Growing up Quechua: Ethnic identity,narrative,and the cultural politics of childhood migration in Cusco,Peru

Migration, structural transformations, and memory: Nostalgia and other representational choices

In The Circulation of Children, Jessaca Leinaweaver describes the ways that cultural practices of child circulation in the Andes, as less permanent forms of usually kin-based migrations, must be understood better within systems of Andean cultural meanings and strategies for survival before being judged (2008: 3). While no doubt located in contexts of structural inequality, and often including unequal exchanges of child labor for pay or opportunity, circulation as a form of childhood mobility nonetheless is often perceived as the only option for social advancement. These Andean child-rearing projects often involve children being sent to ‘help’ or ‘accompany’ (acompañar) family members in exchange for better educational or work opportunities. While often misunderstood by outsiders in the worst case as extra-familial and exploitative trafficking, such forms of child circulation are linked to compradazgo (‘godparent’) relationships as well as other culturally specific beliefs and practices. Mary Weismantel (1995), for instance, has drawn attention to the way Andean kinship is culturally constructed largely through the symbolic importance of physical nurturance, primarily feeding, such that there is a felt corporal materiality to relatedness among family members whose bodies are formed by the same foods.

There is also no doubt that these processes of childhood mobility also set in motion reconfigurations in the Andean economies of racial and class identification, particularly when ‘education is a technique for divesting oneself of certain ethnic markers’ (Leinaweaver, 2008: 118). Within dominant Andean racial/class hierarchies, climbing the ladder requires ‘de-Indianization’ and has produced hybrid forms of ‘indigenous mestizo’ identification particularly in Cusco (De la Cadena, 2000). In her discussion of how childhood circulation for the purpose of education is framed as an ideology of betterment or progress (the discourse of superación, or ‘overcoming’), Leinaweaver describes the racist and classist ‘social ugliness’ that is hidden behind this ideology: ‘To fully overcome poverty means that one must take on several social qualities – becoming educated, speaking Spanish instead of Quechua, dressing in store-bought “Western” clothing instead of woven skirts or felt hats or rubber-tire sandals, eating noodles instead of potatoes and drinking beer instead of trago, living in the city instead of in the campo. In other words, to overcome means to become whiter and to shed an Indian way of life’ (2008: 110).

Gina, like many Andeans, has lived a life punctuated by migration. Even from her youngest childhood years, Gina was migrating along with siblings or parents from her village home in Colquemarca to the country (campo) to pasture animals, including overnight stays at a family cabin (choza) high in the mountains. Gina’s family valued education, and when she was eight years old, they decided to send her and her sister to the district capital of Santo Tomás to live during the week to attend school. Gina refers to this as her first ‘little migration’ (migración pequeñita), involving treks on foot of eight hours each way, sometimes alone, each weekend from home to school. At age 10, she undertook another migration, this time eight hours away by horseback to another campesino community to live with an older sister who had just got a teaching job. Following local practices of Andean child circulation, Gina’s family sent her to accompany (acompañar), cook, and keep house for the older sister, even though it meant some temporary interruption of her formal schooling.

In these previous two migrations, Gina had remained in primarily Quechua environments. However, Gina’s next migration, to Spanish-speaking Cusco, would be fundamentally different and more difficult, involving painful degrees of invisibility, silencing, and social isolation. Gina’s father stayed behind with the family farm, which left the family further separated geographically, but the goal of this migration, yet again, was education as social capital for the next generation. Gina’s father wanted his children to be well educated and wealthy enough to buy the family a radio, because he had heard about them but had never seen one. An older brother of Gina’s had already moved to Cusco to enroll in a seminary and learn Spanish, and he facilitated arrangements with superiors from progressive wings of the Catholic Church for the family, and so they left for Cusco riding in the back of a transport truck, an experience Gina described as ‘tragic.’ After two days of traveling, and getting sick and vomiting, in the truck, they finally arrived, and after a night spent in a hostel, they rented a small room the following day. Gina described the room as old and cold, and they were not accustomed to being shut inside all day. Other aspects of urban life, such as traffic lights, were also stressful, and Gina frequently took circuitous routes through town just to avoid them. Eventually, Gina’s brother spoke to some US priests and arranged for the family to be moved to an empty room that was part of the seminary. She fondly remembers watching and listening to the Quechua campesinos that came to take catechism classes in Spanish, as it reminded her of home. Her brother, however, was far more preoccupied that the family should learn Spanish and assimilate to urban mestizo Cusco, and one afternoon, he took Gina and her sister to the movies so that they could practice listening to Spanish. The experience proved to be a shocking one:

