By Anthony Faiola
                  Washington Post Foreign Service

                  HUAMANGA, Peru—Thousands cheered as Alejandro Toledo jumped
                  into a truck emblazoned with the ancient Inca symbol of the sun and drove
                  in a campaign parade through the streets of Huamanga, a town in the
                  jade-colored hills of Peru's central highlands. As he passed by, a wrinkled
                  woman dressed according to Indian custom in a multihued skirt and a
                  bowler hat broke ranks to drape him in a rainbow flag emblematic of the
                  storied Inca Empire that fell to Spanish conquistadors almost 470 years
                  ago.

                  "You're one of us," she said with tears in her eyes. "Do it! Win for us!"

                  Toledo, a former shoeshine boy with a profile reminiscent of Pachacutic,
                  the Incas' greatest ruler, is running to become modern Peru's first
                  Amerindian president. Although such an ambition once was little more than
                  a dream, he has skyrocketed in opinion polls in recent weeks to become
                  the main challenger to President Alberto Fujimori in the April 9 election.

                  Draping his campaign in Inca symbols to dramatize his origins, the
                  53-year-old Toledo calls himself el cholo, a racial epithet also used as a
                  term of endearment among Peruvians of mixed or indigenous blood whose
                  families, like Toledo's, left the traditional way of life behind generations
                  ago. But he is not running on a radical platform to restore land or make
                  reparations. Rather, he is winning support based in part on a simpler
                  argument--that it is time this nation, in which most people are
                  dark-skinned, elected a president who, as Toledo says, "looks like they
                  do."

                  Peru has elected non-Indian presidents since the republic was formed in
                  1821. But Toledo, despite an upbringing that had little in common with that
                  of traditional Peruvian Indians, has become a potent political force by
                  riding the wave of a powerful indigenous reawakening throughout Latin
                  America.

                  "After so many years of bowing our heads, it's time we all held them up in
                  pride," said Toledo, who rose out of poverty in Peru's coastal slums to
                  study economic development in the United States, become a visiting
                  scholar at Harvard and a World Bank official in Washington. "As
                  president, I'm going to help us achieve that pride together."

                  The region's indigenous movement is being compared to the voting-rights
                  struggle of African Americans in the United States during the 1960s. Here,
                  people of Indian blood are fighting--and in many cases, winning--an
                  unprecedented crusade for a louder political voice while celebrating and
                  recapturing their cultural identities as never before.

                  The core of the struggle is a quest for political power, and indigenous
                  groups are gaining their strongest voice in national politics since the Spanish
                  conquest.

                  In December, for instance, Venezuela became the 14th Latin American
                  nation in 10 years to grant new constitutional rights to indigenous groups.
                  Venezuela redefined the nation as a "multi-ethnic and pluricultural society"
                  and granted indigenous communities a sort of home rule that allows them to
                  apply tribal law in their territories.

                  In Ecuador, the Indian rights movement has arguably turned into a fourth
                  branch of government. Angry about the policies of President Jamil
                  Mahuad, an indigenous organization aided by the military stormed
                  Congress in January in a move that led to Mahuad's overthrow and the
                  elevation of his vice president, Gustavo Noboa.

                  And after centuries in which Western tastes and styles became the
                  standards many Latin Americans of Indian blood longed to achieve,
                  everything from Aztec gods to the Earth symbols of Patagonian Indians
                  have emerged as politically charged fashion statements in the T-shirts and
                  tattoos worn by youths of the region. Native shamans in some nations are
                  being given special legal status to practice traditional medicine alongside
                  doctors using Western techniques. At the same time, experts say, a record
                  amount of poetry, folklore and even textbooks are being published in such
                  Indian languages as Quechua and Aymara under the spreading trend of
                  bilingual education.

                  "What you're seeing is a major indigenous awakening that is having a
                  massive impact on politics, law, and culture," said Diego Iturralde, a
                  political anthropologist based in Quito, the Ecuadoran capital. "It is
                  overthrowing governments, changing constitutions and generally altering the
                  norms of society in Latin America."

                  The reawakening, which sprang out of rural leftist and land reform
                  movements in the 1980s and 1990s, flows in part from an increasingly
                  popular theory of "inter-culturalism" embraced by new leaders such as
                  Toledo. The idea holds that the best way to improve the lives of isolated
                  indigenous groups is to spread Western education and technology while
                  retaining traditional clothing, ceremonies and language.

