The title of this book summarizes so well what Brooke Larson, who has researched for decades the topic of education among the Aymara people, has found. The author shows that the Aymara over the twentieth century continuously tried to gain access to education, whether they were hacienda peons, Indigenous community members, or urban dwellers. The main focus of the Aymara, who constitute the vast majority of the rural and urban populations of northern Andean Bolivia, was to learn how to read and write, so that they could defend their lands from encroachment. The book documents these struggles, as well as the white elites’ and the Bolivian state's attempts to either hinder or foster this endeavor.

The subject of Indigenous education is a complex and fraught one, as the author makes clear. The first chapter examines the Bolivian elite's policies toward Indigenous learning in the context of the early twentieth century....

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