They had just started the previews. We were already becoming anxious because we saw that they had shut the door, you know, and it was dark … and the screen, you know, and the sounds there were, because it was a movie with a lot of ‘tatatata,’ bullets, all those things, you know. We told my brother we couldn’t take it. The sound, the noise in our ears, the screen … there were a lot of people but we couldn’t see. My brother, prudently, despite the fact we had paid admission, took us out. Sure, outside he got mad at us, he told us you have to get used to it, how are you going to learn Spanish, like this you won’t learn, you have to learn to listen. My brother was upset but at least he had the patience to get us out of there and take us home. That was a frustration for us, saying how were we going to live here, if we can’t even stay 10 minutes or half an hour in those places, you know. What’s going to happen to us? I said those sounds … I’m not going to be able to take it, because I’m used to walking in silence, in peace … If what my brother wants is for us to learn Spanish at the movies, I’m never going to want to go to the movies because it makes me afraid, maybe they might do something to us there, you know.

Later, during return trips to Colquemarca, however, Gina did not tell the story this way, but rather raved to friends and family about the wonders of urban Cusco, including the cinema. Rather than confiding the difficulties of her migration, she chose to represent herself as the successful cosmopolitan migrant, building up her social capital back home in part through occluding the most painful examples of her assimilation, a theme present in the experiences of many migrants (for a literary representation of this phenomenon, for instance, see Muñoz, 2006).

In addition to her memories of idealizing her migrant status in the presentation of self upon return to her natal community, there is yet another type of nostalgic remembrance in Gina’s recollections, one of a free and non-commodified circulation of resources and products, especially of food, in her childhood, linking authentic campesino childhood to a purer expression of the Quechua ethic of reciprocity or ayni, along with abundance (cf. Allen, 2002), in contrast to the extractive capitalist wage economy of today’s cities. For instance, Gina recalls her father insisting he had the right to request food from his brother, Gina’s uncle, due to the fact that he had no children of his own and was thus obligated to invest in his nephews and nieces. In other portions of our interviews, Gina described systems of non-cash barter and exchange of agricultural products between communities and how foods like fruit and cheese were never ‘rationed’ as they are by families today but rather communally shared. Gina also stated that while her mother sewed and her father cut hair for the community, they rarely did so for cash and that no one in the family utilized money. However, in apparent contradiction in yet other moments, she casually mentioned that sometimes people would indeed pay her father, or that he would sell a cow for money, or that she or other children were given money to go buy bread, or during Carnival, to buy the liquor that came in from Arequipa.

Despite the apparent conflict between these statements and a nostalgia for the bygone days of reciprocity, the two realities that emerge from her accounts mirror the tensions of the structural transition that occurred for the rural Andes particularly during the latter half of the 20th century, a situation Weismantel (1998) has described as a semi-proletarianized economy where non-commodified forms of indigenous exchange coexisted with the invigorated infiltration of wage labor. Catherine Allen’s ethnographic revisitation of the community of Sonqo details massive shifts in cultural values resulting from these structural transformations, such as the fact that homes are now more often referred to as lots (lotes) than as spiritual entities (Wasitira) and the fact that requesting reciprocal help (ayni) is now viewed as lazy, a startling reversal from her fieldwork in the 1970s when wage labor was the most disparaged exchange activity (Allen, 2002: 213). I would argue that Gina’s choice to narrate these profound structural transformations within the context of her childhood migration through a nostalgic remembrance of reciprocal economic relationships, albeit with slippage, is a self-representational choice and a strategy for a more authentic identification with Quechua campesino roots that bolsters the validity of her now professionalized Quechua identity.

