Intercultural Interview

For my intercultural interview I ended up reaching out to my high school Spanish teacher to help connect me. I had originally planed on interviewing someone else, but that fell through on me, so FaceTime was the best that I could get to an actual face to face interview. I ended up interviewing a person from my home state named Daniela, who grew up in southern Peru before moving to the United States for college. In the short time that we had, her stories really showed me more than I thought I would ever know about Peru and Peruvian culture/beliefs.

To initiate conversation and really get an idea of where Daniela has come from, I started out by asking her about her childhood, where she grew up, and what life was like for her during that time. Daniela was born in Lima, and lived in Lima until she moved to the United States to go to school in 1983. Growing up, Daniela was part of an upper-middle class family, and thus lived differently than people from people who were not as well off. Daniela explained to me that the wealth in Peru is spread out geographically, so there is more money in the larger cities and extreme poverty in the rural areas. Life for people in the Amazon basin in still considered very tribal, and many of their beliefs and ways of lives reflect their environment. She also said that in Peru, the people that live in the Amazon basin are considered to be the poorest people in Peru, and only recently did the government of Peru officially recognize and attempt to protect their heritage.

Next, Daniela told me about the people that live in Peru’s mountainous regions; in cities such as Ayacucho and Cuzco. Here the population is largely of Quechua or Aymara descent, and most of these people still speak native...

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... Pacha “Mother World”) and Viracocha (Creator God/God of the Sun/ Father of the Inca). Still today these beliefs are considered to be an important part of the traditional Peruvian culture, and these beliefs are still enticing the newest generations to hold strong to them.

Though the interview was not conducted under the most ideal conditions, and the distance that separates us made it impossible to connect on other terms; overall I know that I have only come to gain a much stronger appreciation for the Peruvian culture, and the people that every day of their lives live without a desire change anything that would change their traditional ways of life. From this interview I have been given an invaluable experience that will only become more of a benefit to me as I continue to proceed from this point into an ever more increasingly inter culturally diverse world.