Eric Hirsch

lmost everybody I have spoken to since I arrived two months ago in Cusco, Peru, the gringo and tourism capital of South America, has asked me a similar set of questions: Have you been to Machu Picchu yet? Did you climb the Inca trail? Have you eaten guinea pig? Drunken chicha? Bought an alpaca sweater? Seen the condors? Taken pictures? Anybody who has been to a place where tourism is popular, a place that is fervently talked about as “one of those places you have to go to” with certain things you “have to see” will confront questions like these. Fittingly, (we) tourists often get so caught up in camera zooms and resolution and digital speeds that we forget to really see the place we are.

Tourism is a frustrating process, especially for the self-conscious tourists. Of course, the city and state encourage it, as they should, as certain parts of Peru thrive on and are made rich from tourism. Fine. So far, this feels like an exhausted topicÑthe inherently flawed nature of tourism. But what I have found here in Peru is a tragic twist on the subject: tourism here is not just bad for the silly reasons for which tourism is bad anywhere. Rather, the tourism in Cusco and Peru encourages a strange sense of time travel that accompanies travel in space, replacement of certain realities with idealistic false generalizations, and a relentless romanticization of the past at the expense of the present.

The Incas have become, through tourism and also a touch of national pride and state-sanctioned patrimony, a lost treasure to the world that can only be found if one comes to Peru, thus traveling backward in time to see the seat of the great Inca empire. Machu Picchu is a city forever stuck in the past, as is the primitive but expertly constructed road called the Inca trail that the more adventurous tourists tend to explore. It also is an amazing feat of human strength. Stories are told by tour guides and also study abroad homestay fathers (both of which are confident they know everything about the subject) which speculate and fantasize about how the Inca workers would lug multi-ton stones up steep mountainsides.

In one tourist book called Exploring Cusco, Peter Frost, an English ex-pat who is an “expert” on Machu Picchu and has written articles for National Geographic, attempts to explain how, exactly, Machu Picchu was built and why it has no equal in the modern world. He writes:

“What we lack are other traits that the Incas did have: endless patience and a profound spiritual reverence for their working material, the stone itself.”

I am honestly not sure how anybody could know about Inca patience, and “profound spiritual reverence” for rocks also strikes me as a little bit forced. Frost also infuses the discussion of the Incas with words like “superhuman”, “perfect,” “ingenious,” and “legendary,” among others. Wow, the reader thinks...The Incas must have been pretty amazing.

Machu Picchu is, too, one of the seven ancient wonders of the world; throughout Cusco, big red painted messages still can be found sprawling over white walls next to the highway saying, “a Vote for Machu Picchu = a Vote for Cusco” and in some places next to that message, we see an update that says, “We have achieved it!” It goes without saying, then, that without Machu Picchu and a host of other Inca ruins, Peru would be significantly poorer.

Yet even with the prosperity that tourism brings, Peru is an incredibly poor nation, among the poorest in South America, according to some sources (these measures of poverty are by no means incomplete; it should be mentioned that successful subsistence living in fertile areas here is not at all poverty). And who are the poorest of the poor here? Those individuals we would call “indigenous,” “Indian,” many of which ironically have Inca blood. Having such blood does lead to pride. A man who I stayed with in the Colca Canyon in the south of the country told me happily, “I’m purely Indian!” But would the state have pride in this man, who is not an Inca but a modern farmer that carries a cell phone in his pocket and a radio to the cornfields?

The language that predated the rise of the Inca Empire and the language they adopted as the imperial language was Quechua, and it is still widely spoken today. While it is nominally a pride of the nation, and while laws formally declare Quechua a second official language of Peru along with Spanish, it is in reality very difficult to only speak Quechua here when the need arises for an encounter with an official or state apparatus. Quechua speakers, many of which claim to have Inca blood, also make up one of the most impoverished social groups here.

What we find then is that Peru’s Inca heritage stops at a valuing of what used to be here in Peru, whereas the modern indigenous descendants, who are by no means mighty like the Incas were but who continue to use the language and hold a number of traditional festivals and rituals, are a disappointment. They are a shred, a vestige of what used to be. And, when they engage in these rituals and wear their colorful ponchos, they become, in the tourist’s photograph, evidence of his or her time travel.

Until recently, the discourse of national shame that surrounded them was toxic and omnipresent. Peasant land rights efforts only made major headway when the hacienda system was dismantled in the 1970s. Individuals classified as “indigenous” were not even allowed to vote until 1980. And still today, I have encountered many people of the mestizo upper middle-class who blame their indigenous countrymen for the lack of national unity and the lack of a solid Peruvian identity, while at the same time taking pride in their country for once being the land of the Incas. The presence of so many internationals that come to Cusco to see Inca ruins promotes a valorization of these savage, imaginary Indians and at the same time a strange disappointment that what’s left of that great ancient empire is an impoverished group plagued by social problems. And yet, in efforts to solve these problems, their historic denial of rights and modern legitimacy by the state comes back time and time again to haunt them, promoting a vicious cycle. That cycle of need and lack is felt and lived by many of Peru’s Quechua speakers, not to mention the many descendants of other ancient sociolinguistic groups here, so that one man I lived with for a few days who claimed to have Inca blood had to make his living as a porter lugging tents and other baggageÑoften up to 95 poundsÑfor wealthy tourists on their way up the Inca trail to Machu Picchu. This, while his ancestors hundreds of years before would patiently carry up sacred stones to construct their great city.