However, this is not the only instance where I believe remembrance and the context of recounting, here in an interview with a white male US academic friend, were fraught with representational choices. For instance, when Gina explained to me that she and her family only had one small room for sleeping and had to sleep in the same beds, she hastened to add that they did so ‘very naturally and healthily,’ and when she recalled how the children of her community would imitate adult religious fiestas, she first stated that they copied everything but the drinking, but then added very quietly and quickly, ‘pero chicha, sí, creo’ (‘but corn beer, yes, I believe so’). While my first response to this moment was bewilderment (why was she so unsure or timid about this, and couldn’t she remember one way or the other, rather than ‘believing’ they might have drunk chicha?), my subsequent interpretation of this moment rests on an acknowledgment of how racist prejudice and discrimination against Andean Indians are frequently rooted in discourses of health and hygiene (cf. Colloredo-Mansfeld [1998] on ‘hygienic racism’) and stereotypes of Indian drunkenness (how much worse if the image is of Indians letting their children get drunk).

Reflexive ethnographic analysis must take into account the potential that these structural contexts, as well as the subjectivities and identities of the interlocutors in ethnographic dialogue, have to frame narratives and choices about self-representation. In sum, in interpreting Gina’s life history interviews, her remembrance of her Quechua childhood is characterized by two tendencies: a tendency to idealize her childhood and smooth over the social complexities and structural transitions occurring then, perhaps as an opportunity to claim and embrace her childhood Quechua roots more authentically or unproblematically; and also, a felt need, along with her impressive ability, to offer cultural translations of her life experiences for white/mestizo audiences that stave off prejudicial or stereotypical interpretations, given the larger dynamics of racism and discrimination against Quechua peoples in Peru and throughout the Andes.

‘Looking for a little corner’: Indigenous identity and education in the Andes

While education is perceived as a pathway to social mobility in the Andes, income inequality gaps may actually increase along with years of schooling between dominant and marginalized ethnic groups sharing the same level of education (Larrea et al., 2007: 64). Thus, though education is a way to move up the class/race hierarchy and shed poor, Indian ways, there are high costs for this type of social capital investment, as schools are also institutions that reproduce racial domination in a variety of ways. Carlos De la Torre’s studies of middle-class Indians and Afro-Ecuadorians in Quito reveal testimonies of blatant racist expressions and practices towards indigenous and black students (1996, 2002), while Caggiano’s study of Bolivian Aymara migrants to Buenos Aires details racist micro-aggressions such as insults and the correction of pronunciation but also notes that another manifestation is ‘children who speak very little, probably as a result of past misunderstandings, or who speak very softly’ (2010: 112), a theme of silencing and invisibility evident in Gina’s case. Other scholars have examined more subtle and contradictory reproductions of racism even within the ostensibly multicultural or intercultural/bilingual institutional systems that have become increasingly common in the Andean countries of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Though oriented towards a racially liberatory multicultural or intercultural ethic, these educational institutions are nonetheless sites for the production of national citizens and appropriately ‘modern’ subjects (Canessa, 2004; García, 2005), as well as for the perpetuation of racist micro-aggressions, the politics of racial tokenism, and forms of paternalism/maternalism that often make indigenous educational access dependent on the good will or favors of white/mestizo employers and their social capital (Hollenstein, 2009). Carmen Martínez Novo’s (2009) critique of bilingual and intercultural education in Ecuador demonstrates that even projects growing out of the cultural demands of indigenous movements may be sabotaged by severe deficits in resources, infrastructure, and trained professionals, leading to a separate and unequal educational system targeted to indigenous students but yet rejected by many of them and their parents as second-rate, also leaving unanswered the question of what responsibilities dominant racial groups might have to circulate in intercultural worlds.

