Peruvian singer Dayan Aldana, now based in Centreville, Virginia, performed at the 2015 Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s Community Days, honoring the changing traditions of Peruvians in the United States.

Through participatory methods, this radio station in the Peruvian Amazon works across generations to keep their community’s Kukama culture and oral traditions alive.

Every July 15 to 18, the otherwise small, sleepy town of Paucartambo, Peru, becomes a kaleidoscope of color, music, and dance for the Fiesta de la Virgen del Carmen.

The Perú: Pachamama program featured several chicha street artists, including Elliot Tupac, a Peruvian muralist and designer who hails from Lima.

Kukama is a “deeply endangered language” (according to the Endangered Languages Archive) spoken in the city of Nauta in the Peruvian Amazon.

This potato dish covered in a creamy yellow sauce, served alongside a hard-boiled egg, lettuce, and olives, derives its name from the town of Huancayo, where many of the ingredients grow abundantly.

Stroll down the streets of Monsefú along the northern coast of Peru in July, and you are bound to catch a scrumptious whiff of garbanzos con pavo horneado.

Now that the Folklife Festival is over, I had time to visit The Great Inka Road: Engineering an Empire exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian.

The Perú: Pachamama program at the 2015 Festival featured a group of traditional weavers from the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco, including Timoteo Ccarita Sacaca, a Cusco native.

As the Perú: Pachamama program opened on the National Mall, the Peruvian Ministry of Education announced a new policy officially recognizing the alphabets of twenty-four indigenous languages.