The Aymara

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Before the sun clears the eastern cordillera on the shortest day of the year, the stone esplanade of the Kalasasaya at Tiwanaku is already full. People have climbed through the cold dark to the ruined ceremonial platform above the southern shore of Lake Titicaca, and they stand facing the low notch in the mountains where the light will come. When the first rays strike the andesite, thousands of hands go up, palms open and turned outward, to take in the warmth and the force of the new sun. Ritual specialists burn offerings on low fires, and the smoke rises with the words. This is Machaq Mara, the Aymara new year — also called Willkakuti, “the return of the sun” — the winter-solstice dawn of the southern June, when the old year is spent and the agricultural year turns over. The people on the platform are the living heirs of the city whose builders once raised it, keeping the year on the very ground their forebears cut and set.

They are the Aymara, and in their own speech they are the jaqi — “the people.” They are one of the great living nations of the Andes: some 2.3 million strong across four republics, spread over the Lake Titicaca basin and the wind-scoured high plateau, the altiplano, that opens south of it at around 3,800 meters, where thin air lets the sun burn while the ground stays cold and the frost comes down hard even in the growing season. Their story runs from a ruined lake-basin civilization through their own herding kingdoms, two conquests, and a colonial silver economy, to a modern state that has refounded itself around exactly the world the solstice dawn displays.

The people and their speech

The Aymara are named for what they speak, and the language is theirs alone. Aymar aru stands at the head of a small family all its own — the Aymaran family, which the linguist Martha Hardman proposed calling Jaqi, from the same word for “human being.” Its only other members are two severely endangered tongues, Jaqaru and Kawki, spoken by a few hundred people at most in the Yauyos highlands of Peru’s Lima region, far to the northwest of the Aymara heartland. Aymara is emphatically not a dialect of the Quechua spoken by the larger Andean people to the north. The two share a great deal — sound systems, grammatical habits, a vast common stock of words — but scholars such as Willem Adelaar hold that the resemblance is better explained by millennia of neighborly contact than by descent from one ancestor; the proposed “Quechumaran” super-family that would unite them remains controversial and unproven. The Aymara and the Quechua are two distinct peoples who have shared the roof of the continent, and much of a worldview, for a very long time.

By the census counts of the 2010s the Aymara number roughly 2.3 million: about 1.59 million in Bolivia, some 548,000 in Peru, near 179,000 in Chile, and about 19,000 across the border in Argentina. The great majority live in Bolivia, where Aymara is one of the official languages of the state; it is likewise an official language of Peru, third after Spanish and Quechua, and a recognized minority tongue in northern Chile and in Argentina. It is spoken at market and hearth by children and elders alike, not conserved in a book — a first language, not a relic.

Heirs of the ruined city

The Aymara reckon their deep genealogy through Tiwanaku, the monumental ceremonial state that rose near the southern lakeshore and dominated the southern Andes across the second half of the first millennium, roughly 500 to 1000 CE. When Tiwanaku came apart — its raised lake-edge fields failing under a long drought, its ceremonial core emptying — it left the temples standing and the high country to reorganize itself around them. Whether the builders of Tiwanaku were themselves Aymara-speakers, or whether Aymara spread across the altiplano only after that city’s fall, filling a land already shaped by it, is genuinely unsettled among archaeologists and cannot be resolved from the evidence now in hand. What is not in doubt is that the altiplano the Aymara took up was the one Tiwanaku had made, and that the solstice rite they keep there today claims that inheritance in the plainest possible terms — the descendants raising their palms on the ancestors’ platform.

What the documentary record shows clearly begins after the fall. Across the centuries before the Inca, the basin was carved into rival Aymara lordships — the señoríos, the “Aymara kingdoms.” Chief among them were the Colla, centered on Hatunqolla on the northwestern shore, and the Lupaqa, centered on Chucuito to the south, with the Pacajes, the Omasuyu, and others ranged around the lake and down the plateau. These were pastoralist powers, their wealth counted in vast herds of llama and alpaca — the wool, the meat, and the pack trains that were transport and treasure at once on a roofless plain. Their hereditary lords, the kurakas, warred over the lake’s rich shoreline pasture, and the polities they ruled shared a language, a herding economy, and a way of ordering the world that no later empire ever fully unmade.

