Peru is a multiethnic country, which means that it is home to people of many different historical backgrounds. Therefore, it is a multicultural country as well. Since it is a multiethnic society, Peruvian people usually treat their nationality as a citizenship instead of an ethnicity.

The Peruvian census does not contain information about ethnicity so only rough estimates are available. Its population can be composed of Amerindians: 45%, Mestizos: 37%, European: 15%, Afro-Peruvians: 2%, Asians and others: 1%.

Amerindians are found in the southern Andes, though a large portion are also to be found in the southern and central coast due to the massive internal labor migration from remote Andean regions to coastal cities during the past four decades.

While the jungle is the “heart” of the indigenous populations of Peru, White people are mostly found in the northern highlands and are mostly of Spanish, Italian, British, French, German, Irish and Croatian descent.

Overview

Peru is a multiethnic country formed by the amalgamation of different cultures and ethnicities over thousands of years. Amerindians inhabited the land for several millennia before the Spanish conquest in the 15th century; their cultures and influence represent the foundation of today’s Peru.

As a result of European contact and conquest, the population of the area now known as Peru decreased from an estimated 9 million in the 1520s to around 600,000 in 1620. This happened mostly because of the unintended spread of germs and infectious diseases. In fact, the spread of smallpox greatly weakened the Inca empire, even before the Spanish arrival.

The Amerindians did not have as much natural immunity to the disease as did the Europeans who had been exposed to smallpox for roughly two centuries. For this reason, several Amerindian populations were decimated.

Furthermore, the disease killed Inca ruler Wayna Capac, triggering a civil war in the Inca empire that preceded the conquest efforts the Spaniards. Thus, the conquest was facilitated by the weakness of the Inca empire which was recovering from both a civil war and epidemics of unknown diseases.

However, other reasons for the decrease of Amerindian population include the battles for domination and survival, followed by the breakdown of the Inca social system, famine, genocide, human exploitation, and forced mine labor to extract the gold and silver to ship back to Europe.

Forced labor started after the settlement of the Spanish. The Amerindian population suffered further decrease as the Spanish exploited an Inca communal labor system called mita for mining purposes, thus annihilating thousands in forced labor.

Ethnic Groups

Immigration

Spaniards arrived in large numbers under colonial rule. After the independence, there has been a gradual European immigration from Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, Croatia and Spain. Polynesians also came to the country lured to work in the Guano islands during the boom years of this commodity around the 1860s.

Chinese arrived in the 1850s as a replacement for slave workers in the sugar plantations of the north coast and have since become a major influence in Peruvian society. Other immigrant groups include Arabs, South Asians, Japanese and Americans from the United States.

Amerindian

Amerindians constitute around 45% of the total population. The two major indigenous or ethnic groups are the Quechuas (belonging to various cultural subgroups), followed by the Aymaras, mostly found in the extreme southern Andes.

A large proportion of the indigenous population who live in the Andean highlands still speak Quechua or Aymara, and have vibrant cultural traditions, some of which were part of the Inca Empire, arguably the most advanced agricultural civilization in the world.

Literally dozens of indigenous cultures are also dispersed throughout the country beyond the Andes Mountains in the Amazon basin. This region is rapidly becoming urbanized.

Important urban centers include Iquitos, Nauta, Puerto Maldonado, Pucallpa and Yurimaguas. This region is home to numerous indigenous peoples, though they do not constitute a large proportion of the total population. Examples of indigenous peoples residing in eastern Peru include the Shipibo, Urarina, Cocama, and Aguaruna, to name just a few.

Mestizo

Mestizos compose about 37% of the total population. The term traditionally denotes Amerindian and European ancestry — mostly Spaniard ancestry and to a lesser degree, Italian.

This term was part of the caste classification during colonial times, whereby people of exclusive Spanish descent but born in the colonies were called criollos, people of mixed Amerindian and Spanish descent were called mestizos, those of African and Spanish descent were called mulatos and those of Amerindian and African descent were called zambos (though nowadays, these terms have racist connotations).

Most Peruvian mestizos are of Amerindian and European descent, but other ethnic backgrounds (such as Asian, Middle Eastern and African) are also present, in varying degrees, in some segments of the mestizo population. Most mestizos are urban dwellers and show stronger European inheritance in regions like Lima Region, La Libertad Region, Callao Region, Pasco Region, Cajamarca Region, and Arequipa Region.

European

European descendants constitute around 15% of the total population. They are descendants of the Spanish colonizers and other Europeans such as Italians, British, French, Germans and Croatians who arrived in the 19th and 20th centuries. The majority of them live in the largest cities, usually in the North and Center of Peru: Lima, Trujillo, Chiclayo, Piura, Cajamarca and San Martin. The only southern city with a significant white population is Arequipa.

Recently, Peru has seen a migration of American retirees and businessmen come to settle in the country, due to lower cost of living and economic booms in the 1990s and 2000s, though Peru experiences busts in between.

Asian

There is also a large presence of Asian Peruvians, primarily Chinese and Japanese, along with recent arrived Koreans and Taiwanese immigrants. Asian Peruvians constitutes about 3% of the population, which in proportion to the overall population, is the second largest of any Latin American nation, after Panama.

Peru has the second largest population of people of Japanese descent in Latin America after Brazil and the largest population of Chinese descent in Latin America. Historic communities inhabited by people of Chinese descent are found throughout the Peruvian upper Amazon, including cities such as Yurimaguas, Nauta, Iquitos and the north central coast (Lambayeque and Trujillo).

In contrast to the Japanese community in Peru, the Chinese appear to have intermarried much more since they came to work in the rice fields during the Viceroyalty to replace the African slaves, during the abolition of slavery itself.

