The Roots and the Growth of Women's Writing in a Peruvian Village 1

In Tupicocha, a monolingual Spanish-speaking village in Huarochirí province in the Peruvian high Andes, male peasants have a long tradition of writing to document every communal activity or decision with extreme care. Today the village is organised at several political levels: the rural peasant community, the corporate kinship groups known as ayllus or parcialidades, ² the municipality, confraternities, and NGOs (non-governmental organisations). All of these have served as important sites of writing for the men of Tupicocha for many years. For the village's women, however, writing outside the domestic environment is a much more recent practice.