Voices of Resistance

Exploring Indigenous Histories and Data Inclusion

There were two deciding factors, of many, that strongly influenced my decision to commit to Harvard for college: the Quechua Initiative on Global Indigeneity and the fall 2023 course EMR 151, Quechua, Indigenous Language Revitalization and Global Indigeneity. Growing up in North Carolina as a Peruvian-American with strong communal ties, I long coveted spaces, both personal and academic, where I could engage with my family’s experiences—as well as the overarching breadth of Peruvian history.

My heart pounded as I stepped into the Barker Center in Harvard Yard for my first day of classes, but my agitation slowly abated as unbridled excitement grew in its place. Here, hundreds of miles away from home, nearly everything was new. But, in this room with sixteen other students, also enrolled in this course, EMR-151, I felt secure, surrounded by a diverse group of people who also sought to learn from the visiting language activists, interdisciplinary readings and community testimonies. Even after my first semester at college, I kept on engaging with speakers, events, and experiences within Global Indigeneity.

On Friday, March 8, 2024, the Tozzer Anthropology Building hosted Professor Marcel Velázquez Castro, who lectured on Disposable Bodies and Uprooted Lives: Indigenous Child Servitude in Peru’s 19th Century and its Modern-Day Legacies. In this Harvard DRCLAS-sponsored event, he explored questions surrounding how the past lingers in the present and across decades, and how structural discrimination and violence permeate everyday life.

Velázquez Castro a professor at the National University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru, focuses on postcolonialism studies within Peruvian literature. In his lecture, he told the stories of the numerous children from Indigenous communities in 19th and 20th-century Peru who were abducted into domestic servitude, where wealthy upper-class and upper-middle households would take advantage of their unfamiliarity with the Spanish language and city to integrate them into their families forcibly.

Resistance was a recurring theme in his lecture, reflected in Velazquez Castro’s statement, “La huida es una forma activa de resistencia que revela la agencia de estos niños en un espacio nuevo y hostil,” which can translate to “flight is an active form of resistance that reveals the agency of these children in an unfamiliar and hostile environment.” Rather than an innate right, the opportunity to have one’s history, as an individual or community, conscientiously reflected and considered in academic platforms is regarded as a privilege. Stories circulate in a combined effort between those who experience them and those who maintain the resources to disseminate them, where it is an especially powerful overlap when the two are one and the same.

These children were harmed physically and emotionally when they wouldn’t comply with what was demanded of them. On average, they were between the ages of 3 and 16, with the majority falling between ages 7 and 12, young enough to be just entering primary or secondary school, or elementary/middle school. They were given false promises of educational and economic advancement to escape poverty, lulled into a perpetually abusive environment, and severed from their families, homes and childhood.

Had these children not initiated their escape, it is uncertain whether their stories would still be told as true to their circumstances, with their own voices and recollections. Now, we know their names, their ages, their appearances: parts of their lives that further communicate their endurance and exploitation—narratives that, if excluded, would expand the archival silence Indigenous communities across Latin America are forced into, and overall conversations on ethnicity in different parts of the world.

In the context of this colonial legacy, young women who immigrated from other provinces to the capital often performed inhumane and demanding labor. Indigenous communities continue to live in a vulnerable position within current Peruvian society and endure the heavy burdens of the past. A 2023 report conducted by Onampitsite Noshaninkaye Tzinani (ONOTZI), a Peruvian non-governmental organization (NGO), and Free the Slaves (FTS), an international NGO, attests to the continued human trafficking and domestic exploitation of Indigenous communities in Peru. The remains of this history, in the past and the present, show there is no one universal experience among those whose stories are recounted: no two histories are the same.

Between neglect and exploitation: Four case studies of indigenous communities in Peruvian Amazon, concludes, “If we do not understand how human trafficking, forced labor, and other forms of exploitation manifest in particular contexts or affect the human rights of Indigenous communities, who have a history of discrimination and marginalization, we will not be able to contribute towards the eradication of such practices. As a start, we must first avoid silencing their voices.”

As the course EMR-151 with Professor Mendoza-Mori came to an end, my classmate and I facilitated a discussion centered around the active inclusion of Indigenous leadership in data collection and goal development for one of the course’s major assignments. Data collection, we found, is an essential component of understanding forms of oppression within these communities, and the absence of Indigenous governance results in the presence of the detrimental consequences of omitting vital perspectives.

Now, as I enter my second year at Harvard, and I continue to engage in initiatives within my community and related spaces, I hope to explore the intersection of mathematical modeling and social science in bridging the persistent gaps related to incomplete representation in the larger pool of this data. Inclusive data practices, like data disaggregation, for example, can reveal which populations are most impacted by forms of exploitation—information, and by extension, narratives, that are otherwise neglected.