HUAMPAMI, Peru -- In his first year at San Marcos University, Hermenegildo Espejo barely spoke, and certainly not in class.

His Spanish was rudimentary, his accent an embarrassment. Classmates in Lima, a two-day trip from his Amazon home town, laughed at his grammatical stumbles, his odd pronunciation.

"I didn't understand anything. I couldn't pronounce words well," the 22-year-old Peruvian Indian recalls, wincing as he gazes out a taxi window on a rutted jungle road near his home.

Six years later, Espejo is a thesis away from an undergraduate degree in linguistics at Peru's top public university. And while his Spanish is now excellent, it is not his priority. He aspires to produce the first unified grammar of Awajun, his native tongue.

Espejo's story highlights the two biggest challenges Latin America's indigenous peoples face in their struggle to preserve their cultures: keeping their native languages alive and empowering themselves through education.

Throughout Latin America, native languages are disappearing and Indians are under intense pressure to speak Spanish. At the same time, Indians have little access to post-secondary education. They are ill-prepared by substandard schools, afflicted by high dropout rates and usually short on financial help.

More than a fifth of the 557 languages spoken by Latin America's natives are at serious risk of extinction, according to the ambitious "Socio-Linguistic Atlas of Latin America's Indigenous Peoples" that UNICEF is publishing this month. Across Latin America, more than 100 native peoples have abandoned their mother tongues and now speak exclusively Spanish or Portuguese, says Inge Sichra, the book's lead author.

In coastal Peru, speakers of the Andes' dominant native languages are routinely shamed into abandoning them, says Peruvian anthropologist Rodrigo Montoya.

"Racism isn't a historical relic. It's not something from the past, a colonial inheritance that's lapsed. No sir, racism is a concept fully in force," he says.

The legacy of suppression of language dates back to Spanish King Carlos III's 1770 decree banning native tongues in the realm. The order provoked uprisings up and down the Andes that the Spanish brutally suppressed.

That enduring baggage of colonial rule - Lima was the seat of the Spanish viceroy - persists today.

"My parents were bilingual but they didn't permit us to speak Quechua at home," says one of South America's most respected linguists, Rodolfo Cerron Palomino, a professor at Catholic University in Lima and a pre-eminent scholar of Quechua.

Alan Perez, an Ashaninka from Peru's interior and an industrial engineering student at San Marcos, says his parents never taught him his mother tongue. He has made little effort to learn it. "Like it or not, you adapt to this place and gradually lose who you are," he says of Lima.

For Espejo, the challenge of preserving his language and identity went hand in hand with getting a good education.

Espejo is among the few Amazon Indians at San Marcos, whose dusty campus borders a gritty industrial district and contrasts sharply with the well-manicured grounds of Lima's private Catholic University a mile away, dominated by Peru's light-skinned elite.

Upward mobility, limited to begin with for Latin America's poor, is doubly so for its indigenous citizens. And Peru, along with Guatemala, are among the countries where racism is most ingrained, academics and rights activists generally concur.

Join the discussion

The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what's in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere in the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. In order to post comments, you must be a registered user of MiamiHerald.com. Your username will show along with the comments you post. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.

     Showing: Oldest first Newest first Most-recommended first Least-recommended first

@Nyx.AuthorDisplayName@ wrote on @Nyx.PostedAtTime@:

@Nyx.repliedToText@

@Nyx.replyAnswerText@

Reply to this Comment @Nyx.Recommender@ @Nyx.AbuseReporter@