Sepahua: from multi-ethnic community to urban village. Transformation of an idealized project in the low urubamba

Abstract

Since its foundation in 1948 under the catholic mission´s protection, Sepahua, a multi-ethnic community located in the Low Urubamba of the peruvian Amazon, has had the vocation to be “pluralistic and open, diverse and integrated”. In its evolution, at least until the early 1980s, its main ideologues, the dominican missionaries, harbored great expectations that indigenous youth, with adequate intercultural education and academic training, would design their own future, despite immigrant pressure to which they were subjected. In correspondence with historical documentation and ethnographic work carried out in 1984 and 2019, the objective of this research respond two basic questions: How power relations in the native community have been transformed with the recognition of municipality in its historical process? and how have administrative management have been affected by such circumstances and by the increasing influx of settlers? Regarding to the results, the colonizing invasion of the territory, the introduction of the market economy, the municipalization of space and the indigenous mestization of the community itself, it have caused that the initial project and expectations are far from reality.