In 1966, as a recent graduate of a liberal arts education, I began to work as a Peace Corps volunteer with the Amuesha people of the tropical forest-covered, eastern slopes of the central Andes Mountains. I was taken aback to learn that the European, Andean and coastal peoples who had colonized their territory over the past eight decades, including the majority of the government officials, considered them to be aliens, and denied their rights as Peruvian citizens. The discourse regarding the savagery and backwardness of the rural indigenous people in contrast to the civilization and progress of the urban Peruvians was very current at that time.

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