Driving into Lima from the airport, one of the first images the traveler notices is a billboard advertising two Caucasian people sipping Inca Kola, Peru’s unofficial national drink. This advertisement is an incongruous representation in a country that has one of the largest indigenous populations in Latin America and where only about 15% of the population is white.

I chose to study abroad in Peru because I wanted to learn about its indigenous cultures and history. Columbia offers a well-rounded curriculum based in Western classics, but I was hoping to find different perspectives more easily accessible in Peru. Instead, the first month there, I only realized how pervasive European culture is in any part of the world, and how comfortable and natural it felt to me. Though I was studying Pre-Hispanic History in school, the history that I was immersed in within the classroom didn’t seem to connect with any of my surroundings.
The neighborhood of Lima that I live in is filled with Italian style cafes, flashy department stores, upscale lounge-bars, and all the trimmings found in any big, modern city. In the beginning, my first instinct was to seek shelter in these places, intimidated by the confusion and danger of the rest of the city. The indigenous perspectives and culture I had hoped to find seemed hard to find at best, and non-existent at worst.

After a month in Lima I finally left my upscale neighborhood to explore Lake Titicaca for Easter weekend. The trip threw into sharp relief the differences between Lima and the rest of the country. While Lima is a chaotic urban sprawl where most people consider themselves mestizo, partially European, and don’t identify with an indigenous background, I suddenly found myself on an isolated island seeing a different side of Peru. In Taquile my friends and I were lucky enough to meet Ernesto Quispe, a native of the island, who welcomed us into his world, providing us with lodging and meals for a small fee.

Even though it was only for a short time, living with Ernesto and his family finally allowed me to get a glimpse into a very different culture. Since it was Easter weekend, the island was alive with celebrations that incorporated traditional earth worship celebrations with Spanish-introduced Catholicism, and Ernesto was very welcoming. He invited us to make offerings of alpaca fetus and coca leaves to the Earth Mother in the morning, and took us to be a part of his community’s celebration of coca exchange, beer drinking, and offering burning.

For the first time I really didn’t feel like I fit in. In Lima I always felt as though I was a part of the “dominant culture.” Now, here I was sitting on the wet grass, surrounded by women in full bright skirts and headscarves slowly chewing coca leaves and passing bottles of beer. No one looked at me directly, and I definitely wasn’t part of the ritual or the hierarchy of coca leaf exchange. I sat there awkwardly in my jeans, swallowing my coca leave bundle the wrong way, finally feeling like I was getting out of “the bubble”.

This community didn’t accept me, but I was relieved by the fact that I didn’t fit in. I shouldn’t have fit in – this wasn’t my familiar Western world, and for now I was only allowed to observe. For the first time, I could see a limit that the European comfort zone hadn’t completely transgressed in Peru. Returning to Lima was difficult, but hopefully more travels will allow me to further examine the division between Lima and other areas of Peru and to contemplate new perspectives.