The reciprocal world

Underneath the politics runs a sacred order that no conquest displaced, and it must be spoken of in the present tense, because it is lived now. Its governing principle is ayni — reciprocity, the standing obligation that nothing is taken without a gift returned, and that giving and receiving be kept in balance. Ayni binds people to one another in the turn-and-turn-about labor of the community, and it binds the community to the living powers of the land: the earth and the mountains are not addressed with empty hands.

Beneath and within the ground is Pachamama, the earth-mother — not a remote creator seated above the sky but a near, fecund, provident presence in the soil underfoot, who gives the crop and the herd and who must be given back to. She is fed, not merely praised; before anyone drinks, the first drops are flicked or poured to the ground for her, and in the lean month of August, when the earth is said to open and to hunger, she is fed most carefully of all. Above the fields stand the mountains, and they are persons. The high peaks are the achachilas — literally the grandfathers, the mountain-ancestors who watch over the communities descended from them and provide for and protect them. Illimani above La Paz, Illampu over the northern lake, Huayna Potosí and their kin are named and addressed as kin in turn: they hold the snow that becomes the rivers, they guard the herds and the people below, and they punish neglect. The living earth below and the ancestor mountains above are the two poles of the Aymara sacred landscape, and between them the whole economy of offering turns.

The snow peak of Illimani, one of the achachilas, rising above La Paz on the Bolivian altiplano. Pavel Špindler, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

The one who knows

Between the people and these tutelary beings stands a specialist: the yatiri, whose name means “the one who knows.” The yatiri is at once healer and diviner, reading the future and the cause of an illness in the fall of coca leaves cast on a woven cloth, and assembling the offering that carries a household’s or a community’s request to the powers. That offering is the mesa — the ceremonial table or bundle, built of set things laid in order: coca leaves, llama fat, sweets and colored figures, and, in the fuller versions, a sullu, a dried llama fetus. The bundle is burned so that its essence rises to the earth and the mountains as food is eaten, and the offering is the prerequisite of any serious request — for health, for a good harvest, for fortune, for the safe raising of a house. Alongside the yatiri the tradition names other specialists: the ch’amakani, who is held to treat with the powers in the dark; the qulliri, the healer of the body; and the amawt’a, the sage and keeper of knowledge. What passes in the yatiri’s own reading of the leaves, and the precise composition of the bundle, belongs to the specialist and to those who consult one; it is named here at the distance the public record keeps, described in its meaning and never opened as a procedure to be followed.

Time that comes from behind

There is one feature of the Aymara world that has drawn the attention of scholars far outside the Andes, because it inverts something most languages take for granted. In Aymara the word nayra means “eye,” and also “front” — and also “the past.” The word qhipa means “behind” — and also “the future.” The known past therefore lies visibly ahead, spread out in front of the speaker like the ground already crossed, while the unseen future comes up from behind, unwatched, at one’s back. This is not a poetic flourish but a construal built into the grammar and confirmed in the way people move their hands as they speak of time, documented by the cognitive scientists Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser in a 2006 study in the journal Cognitive Science. Their argument turns on gesture as much as on words: Aymara speakers, especially older monolinguals, point ahead of themselves for past events and behind for future ones, the reverse of the Spanish speakers around them. The logic is coherent and even severe — one can see what has already happened; one cannot see what has not — and it fits a people who greet the returning sun as a thing that comes back rather than a thing they advance toward.

That returning is celebrated as Machaq Mara at the June solstice, the dawn this account opened on, and its calendar is not ceremonial only. The turn of the year opens the agricultural cycle on land the community works in common. The characteristic Aymara field system is the aynuqa — sectoral fields held and fallowed collectively by the ayllu, the kin-and-land community, so that whole zones of the high plateau are planted, harvested, and rested by rotation rather than by the choice of any one household. The reciprocity that feeds Pachamama is the same reciprocity that organizes the soil: the ground is worked in turn, given its rest, and never asked to yield beyond its return.

