Made by the Mujeres Creativas workshop in Lima, Peru, this piece is a second replica of the original arpillera, made by the Mujeres Creativas Workshop in 1986. It portrays the arrival of families of displaced people in one of Lima's shantytowns. The poverty of their temporary homes is apparent from the wooden planks they are unloading from trucks. The instability of their lives is evoked by the figures of the women standing guard to resist the police from coming and wrecking the houses. This arpillera depicts the isolation and poverty of those displaced by the war and their tenuous link to a kind of peaceful normality.
Over 600,000 people were displaced within Peru during the 1980s and 1990s as a result of armed conflict between the government, self defence groups and insurgent forces of the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Resistance Movement.
Presently, the urban slums on the outskirts of Lima are home to some 200,000 internally displaced peoples (IDPs). Although the majority of them came to Lima over 15 years ago, they live in the same makeshift shacks, constructed upon their arrival, that we see in this arpillera. The majority of IDPs endure constant hardship; they work on average more than 14 hours a day in informal street trade and temporary work to make ends meet.
A 2004 law on internal displacement helped to protect IDP's rights, as it incorporated the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and created a division within the Ministry of Women and Social Development (MIMDES) to coordinate the response to internal displacement. This body has improved the situation of some IDPs by starting to register them for eventual reparations, and implementing some livelihood support programs.
However, during 2010 the number of people registered remained at only 5,000. Whilst rooted in 1980s Peru, the displacement issue stitched by these arpilleristas has resonance in our current decade, where 65 million people worldwide are now displaced.http://www.unhcr.org/en-ie/figures-at-a-glance.html
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