An intense and fascinating journey into the diverse and contradictory Peru of the XXI century. After a civil war that lasted two decades, mining and gastronomy transform the country's economy without changing its foundations, such as racism and segregation.
Avilés travels along the coast, the Andes and the Amazon to record the lives, dreams and thoughts of indigenous Peruvians historically separated from the national project: from a family in voluntary isolation in the Amazon to the potato farmers in Andahuaylas; from the Aymara community of Carancas, which witnessed the fall of a meteorite, on the border with Bolivia, to the neighborhoods of Chumbivilcas where a "pagan" festival called Takanakuy has displaced Christmas. At the same time, Avilés reconstructs his origin as a displaced Quechua individual through family scenes that go from the years of terrorism to the pandemic, and speak of a personal and collective awareness.
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About the book:

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I read in the pages of De dónde venimos los cholos the story of Marco, son of immigrants, who migrated from an Andean town to the capital of Peru, but also that of many others who never left their land and stayed in their mountains or their valleys, where they continue to be cholos. Because our 'cholismo' accompanies us wherever we go (...) Because more than the economy or one of the many booms that those of us who are from there like to invent, it is books like Marco's that are bringing about the true awakening of this country stuck in the middle of South America.
-Gabriela Wiener

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Narrative Journalism in Peru gained new energy at the beginning of the century when a group of young writers —I am thinking of Julio Villanueva Chang or Jeremías Gamboa, among others— gathered around the magazine Etiqueta Negra, bringing up to date a genre that, except for some individual and scattered efforts, was in urgent need of modernization among us. Well, I think that the book that Avilés has published a few months ago means the highest conquest that this group of young authors has given us so far and, at the risk of sounding categorical, perhaps one of the most important and powerful books of chronicles that have been published in our country.
-José Carlos Yrigoyen, El Comercio.

 

​If literature must stir consciences, the chronicle must smash them. Marco Aviles –one of the top representatives of the magazine Etiqueta Negra, perhaps the greatest school of journalism in Latin America– has shaken the minds of his country with this provocative book of seductive prose. What is "a cholo"? How many layers of racism cover that word? Aren't we all cholos, immigrants, mixture, miscegenation, more or less Molotov cocktails? To reflect that condition, the human one, this book hybridizes the journey through the geography of Peru, the interview, the profile and the autobiography. Particularly memorable, in fact, are the introduction and epilogue, where the author, who was born in the Andes and now lives in the United States, gives personal clues to understand his obsession with racism, which this book deconstructs and denounces.

-Jorge Carrión, The New York Times