Despite the presence of Peruvians of Asian heritage being quite recent, in the past decade they have made significant advancements in business and political fields; a past president (Alberto Fujimori), several past cabinet members, and one member of the Peruvian congress are of Japanese or Chinese origin.

Small numbers of Arab Peruvians, mostly of Lebanese and Syrian origin, and Palestinians also reside, as well a small Hindustani and Pakistani community.

Afro-Peruvians

The remaining is constituted by Afro-Peruvians, a legacy of Peru’s history as an importer of slaves during the colonial period. Today also mulattos (mixed African and European) and zambos (mixed African and Amerindian) constitute an important part of the population as well, especially in Piura, Tumbes, Lambayeque, Lima and Ica regions.

The Afro-Peruvian population is concentrated mostly in coastal cities south of Lima, such as that of those found in the Ica Region, in cities like Cañete, Chincha, Ica, Nazca and Acarí in the border with the Arequipa Region. Another large but poorly promoted segment of Afro-Peruvian presence is in the Yunga regions (west and just below the Andean chain of northern Peru), (i.e., Piura and Lambayeque) where sugarcane, lemon, and mango production are still of importance.

Important communities are found all over the Morropón Province, such as in the city of Chulucanas. One of them is Yapatera, a community in the same city, as well as smaller farming communities like Pabur or La Matanza and even in the mountainous region near Canchaque. Further south, the colonial city of Zaña or farming towns like Capote and Tuman in Lambayeque are also important regions with Afro-Peruvian presence.

Social Identifiers

Socioeconomic and cultural indicators are increasingly important as identifiers. For example, Peruvians of Amerindian descent who have adopted aspects of Hispanic culture also are beginning to consider themselves “mestizo”.

With economic development, access to education, intermarriage, and large-scale migration from rural to urban areas, a more homogeneous national culture is developing, mainly along the relatively more prosperous coast.

Peruvians view themselves as a racially mixed people: a “half indigenous, a third European, a sixth African and one part Asiatic” composition as a “melting pot” recipe for a Peruvian stew.

Language

Peru has two official languages — Spanish and the foremost indigenous language, Quechua. Spanish is used by the government, media, education and commerce. Amerindians who live in the Andean highlands speak Quechua and Aymara and are ethnically distinct from the diverse indigenous groups who live on the eastern side of the Andes and in the tropical lowlands adjacent to the Amazon basin.

Peru’s distinct geographical regions are mirrored in a socioeconomic divide between the coast’s mestizo-Hispanic culture and the more diverse, traditional Andean cultures of the mountains and highlands. The indigenous populations east of the Andes speak various languages and dialects. Some of these groups still adhere to traditional customs, while others have been almost completely assimilated into the mestizo-Hispanic culture.

Peru’s official languages are Spanish and — according to the Peruvian Constitution of 1993 — Amerindian languages such as Quechua, Aymara and other such indigenous languages in areas where they predominate. There has been an increasing and organized effort to teach Quechua in public schools in the areas where Quechua is spoken.

According to official sources, the use of Spanish has increased while the knowledge and use of indigenous languages has decreased considerably during the last four decades (1960–2000).

At the beginning of the 1960s some 39% of the total Peruvian population were registered as speakers of indigenous languages but by the 1990s the figures show a considerable decline in the use of Quechua, Aymara and other indigenous languages — only 28% are registered as Quechua-speaking (16% of whom are reported to be bilingual in Spanish) and Spanish-speakers increased to 72%.

For 2005, government figures place Spanish as being spoken by 80.3% of the population, but among Amerindian languages another decrease is registered. Of the indigenous languages, Quechua remains the most spoken, and even today is used by some 16.2% of the total Peruvian population, or a third of Peru’s total indigenous population. The number of Aymara-speakers and other indigenous languages is placed at 3%, and foreign languages 0.2%.

The drastic decline in use and knowledge of indigenous languages is largely attributed to the recent demographic factors. The urbanization and assimilation of Peru’s Amerindian plurality into the Hispanic-mestizo culture, as well as the new socioeconomic factors associated with class structure have given privilege to the use of Spanish at the expense of the Amerindian languages which were spoken by the majority of the population less than a century ago.

The major obstacle to a more widespread use of the Quechua language is the fact that multiple dialects of this language exist. Quechua, along with Aymara and the minor indigenous languages, was originally and remains essentially an oral language.

Therefore, there is a lack of modern media which use it: for example books, newspapers, software, magazines, technical journals, etc. However, non-governmental organizations as well as state sponsored groups are involved in projects to edit and translate major works into the Quechua language; for instance, in late 2005 a superb version of Don Quixote was presented in Quechua.

The percentage of native speakers of Quechua who are illiterate has been decreasing lately, as 86.87% of the Peruvian population is literate. More encouraging, nationwide literacy rate of youth aged 15 to 24 years is high, and considered an achievement in Peruvian educational standards.

Religion

The Peruvian government is closely allied with the Catholic Church. Article 50 of the Constitution recognizes the Catholic Church’s role as “an important element in the historical, cultural, and moral development of the nation.”

Catholic clergy and laypersons receive state remuneration in addition to the stipends paid to them by the Church. This applies to the country’s 52 bishops, as well as to some priests whose ministries are located in towns and villages along the borders. In addition each diocese receives a monthly institutional subsidy from the Government.

An agreement signed with the Vatican in 1980 grants the Catholic Church special status in Peru. The Catholic Church receives preferential treatment in education, tax benefits, immigration of religious workers, and other areas in accordance with the agreement.

Although the Constitution states that there is freedom of religion, the law mandates that all schools, public and private, impart religious education as part of the curriculum throughout the education process (primary and secondary). Catholicism is the only religion taught in public schools. In addition, Catholic religious symbols are found in all government buildings and public places.