In Gina’s case, attending school in 1960s Peru, well before the current waves of multicultural and bilingual schools, meant adhering to a nationalist, assimilationist, white/mestizo and Spanish-centered curriculum and educational culture. Not surprisingly, Gina’s first months of school were filled with isolation, alienation, and marginalization. She describes a culture of invisibility and silence which existed for campesino students in Cusco’s schools, one in which their identities as Quechua migrants were never acknowledged and in which her own strategy was to hide and cover her identity as much as possible until she could successfully assimilate. She hid behind the taller girls in the desks in front of her and tried never to look her teacher in the eyes. What she feared most, after all that her family had gone through to migrate to Cusco, was that school officials might actually expel her and send her back to her community if they found out she was Quechua and did not understand Spanish well. While she feels her strategy worked in a sense, Gina also reflected on its enduring costs, which she described quite literally and eloquently as a loss of voice and a sombering effect on her character:

Here in Cusco we didn’t play … to play in Colquemarca you went outside and you were free there, running around, playing. Here to play my mother told us we couldn’t go out to the street, because in the street there are cars, in the streets there are people that don’t know you and maybe since you don’t speak Spanish well, they could fool you … they could take you. And I didn’t play in school either, because the games were also in Spanish, you know. I didn’t play. So what did I do? Kind of so the teacher and the kids wouldn’t notice me, I came in, I sat in some little corner and I was writing the same thing, I mean, so that no one would say to me, ‘why aren’t you playing?’ You know, as if to say she was doing her homework or she must be doing something, right? But it was the same thing I repeated like this. I was making little doodles with my hand and trying to listen, but on one hand also to cover myself up so that, how am I going to play if I can’t run along like them in Spanish? All these things, I don’t know, I’m going to lose in everything. Because they’re going to realize I know Quechua, they’re going to make me the ugly duckling, you know. And I didn’t want that, but so also during recess I sat in some little corner, and I looked for little corners, I didn’t look for the open patio but instead little corners where the people hardly passed by. I said, what a shame, why have they brought me here? Because now I’m not playing, I’m not walking, it was just the route from school to home, that’s all. And I believe that made my character … I am … even today I’m serious. And my daughters get on my case, they say why don’t you laugh more? Why don’t you laugh? … But inside myself I say: there’s a reason … because if I laughed maybe the kids would have talked to me, right, in Spanish, and I wouldn’t have been able to answer … I closed up more and more … and I think that has influenced my character to be very reserved and to not laugh … not laugh. Because I believe they cut out play, I cut it out myself because to play is to shout naturally, to laugh naturally. I believe they cut that out from me and that even my face changed, you know. That’s what I missed, I said what a shame I’m not playing, not shouting, how’s my voice going to be if I’m just talking like this, just softly, I’m not shouting like in Colquemarca, how will my voice be after?

Gina would look forward to return visits back to Colquemarca, where she felt she could laugh and play and hear her own voice again.

Even though she was trying not to draw any attention to herself in Cusco, she desperately wished that one of her teachers had asked her about her background and even mused on that possibility during our interviews:

Because it would have been nice if she had said, where are you from? Where have you studied in primary? Then right there I would have said: No, I’m from Chumbivilcas and I speak Quechua and I’m learning. They never asked me in primary or secondary. Nothing. In primary my teacher was good but I never heard her voice say to me: let’s see, Gina, my name … nothing, you know. Sure on one hand I went around hiding but on the other hand the teacher didn’t speak to me.

Finally, however, there was a biology teacher, a nun who asked her where she was from in a one-on-one tutoring session. This one small act was so profoundly meaningful for Gina that she credits it with influencing her initial choice of career in the sciences, though eventually she switched to primary education. It turned out that the nun was from a town called Espinar, along the highway to Colquemarca. Even with this teacher, however, Gina could not bring herself to reveal that she was a Quechua speaker, though it seems likely the teacher knew anyway, but also, interestingly, never brought it up – the discussion of background was confined to region of origin, not ethnic or ethnolinguistic identity.

