BIOGRAPHY
How a Journalist from Madrid Became an Amazonian Ethnographer
The Amazonian part of my life begins in 2001, when I travel to the Shipibo village of San Francisco de Yarinacocha, in Peru. There, I live with the family of Roger López, the shaman who invites me to drink ayahuasca for the first time. Awe, confusion, discovery, wonder, curiosity… And I write my first novel: Ayahuasca, Love, and a Troubled Soul.
A path opens before me, one I choose to follow in 2007: I leave Madrid—my apartment, my comfortable position in major media outlets—to pursue a Master's in Amazonian Studies offered by the National University of Colombia in Leticia. I want to understand why what I found on my first journey did not resemble what I expected to find. I want to replace stereotypes with knowledge, and later, I want to tell stories by every means possible.
My master's thesis is an in-depth chronicle about the youth of the Shipibo people, past and present: La Edad del Desarrollo. Señoritas y Muchachos en la Selva que se Acaba (The Age of Development. Girls and boys in a disappearing jungle). I spend a year doing fieldwork in two Shipibo communities. My field diary is absurdly long. From that material, I craft an ethnography that draws on short stories, novels, and essays to convey the ethnographic experience. For the first time in the history of the program, the thesis jury grants a laureate distinction.
In the years that follow, I publish dozens of chronicles and photo-reportages in outlets such as El País, El Espectador, eldiario.es, Interviú, Cáñamo, and many others. I'm interested in the economic and social dimensions of shamanism. I'm drawn to cultural change: the way the complexity of the Western world extends its intricate networks over the simplicity of Amazonian societies.
I'm also interested in new forms of storytelling: my multimedia book Ayahuasca, Iquitos, and Monster Vorax integrates literature, photography, video, and audio into a single narrative. I publish the photo book Ayahuasca Entre Dos Mundos (Ayahuasca Between Two Worlds), the result of ten years of photographic research, accompanied by literary texts. I develop my work independently.
And I live: in an Indigenous community near Leticia, with the Okaina leader Anitalia Pijachi Kuyuedo, with two children, many dogs, cats, monkeys, parrots, and turtles. I have a chagra, a traditional plantation, in the heart of the jungle, crossed by a beautiful stream where, when I swim, I feel like a privileged human being.
