Aymar Arux Akhamawa
My name is Miguel Huanca, I was born in the Altiplano region of Bolivia, which is located close to Perú, surrounded by beautiful Lake Titicaca, the mountains, and the "Pacha mama" mother land, the most respected name by the Aymara people. I lived the majority of my childhood in Altiplano, los Andes, going to school, raising animals, working the lands, and traveling with my parents to the markets. In the nineteen-seventies I became a teacher of Aymara and Spanish, working at the university and in many other educational institutions, where I first began to develop original teaching materials. Later, after moving to the United States, I wrote the Aymara textbook, Aymar Arux Akhamawa, (Aymara Language Is Like This) the only English-Aymara textbook in existence while teaching at the University of Chicago. Aymar Arux Akhamawa is published with support from the University of Chicago Center for Latin American Studies, its faculty, and its generations of students who studied Aymara with me there. The development of these materials meet the pedagogical goals of the intensive Aymara program of enhancing students communicative competency by exposing them to authentic, unscripted conversation between native Aymara speakers, yielding important linguistic and cultural materials. For more than two decades, the University of Chicago has been the only institution in the United State to regularly offer Aymara instruction, supported with funding from consecutive U.S. Department of Education National Resource Center grants. I feel education has strongly influenced my orientation in life, both academic and personal. Through firsthand experience, I came to realize that material wealth does not come easily to all, and that poor people are not so because of any inherent laziness or lack of intelligence. The value of education, in fact, was strongly impressed upon me by my family. Finally, I am proud as an Aymara teacher and Aymara person who contributes to the recognition and inclusion of the Aymara Language in socio-cultural and political spheres of the world today. I love to teach Aymara!