After Gina’s mother returned to Colquemarca, Gina and her sister were relocated by the Church to another room near an order of nuns, a room they paid for through regular shipments of potatoes from the family farm and chores performed by the girls for the convent. Gina recalls the bells of María Angola church ringing at 9 p.m., as she continued to polish the chapel pews and aisles. Gina and her sister raised chickens and guinea pigs (cuyes) for cash income, as well, and as aspiring cosmopolitans transitioning to the rhythms of urban mestizo Cusco, they enjoyed walking down to El Astro bakery (pastelería) for sandwiches, hot chocolates, desserts or a soda. Still, these were small pleasures for what was a difficult transition far from home and family.

While Gina had by this point learned enough Spanish to function reasonably well, there were still regular experiences of marginalization, as happened one day when one of the mothers of the convent could not understand Gina’s use of the Quechua double-possessive grammatical construction in Spanish. Gina was trying to let her superior know that the mother of another child living in the convent had stopped by, and using a literal translation from the double-possessive form in Quechua to Spanish, kept telling the mother that ‘your/María Angélica’s mother has come’ (‘ha venido su mamá de María Angélica’), to which the perturbed mother kept replying, ‘My mother?’ before finally storming off:

And the mother left. And it stayed recorded in me how the mother left making so much noise and didn’t listen to me, didn’t understand what I was telling her. I felt a bit bad, I said, what is it the mother doesn’t like about me? I’ve been presentable, I’ve done my job, and I’ve gone to let her know, right? I was a little frustrated. Maybe the mother is in a bad mood? … and then later when I learned, when they taught us Quechua grammar, there I discovered, or whatever, it was the same, I was repeating from Quechua. And for me it was good Spanish, you know, of course for the mother it wasn’t good Spanish. I believe it was that day I finally said, ‘done, one less weight from that day I felt bad.’ Because I had spoken fine, I wasn’t lying, the truth. Or sure, I was translating from my Quechua, because in Quechua that’s what it is. Mariac mamá. In Quechua it’s her/Maria’s mother. Or his/Juan’s son, his/Juan’s house. It’s not Juan’s house. I feel good that I said what I had to say in my Quechua. The problem was that the mother did not understand that I’m a native Quechua speaker, that’s what it was.

When Gina attended Universidad San Antonio Abad del Cusco, she found that her upward mobility was still limited by class, as she had planned to major in chemistry but soon realized she would not be able to afford the costs associated with laboratory supplies, lab coats, and books, so she switched to a career in early childhood education. During these years, Gina also began joining student associations affiliated with the progressive liberation theology wings of the Catholic Church, such as the Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos, through which she got involved in community development projects, met Gustavo Gutiérrez, and had discussion groups on dialectical materialism and Marx, justice, and social solidarity. Later, through these social connections in the Church, Gina worked for the Oficina Regional de Educación Católica as a secretary for a father who ended up helping her immensely with her writing skills in Spanish.

Gina’s migratory and educational trajectory demonstrates the multiple role of educational, religious, and NGO institutions as pathways to social mobility and yet often sites for the reproduction of dominant class and race hierarchies. The latter costs, in Gina’s case, took the form of assimilation, invisibility, silence, a type of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy around the expression of indigenous identity in urban mestizo institutional settings, costs that are narrated as durable impressions on character, expression, and voice. However, we also see Gina’s strategies for survival and resistance, particularly in her experience with the convent mother, which involve constructing a redemptive or liberatory narrative through connecting three distinct moments: (1) the painful childhood experience of exclusion in a cultural world ignorant to Quechua migrants’ linguistic and cultural expressions, (2) the subsequent moment, years later, when further education led to a realization that she had followed a valid, Quechua linguistic logic, and (3) the moment of the interview, when she synthesizes the previous two moments into a fuller narrative that emphasizes her peace and security in knowing that things should have been and should be otherwise.

