To walk with sight and defend ourselves: Literacy and schooling in the Peruvian Andes

This dissertation discusses the impact of literacy in Umaca, a rural community in the Peruvian Andes. Based on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork and an interdisciplinary critical approach from the “New Literacy Studies”, my work analyzes literacy beliefs and language practices from three community domains: the bilingual school, the Evangelical church and the home.; A look at socio historical data shows that Spanish literacy has been constructed within a Discourse of power and threat. Literacy entered the community as an element of authority and dominance which peasants needed to acquire in order to defend themselves from abuse and humiliation. Since then, literacy has been perceived as an external device that serves as a link with the state and the idea of the nation.; The two official institutions that have brought the written word to the community—the bilingual school and the Evangelical church—have reinforced this view of literacy. Instead of assuming a critical posture, the school imparts a decontextualized literacy, which is seen as an end in itself, and marginalizes Quechua oral discourses (such as riddles and tales) by conceiving them as inferior to Spanish{09} literacy. This deepens the distance that already exists between people and the written word and children do not appropriate literacy through this domain. On the other hand, the Evangelical church also considers few and rigid literacy uses that, in this case, go hand in hand with a strict and restrictive view of human behavior. However, despite a definite lack of self-generated literacy practices among the peasants, children have adapted Evangelical uses of the written word to a greater extent than any other schooled literacy practice.; The Discourse surrounding literacy informs the actions peasants take and the perspectives they have in relation to the written word. People hardly read and write in their daily lives: literacy neither fulfills their expressive needs nor contributes to information exchange within the community. While they do not use the written word vernacularly and are rarely involved in the formal or dominant uses of Spanish literacy (bureaucratic and schooled literacy) they conceive Quechua literacy as nonsensical.