma Agraria Peruana, DO03082-001 to -010 (offset on paper, 100 × 70 cm, mass print run, dated 1969–1975; long-term loan of the Fundación Museo Reina Sofía, 2017; the 1975 sheet, DO03082-010 'Minero, Perú cumple con el pueblo peruano', prints 'Refinería de cobre Ilo–Moquegua, Setiembre 1975' over a treated photograph of refinery workers and carries no reform seal): https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collections/artist/ruiz-durand-jesus
8. University of New Mexico, Center for Southwest Research, Sam L. Slick Collection of Latin American and Iberian Posters, records for '190 años después Túpac Amaru está ganando la guerra' (Ruiz Durand, 1968–70, offset on thin paper, Industrial Gráfica, op-art image in orange, pink and blue), '24 de junio: día del campesino' (Ruiz Durand), 'Si trabajas tierras de otros en Cajamarca tu situación cambia' (Ruiz Durand, id 3392, farm workers on a black-line op-art background), 'Reforma agraria en el Perú: ¡A fondo!!' (Ruiz Durand, 1968–70, id 3371, op-art concentric circles over grid lines), 'Tierra sin patrones' (Emilio Hernández) and 'No más lágrimas campesinas!' (Bracamonte): https://nmdigital.unm.edu/digital/collection/LAPolPoster/id/3394/
9. 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023), participant page 'Jesús Ruiz Durand' (posters 1969–1974 for the Dirección de Promoción y Difusión de la Reforma Agraria; solarisation, flat colour, images reframed like comic strips, CMYK offset with dots and patterns; 'achorado' glossed as rebellious, insolent, insubordinate): https://35.bienal.org.br/en/participante/jesus-ruiz-durand/
10. Luis Lama, 'Jesús Ruiz Durand: Los tiempos de la ira', Caretas, 27 March 2024 (interview; the posters made without a computer, with his enlarger turned into a small process camera, high-contrast film and superimposed layers, an 'analogue photochemical Photoshop'; the interviewer calls them 'una fusión de pop, op, psicodelia', the grounds for the psychedelic influence; on his return from New York, Ruiz Durand found the office turned into SINAMOS): https://caretas.pe/cultura/jesus-ruiz-durand-los-tiempos-de-la-ira
11. Wikipedia (es), 'Sistema Nacional de Apoyo a la Movilización Social' (a lead only: SINAMOS created by Velasco's government in June 1971, the year the thesis's dated posters end): https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistema_Nacional_de_Apoyo_a_la_Movilizaci%C3%B3n_Social
12. Wikipedia (es), 'Jesús Ruiz Durand' (a lead only: the source for the aim of a revolutionary image that avoided Russian and Chinese models and drew near Cuban and Chilean posters, the grounds for the cuban-poster influence; its July 1968 date for '190 años después…' is impossible, as Velasco took power on 3 October 1968): https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jes%C3%BAs_Ruiz_Durand

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