Racial circulations: Advancement, mestizaje, and exclusion

The politics of racial categorization and identification in the Andes meant that Gina had become more mestiza in the process of her formal education and through her educational and Church affiliations (cf. De la Cadena, 2000; Weismantel, 2001). When she graduated with her degree and took a post in a Quechua campesino community called Pomacanchi, she returned to a world she knew well, in part with a motivation to give back, but she was now occasionally viewed as an outsider. For instance, when the campesino family with whom she was living started acting strangely distant to her, she figured out that it was because the 1 August day of household offerings to Pachamama was approaching, and they were not sure if she should be present. Gina ironically had to resolve the situation by proving her Quechua-ness to her host family, explaining to them that she was raised in similar traditions by her parents. In such ways, becoming more mestiza through her educational achievements would have occasionally negative consequences when she returned to Quechua communities to work, even as transnational academic institutions, NGOs, and Church officials were more eager to emphasize her Quechua roots and employ her as a teacher or cultural consultant.

For instance, during the time of the Sendero Luminoso, ² Gina’s contacts with a German academic who was doing research on indigenous myths led to suspicions that she had been a conduit for the entrance of terrorist sympathizers in the town. Throughout her years in Pomacanchi, Gina seems to have nonetheless enjoyed a reciprocal relationship with the community. When one of the women of the community experienced a dangerous medical condition, Gina was approached for help, and likewise, when Gina’s young daughter fell ill, she consulted local paqos (curanderos, or healers) to divine the cause through a reading of coca leaves. Gina was also working extensively with the Iglesia Progresista, accompanying Church priests on trips to the campo to offer masses or in community development projects and acting as an interpreter and cultural translator between the Church and Quechua communities.

Gina eventually moved back to Cusco and continued teaching primary school as well as Quechua classes through institutions like the Centro Bartolomé de las Casas. She also continued her work in community development and cultural translation, becoming involved in the foundation of a German-funded community center for Cusco’s porters or cargadores (La Casa de Los Cargadores), an organization that gave rise to another syndicate for Inca Trail porters. Gina was the founding president of the Asociación Gregorio Condori Mamani, the advisory council for the Casa, a role that again placed her in a rather delicate position of cultural brokerage. She explained the struggle she sometimes had with the cargadores who wanted the center to be broken into tiny rooms and ‘given’ to each of them or who complained about the campesino food served in the kitchen because they wanted higher-status white rice and pasta. Even though it was not uncommon for Gina to have to go to the Cusco morgue to identify a cargador who had been run over by a truck or to make funeral arrangements for cargadores who had no other family, her mestiza status, despite her own Quechua campesino childhood upbringing, meant that she could also be framed by a local chapter of the Túpac Amaru ³ movement in a local news article as a scheming mestiza schoolteacher who was planning to wrench the center away from the cargadores to start her own private school. Many cargadores were convinced of this, which provoked a huge meeting where, thankfully, the mess was sorted out and they regained their trust. Gina speaks with pride about the fact that so many of the cargadores now are independent taxi drivers, restaurant chefs, hotel workers or construction workers, which signifies that they have advanced (han avanzado) in her eyes as a result of the foundation’s efforts.

This ideology of advancement, similar to Leinaweaver’s (2008) discussion of the idea of superación, is also important for understanding how Gina and other Andeans more generally reflect on racial categories and racial identification. I had one very frank conversation with Gina about this topic, asking her if she would identify racially or ethnically as Quechua, mestiza, or some other category. Her response, which was punctuated by uncharacteristically lengthy silences throughout, demonstrates the complexities of Andean racial identification:

I would say … both. Both. My origin is … of course we are Quechua, but in my community there’s not that submissiveness that the Quechua have a little bit from other places. All of them struggle to have a little house, something … so maybe that’s an influence. Sure, but it depends on how you manage it, right? I frankly … of course it’s not a problem for me if they say I’m Quechua, if they say I’m campesina. It’s not a problem. But I also realize that I’ve advanced quite a bit, you know, I’ve advanced quite a bit. So I don’t have a problem with … of course I don’t know if I’m a mix of the indigenous with the mestizo, but I don’t feel mestiza as if to say, a mestiza that crushes another person, no, no.

