“The existence of two parallel Perus is not a recent phenomenon. On the one hand, the Official Peru of State institutions, parties, banks and companies, unions, universities and colleges, the Armed Forces and the Church; of the courts, bureaucracy and sealed paper; of exocentric culture. And, on the other, the Marginated Peru: plural and multiform; of the peasantry and the urban mass, of the neighborhood associations, the traditional councils, the rondas and varayoc; of clandestine workshops, street vendors and barters, reciprocity and mere subsistence economies; of the cults of the hills, the wait for Inkarrí and the devotion to the non-canonized saints and pious women; Peru that preserves, adapts and fuses innumerable local and regional traditions; bilingual, illiterate and sometimes monolingual Quechua, Aymara or Amazonian. This contrast, gestated from the early days of the Colony, lasts well into Republican Peru. “

José Matos Mar

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