Aymara

The Aymara are an indigenous people of the high Andean altiplano centered on the Lake Titicaca basin spanning Bolivia, Peru and northern Chile, with a documented cultural and political history predating Inca incorporation of the region, including the pre-Inca Tiwanaku civilization with which Aymara identity and oral tradition are closely, if not simply, associated by regional scholarship. Aymara communities historically organized land and labor through reciprocal kin-based systems similar to the neighboring Quechua ayllu, and Aymara religious practice today typically combines Roman Catholic observance with continuing indigenous Andean cosmology (including reverence for Pachamama, the earth mother). Bolivia's 2006 election of Evo Morales, the country's first president of indigenous descent and himself Aymara, and the subsequent 2009 constitutional recognition of Bolivia as a plurinational state, are documented milestones in contemporary Aymara political representation.