The complexity of this answer in her adult life, both identifying and disidentifying with Quechua and mestiza identities, was set in motion by her experiences of migrating and circulating as a child as her family sought out the best educational possibilities available for her. In addition to geographic migration, Gina’s childhood circulation invoked reconfigurations of her racial identity over the life course that are revealed here and in her other adult experiences. Her struggle to navigate her bicultural Quechua–mestiza identity (as with many bicultural identities, the experience of being ‘both’ and ‘neither’) is evident in these memories, where she could not feel immediately accepted in either Quechua or mestizo worlds and was frequently challenged to prove her ethnic credentials. Moreover, what I have termed in her case the development of a ‘professionalized Quechua identity’ in one class-specific case of what is occurring more generally in Andean ethnic identification, where indigeneity comes to be defined less by traditional ethnic markers (like subsistence strategies, daily dress, or language use) and more by the conscious and selective performance of indigenous identity through presentations of self in important political and cultural contexts (such as through the importance of belonging to indigenous dance troupes in the city of Cusco). Similarly, though within tourist contexts, Dean MacCannell (1992) has noted the emergence of forms of ‘reconstructed ethnicity’ whereby traditional ethnic identities are reformulated in the context of their performance for given audiences.

Conclusion

It has been tempting at times for Gina and I to engage in discourse about how far she has come to be teaching in the US or how difficult it was to adjust to US culture. Despite the challenges of migration to the US, however, greater cultural and social distances had already been traversed during the most difficult migration, the foundational and defining migration of her life, the childhood move to Cusco and all it meant for her life chances and possibilities. After making it in Cusco as a child, making it in the US years later would be relatively easier. I have focused on these prior, Andean mobilities (though they, too, were clearly still inflected by transnational movements), both in terms of geography and racial/ethnic identity, for these local migrations and cultural circulations helped create the conditions and possibilities for an increasingly transnational life. I have also tried to show the usefulness of life history methods for studying narratives and experiences of childhood more generally and the importance of reflecting upon the personal and emotional dimensions of fieldwork collaborations and relationships. The aim of these choices has been to investigate childhood circulations in life history as a conduit for understanding other forms of social mobilities and processes, such as Andean kinship and child-rearing practices, class and professional mobility, the role of educational and other institutions in facilitating or hindering social mobility, the reconfiguration of racial/ethnic ascriptions and identifications, and the representational choices and personal narratives that develop over the life course. These dimensions demonstrate how childhood circulation provides a useful metaphor for considering social trajectories over the life course and the negotiation of identities, always themselves in motion and circulation.

Gina’s story is one of a distinctly Quechua professional identity, an identity shaped at the crossroads of Andean kin practices, racial politics, and social (especially educational and religious) institutions. One of the paradoxes in her story is that her indigenous identity and language have given her access to cosmopolitan opportunities such as transnational academic appointments, but it is also the case that prior migrations, particularly the move to Cusco, which involved assimilation and a process of becoming more mestiza through education, all according to Andean logics of child circulation and ideologies of social mobility, made such access possible. Against the tendency to see Gina’s social mobility as simply liberating, I’ve attempted to portray the fields of power that also make such processes so wrenchingly painful for indigenous, poor, or otherwise marginalized Andeans, who often must cross racial, class, and gendered boundaries to gain social mobility but only through varying degrees of cultural assimilation and invisibility and at the cost of frequently increased alienation or exclusion from the multiple cultural worlds they have learned to nonetheless successfully inhabit. A focus on childhood within the context of a life course allows us to witness the complex unfolding of this vast array and complexity of circulations and its impact on cultural identities and the ways in which they are perceived, expressed, and narrated.