Word: quechua
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Peruvian Indians, he explained, will sometimes try to pass for mestizos (persons of mixed blood) by moving to the cities and pretending not to understand their native language, Quechua. Such extreme behavior, Patch implied, is not necessary in Bolivia...
...former hacienda set in a breath-taking Andean valley two miles high, yet more than ten thousand feet below the summits of massive snowpeaks. Before Cornell University anthropologists began--by arrangement with the government of Peru--an unusual development program in 1952, the hacienda's two thousand Quechua-speaking Indians lived on the brink of starvation...
Built on a saddle between two peaks, Machu Picchu is surrounded by a granite wall, can be entered only by one main gate. Inside is a maze of a thousand ruined houses, temples, palaces, and staircases, all hewn from white granite and dominated by a great granite sundial. In Quechua, language of the sun-worshipping Incas and their present-day descendants, the dial was known as Intihuatana-hitching post...
First Inca. For four centuries, they grew farther and farther apart, and finally lost contact with each other. Then, from Tampu-Tocco, which had flourished as the capital of the Quechua tribe, came a new King named Manco Capac. Around A.D. 1200, according to Quechua legend, he and his many brothers "set out toward the hill over which the sun rose" reached the ancient Amauta capital of Cuzco, settled there and began to rebuild the empire of his ancestors...
Peasants see the whole thing differently. Clad in filthy woolen ponchos, they were a humble lot. They doffed their hats and greeted me as "Doctor." But one who could speak Spanish (most know only Quechua) asked with surprising bluntness, "Are you on the side of Doctor Luna or are you for us?" Told that I wished to report how they live, they broke into smiles, lined up like children before a benevolent elder, and gave me a bear...