Ben's Peru Blog

While I overall thought Machu Picchu unforgettable and an amazing experience, I think much less fondly of the town of Aguas Calientes. While it absolutely does have its charms and areas of genuine beauty. I found the main strip to be a painfully overstimulating tourist hellscape, a la Niagara Falls, Las Vegas etc. I found the main strip to be so over the top in this sense that it almost seemed like a parody of itself, I was half expecting to see a Machu Picchu-themed Hooters at some point. I…read more

In the Neruda reading this week, Machu Picchu represents not only physical grandeur and spectacle but also spiritual resiliance and cultural memory. For Neruda, Machu Picchu embodies the enduring spirit of the Inca civilization despite centuries of colonization and it’s aftermath. I found the following excerpt to be especially intriguing….    “Rise up in birth with me, my brother. Give me your hand out of the deep zone of your wide-spread sorrow. You will not return from the bedrock depths. You will not return from subterranean time. It will not…read more

  Our trip to Amaru was, according to Jon, the most important and culturally significant day of the trip. I feel like in retrospect, this claim was dubious, but that is neither here or nor there. At the beginning of this course back in Lima, Jon told us that we may come out of this course knowing less about indigeneity in the Andes than we knew going into it. I’m gonna be real, I had noooo idea what this was supposed to mean, no idea at all, not an inkling….read more

When I was reading “Deep Rivers”, I found the following quote, where the protagonist Ernesto observes the behaviour of the birds being shot at by the local townsfolk, to be a really apt metaphor for cultural survival, and existential assertion of identity amidst cultural loss. “Why didn’t the flock scatter? Why didn’t they take off at the sound of the explosions, when they saw the wounded falling all about them? Instead they stayed in the branches, screeching, clambering, hopping from one tree to another”   I see the birds’ refusal…read more

While reading Mariátegui’s “The Problem of the Indian: A New Approach”, I couldn’t help but make connections to Frantz Fanon. Though to be fair I think about Frantz Fanon a lot. While they were writing in quite different contexts, they are both fundamentally concerned with the liberation of oppressed peoples and the dismantling systems of exploitation while also confronting the underlying socio-economic and psychological forces that sustain oppression. For Mariátegui, the root cause of Indigenous oppression lies firmly in the inequitable distribution of land and the entrenched power of the…read more

Yesterday we went on a full-day journey from Pisac, to Chinchero, to Moray, to the Maras salt mines. This journey was far longer than any of us expected, I suspect it was far longer than our drivers expected as well, bless their souls (rest assured they were tipped well). I went into this whole thing blind, in the sense that I did not look into any of these sites in any real detail. I more or less learned what each site was when I arrived. Moray was the most fascinating…read more

This week, I found Garcilaso de la Vega to be a fascinating contrast to Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. The tone in which the two writers presented their narratives is very different despite covering similar subject matter. The Guaman Poma reading took on a critical and confrontational tone that focused heavily on the abuses and exploitation suffered by the Inca during the Spanish colonial project. Garcilaso’s narrative on the other hand offered a more romanticized perspective than Guaman Poma. Garcilaso’s writing seemed to aim to create harmony between Spanish and…read more

Upon first reading Guaman Poman De Ayala’s “The First New Chronicle and Good Government”, I was originally inclined to read it as text that was inherently based firmly within colonial idealogy, though, with slightly more progressive (for lack of a better word) tone than I am used to in these Spanish colonial texts. The text is clearly built on colonial frameworks, with Guaman Poman De Ayala, writing the entire thing in Spanish and basing his text, including his critiques, in core principles of Christian morality. While he is, in fact,…read more

Yesterday was one of the best days of my life. I would like to say it is because I got the chance to stand in the presence of a ceremonial Incan fortress….but it’s not…It was because of the llamas and alpacas. I will be chasing the high of meeting these creatures for the rest of my life.    As I write this I am trying to explain to Orla the difference between an Alpaca and a llama She is trying her best to understand, bless her soul, but it’s not…read more

While I have long been aware that many of the buildings in Cusco are built on top of Inca structures, I realized that I have never *really* taken the time to consider the origins of the materials for the colonial buildings that sit atop these Inca remains. The second chapter of Inka Bodies by Carolyn Dean explains that The Cathedral of Cusco was constructed using the stones that were taken, or perhaps more appropriately, stolen from Sacsayhuamán, an Incan citadel that lies just north of where we are now. The…read more