Conquered late, and never wholly

The Aymara were brought under empire late, and they never stayed quiet under it. The Inca expansion out of Cusco reached the lake in the mid-fifteenth century and found the altiplano lordships divided, and it exploited the division. In the war the chronicle tradition dates to roughly 1445 to 1450, the ninth Inca ruler, Pachacuti, broke the Colla in a decisive battle in the northern basin and captured their lord, Chuqui Qhapaq, near Hatunqolla — one of his early major conquests, though the details come down only through Spanish and mestizo chroniclers writing after the fact and must be read critically. The basin became the core of Qullasuyu, “the Colla quarter,” named for the people Pachacuti had defeated and the largest of the four suyus that made up the empire the Inca called Tawantinsuyu, the Land of the Four Quarters. Yet the Aymara lordships revolted against Cusco again and again down to the Spanish arrival, and they kept their language, their lords, and their gods under Inca rule; the state cult of the sun was laid over the altiplano, not substituted for its older devotions.

The second conquest came from farther off and cut deeper. Spanish forces under Pizarro toppled the Inca in 1532 to 1534, and the altiplano passed with the rest of the Andes into a colonial order built to extract silver. Aymara labor and Aymara herds were harnessed to that economy, above all through the mita, the rotational labor draft that fed men by the thousand into the mines of Potosí, where many did not survive. Aymara religion, though, did not vanish under the colonial campaigns the Church called the extirpation of idolatry. It went on beneath and within Catholicism, taking the saints into itself on its own terms rather than dissolving into them: Pachamama is still fed today, the yatiri still lays the mesa, and the cult of the achachilas remains living practice across the altiplano, not a survival to be explained away.

A nation cut by borders

The nineteenth century drew new lines straight through Aymara country. The War of the Pacific of 1879 to 1883 remade the map of the southern Andes and left the Aymara nation split among three states — Bolivia, Peru, and Chile — the new frontiers running through communities that had been one across the basin. In the provinces it annexed from Peru, Chile pressed a program its own officials called “Chileanization” on its new Aymara subjects: schooling and pressure meant to bind them to Chilean nationalism and thin their older loyalties. A people who had shared a single lake now woke on three sides of two borders.

In the twentieth century the Aymara answered with a resurgent politics. The Katarista movement — named for an eighteenth-century Aymara rebel and carried by a new generation of leaders — insisted that Bolivia’s Indigenous majority be more than the country’s silent labor, and it reshaped the nation’s political life. In December 2005 Bolivians elected Evo Morales, of Aymara descent, who took office the following month as the first Indigenous president in the republic’s history. His government made the Willkakuti solstice a national holiday in 2009, and in the plurinational constitution approved that same year the state refounded itself as a country of many nations, recognizing thirty-six Indigenous languages, Aymara among them, as official beside Spanish.

A parade carrying the wiphala at Oruro, Bolivia. Francisco Gonzalez, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

That constitution also raised a banner. The wiphala — a square emblem of forty-nine small squares set on the diagonal, a 7-by-7 grid worked in the seven colors of the rainbow, the Qullasuyu version marked by a white diagonal running corner to corner — was named under Article 6 as a national symbol of Bolivia, to fly beside the old tricolor. Whether the wiphala is genuinely pre-Columbian is contested by scholars; the historian María Rostworowski flatly denied that the Inca ever carried such a flag, and others read it as an emblem reconstructed or invented in the twentieth century, drawing on older Andean textile patterns. What is beyond dispute is its life now. It is loved and resented, raised and defended and burned in the streets as a live political emblem, unmistakably a banner of Aymara and pan-Andean self-determination whatever its age.

None of this is settled triumph, and it would be false to render it as one. The plurinational turn is contested ground; the solstice at Tiwanaku carries a heavy tourist trade now, and Aymara rites are sometimes staged for visitors, the commodification plain and the devotion beneath it no less so. But each June the palms still go up on the Kalasasaya at the first light over the eastern range, and the earth still gets the first of the drink before any person drinks — the same two gifts, to the sun that returns and the ground that stays, given by a people who outlasted the fall of one empire and the coming of two more and made their own name the name of a state.

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