On the first day of my History of Peru class, my professor passed out color pictures of a Spanish colonial era painting done in Peru. He told us that the image would no doubt appear baffling, but to get into small groups and generate theories about what it could mean.
I signed up for the class because I’m half Peruvian, but grew up in the United States. I’ve only been to Peru twice: once when I was five, and once when I was eighteen. For the last couple years, I’ve been on a journey to learn more about my culture and heritage, including learning Spanish. Through this process, I learned that some of our practices such as spiritual cleansing of the body with an egg or an alum stone, and sharing stories of magic and myth, came from our Quechua roots.
During my last trip to Peru, I went to Cusco with some family members. We toured churches with a guide who showed us paintings from the same era as the one we were analyzing in class. I had also researched Andean mythology on my own, so I was well-versed in the symbolism my professor said we would find “baffling.”
My face was hot as I listened to the incorrect theories and speculations of my majority white classmates. Because the Natives in the painting were small, they assumed the painter must have been Spanish and was subjugating the Native people. They were so determined to be on the right side of history that they had lost sight of the obvious: the Natives were portrayed as smaller because they were simply further away. It was a perspective technique.
I found it humiliating for reasons I couldn’t explain. I knew that the professor, who had taught this course for years, was using the painting as a catalyst to discuss religion and the socioeconomics of the Andes during colonial time. Yet he hadn’t accounted for a student who grew up with The Legend of the Ayar Brothers as a bedtime story. He hadn’t accounted for a student familiar with Pachamama, Inti, Qilla, apukana, Manco Capac, or sapa inca. In other words, my History of Peru professor hadn’t accounted for a student who was actually Peruvian, let alone one with Quechua heritage.
I waited until the other students had finished speaking, then tentatively raised my hand. “Can I say?”
When talking about Peru, or when I oscillate between English and Spanish, my grammar gets jumbled and my intonation changes into the ghost of my father’s thick Peruvian accent. It’s slight, but I become self-conscious of it, and despite my attempt to speak as I normally do, I can’t. It’s the strangest thing.
In this way, I explained that Spanish nobility commissioned Native artists to create paintings like this, which mixed Catholic and Andean religious symbolism to help convert the non-literate Native population. I explained how the mountain was Pachamama, or Mother Earth, imagery being combined with the Virgin Mary. I explained how the man in the crown was the sapa inca, or ruler of the Inca Empire, and was most likely talking to a chasqui, or messenger, who ran long distances on the Inca trail. The sun was Inti and the moon was Qilla, deities worshipped by the Inca.
I was proud to hold this knowledge. I was usually the one who knew the least about Peru, so in a weird way, it was kind of gratifying. But later I grew sick thinking about the situation and how othering it was. Despite the rough start, I would go on to learn a lot about Peru’s history, particularly around its economics, government, and its Indigenous politics.
Even though I’m a quarter Quechua, I wouldn’t be called Indigenous there, because I’m half-white and grew up in the United States. I didn’t grow up speaking Quechua or wearing the traditional dress, either. Through research into my genealogy, I learned that many Peruvians are a quarter or even half Native. Yet many I know, including family and friends of mine, don’t identify as Native because they live in urban areas and live an urban life. This is a marked difference between North and South America concepts of indigeneity.
“[In high school] I discovered that my grandfather was Quechua from Ayacucho, something that I had never known, and that when he moved when he made it to Lima, he forbid anybody from speaking Quechua,” professor and anthropologist María Elena García told me.
García is a professor of anthropology and the comparative history of ideas at the University of Washington. She was born in Peru, raised in Mexico, and moved with her family to Virginia when she was fourteen.
“I tell all my students I became Peruvian in Virginia,” she said.
In other words, it is through difference that we become individuals, and because of other ethnicities or races being the majority that we become racialized. She was only one of two Latinas at her high school, which had 1600 students.
When I first met García at a research event on campus back in September, I knew I wanted to ask her about her experience in academia as a Peruvian. Through our conversation, I learned that she had studied Peru and Latin American history at a university in America, like me. Our stories are similar in some ways, but also very different.
“I went to [the College of] William & Mary…it’s down South, it’s Virginia. So, the KKK had a chapter, and the president defended its right to exist…at the university. This was 1989 to 1993,” García said. “[The KKK] hooked stuff on my door all the time. I mean, so you do gravitate to other people who are going to support you.”
This repressive environment drove García to meet and make friends with other Latines who would understand what she was going through, especially South Americans, who became some of her closest friends. It also brought her to an anthropology class that became the catalyst in her academic journey: that made her realize what she wanted to study.
“I was kind of like you,” García told me, “I was sort of searching. I wanted to know more about Peru, about Latin America. There was an archaeologist, anthropologist from Utah who [had] just worked in Peru. She taught the class called something like the Peoples of South America. It’s exactly the kind of class that I as an anthropologist teach against now. This was this essentialist sort of understanding.”
In anthropology, essentialism is the idea that people and things have “natural” characteristics that are inherent and unchanging. It has traditionally been used by White academia to reinforce racism.
“[It was] taught from, in her case, a place of love, but without any kind of critical thought about the way in which our positions shape how we understand things, and talk about things,” García said. “I don’t think I was thinking about it as critically [then]…I just wanted to learn, and she was wonderful. She gravitated to me and [my friend] because we were Peruvian. She became really invested in supporting our time there.”
García didn’t know as much about higher education in America as other students because her parents were immigrants and weren’t academics. Without that teacher investing so much time into her, she wouldn’t have been aware of opportunities to return to Peru to do field work, something she learned about in graduate school.
“Without this kind, lovely White woman from Utah, I don’t know that I would have been able to finish school or even think about graduate school,” said García. “So for me, mentorship is really important. It always, I think, has been. But she taught me, she gave me a beautiful model for me to emulate with my own students.”
These contradictions are facts of life for many people of color in academia. Professors can be great sources of knowledge and information, even while being ignorant and unknowingly harmful. But things are changing.
“Later—because we stayed in close touch until she died—when I started teaching, I told her, I love you and your class. And this is why I’m doing things so differently.”
Because of the relationship they’d build, García was comfortable enough to have an honest conversation with her about how her class reinforced harmful stereotypes, and how she’s working to change that through her own teaching methods. Her research also sheds light on Peruvian issues, an under researched topic in academia.
As a published author myself, who writes explicitly about identity, gender, and racism, I am on a similar mission, just with a different vessel. Taking the History of Peru class helped me situate myself in the context of my own personal and global history, informed how I talk about my Quechua heritage, and helped me understand the implications and nuances of retelling the Peruvian stories and myths I grew up with. Most of all, the class gave me more things to question, things to be curious about, and new subjects to explore. I stopped thinking of Peru as a monolith because I learned more about its regions, such as La Libertad, where my familial and Indigenous roots are strong. The regional differences of Peru is a subject I hope to explore further. As García said:
“The questions I’ve asked my entire career—about Indigeneity, coloniality, power and questions of race—have everything to do with who I am…questions that I have spent my entire life trying to think about. And I’m still doing that.”
Mateo was a fellow in the 2024 Story Gathering Sandbox, a program that gives young writers the opportunity to publish an article for our news outlet, Voices.
Be a part of our movement to share and celebrate the diverse stories of our ethnic communities
Our Northwest cultural communities have powerful stories to tell. Your support can help us amplify these voices. Donate $5 or $10 today and follow us to stay connected with the latest updates.