Quechua

The Quechua are the largest indigenous ethnolinguistic group of the Andes, descended in significant part from peoples incorporated into and, before that, predating the Inca Empire, whose administrative language, Quechua, spread widely across the empire's territory and remains the most widely spoken indigenous language family in the Americas today. Quechua communities historically organized agricultural and pastoral land through the ayllu, a kin-based communal landholding and mutual-labor-obligation system (including the reciprocal labor practice of minka and ayni) that persists in modified form in many contemporary highland communities. Quechua-speaking communities across Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador have documented histories of both colonial-era forced labor (the mita system) and, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, land reform and indigenous political mobilization, notably in Bolivia and Ecuador.