Abstract: Th is article examines what economic growth and state versions of progress have done to small and medium-scale farmers in an urban setting, in Arequipa in southern Peru. Th e general reorganization of production, resources, and labor in the Peruvian economy has generated a discursive move to reposition small and medium-scale farmers as backward. Th is article analyzes how farmers struggle to fi nd their place within a neoliberal urban ecology where diff erent conceptions of what constitutes progress in contemporary Peru infl uence the landscape. Using an analytical lens that takes material and organizational infrastructures and practices into account, and situates these in specifi c historical processes, the article argues that farmers within the urban landscape of Arequipa struggle to reclaim land and water, and reassert a status that they experience to be losing. Such a historical focus on material and organizational infrastructural arrangements, it is argued, can open up for understanding how local and beyond-local processes tangle in complex
ways and are productive of new subjectivities; how relations are reconfi gured
in neoliberal landscapes of progress and dispossession. Such an approach makes evident how state and nonstate actors invest aff ects, interests, and desires differently within a given landscape.