The Cocama People
Five rivers and fifty-seven villages
Deep in the Amazon rainforest of South America live the Cocama people, a community whose lives are woven into the rhythms of the great rivers. Most Cocamas make their homes along the winding tributaries of the Amazon in northern Peru, while a few villages can be found just across the border in Brazil. Their settlements are permanent, nestled on the shifting banks that flood and retreat with the changing seasons. Here, families tend to their crops and cast their nets, living in harmony with the ebb and flow of the water that sustains them. Today, the Peruvian government counts around fifty-seven Cocama villages scattered along five major rivers—home to roughly fifteen thousand people whose traditions continue to flow with the river’s current.
As cell phones and the internet slowly find their way into the deep reaches of the Amazon, the clash between modern life and ancient tradition becomes almost tangible. In small riverside villages, it’s not uncommon to see a satellite dish perched beside a thatched roof or a teenager scrolling on a phone beneath a canopy of towering trees. Yet, despite these glimpses of modernity, the people who call this place home seldom meet outsiders in any personal way. Old stories and myths still shape their fears and guide their understanding of the world. With no roads to connect them to the outside, a journey to the nearest port city can take days by boat, days spent drifting through endless waterways that seem to separate their world from everyone else’s.