                  But especially in such nations as Peru and Mexico, where most people no
                  longer lead traditional Indian lives, the movement is also about a
                  celebration of their roots. In Peru, for instance, where the indigenous
                  movement has roots that go back far before the current movement jumped
                  into high gear in the 1990s, the population has long had a love-hate
                  relationship with its "Indian side."

                  Peruvians of every shade take great pride in the glorious history of the
                  Incas, who, along with the Aztecs in Mexico, built the most sophisticated
                  cultures in pre-Columbian America. But especially after a great migration
                  from the highlands to coastal towns in the 1940s and 1950s, huge
                  segments of the Indian population blended into society and lost their
                  traditional identities. It reached a point at which most assimilated
                  indigenous people, or people of mixed blood, took offense at being called
                  Indians.

                  "For as long as I can remember, we have been taught to hate the Indian
                  inside us. Anyone dressed in traditional indigenous garb, for instance,
                  wouldn't be served at a restaurant in Lima even if the waiter and waitress
                  were just as dark-skinned as the client," said Nelly Mejia Paredes, a
                  Quechua activist from Ayacucho province who, although taking computer
                  training classes, still wears the bowler hat and colorful layered skirt of her
                  people. "But now I see that self-hate fading. After so many servile years,
                  we are finally asking important questions like 'How dare they look down
                  on me because I am proud of my culture?' "

                  The phenomenon of Toledo, who has made ethnic pride a key issue in the
                  dash for the presidential sash, has become the latest example. Polls show
                  Toledo coming in second to Fujimori in the nine-candidate first round
                  ballot on April 9, but in a dead heat in a runoff against Fujimori in June.

                  Many see the election of Fujimori in 1990 as the Peruvians' first step in
                  accepting ethnicity in their leaders. The son of Japanese immigrants,
                  Fujimori donned Indian ponchos and used his status as a member of an
                  ethnic minority to defeat Mario Vargas Llosa, a noted author from Peru's
                  European-stock cultural elite. Reelected in 1995 after stabilizing the
                  economy and crushing two powerful guerrilla movements, Fujimori now is
                  seeking an unprecedented third term.

                  "Fujimori wants to stay in power at any price; that's one thing," Toledo
                  said. "But I also think there are people who have misplaced fears about
                  having someone who looks like me in the presidential palace," he said,
                  pointing to his coppery skin.

                  Toledo is one of 16 brothers and sisters whose poor and desperate
                  parents left their village when he was 6 in search of a better life in a larger
                  town on the central coast. It meant Toledo was raised largely outside
                  Indian culture; as with so many other indigenous Peruvians, his family's
                  ancestral surname was lost shortly after the conquest.

                  Some experts say it is precisely the fact that Toledo's ties to the indigenous
                  world are more genetic than anything else that has made him electable,
                  especially among mixed-race Peruvians who do not identify with the
                  traditional message of radical indigenous leaders.

                  Toledo staged a weak bid against Fujimori in 1995 and lost partly
                  "because the only issue he used was this cholo thing--that he was part of
                  the people," said Fernando Tuesta, a Lima-based political analyst. "But
                  now he has greatly strengthened his bid with an altered message that says,
                  'Hey, I look like you, and I'm proud, but I've also studied abroad and been
                  accepted by the international community. Look, even my wife is white.' "

                  As Toledo rode through the streets of this city of 120,000 in what he calls
                  a "cholomobile," by his side stood his wife Eliane Karp, a French-born
                  Jewish woman he met while studying at Stanford University. Although
                  Karp is an expert in indigenous culture who wears the Inca sun symbol on
                  her gold necklace and delivers fiery campaign speeches in more fluent
                  Quechua than Toledo himself, she remains one of the symbols of Toledo's
                  life outside indigenous communities.

                  On his rented plane en route to Huamanga, Toledo's reminiscing sounded
                  more like that of an American baby boomer than that of el cholo. "Yea,
                  man, I remember the sixties in the Haight [the Haight-Ashbury
                  neighborhood of San Francisco] real well," he said in fluent English, leaning
                  back with a grin. "Those were great times, fun times when you were
                  idealistic and thought anything was possible."

                  After winning a writing contest and a position as local correspondent for a
                  newspaper in Lima, Toledo won a scholarship to San Francisco State
                  University. He later won scholarships to Stanford for a masters degree in
                  economics and a doctorate in developmental education.

                  Although he has been called a populist, he has sought to reassure
                  businessmen with pledges of continuing free-market reform and fiscal
                  discipline, and his speech in this town's colonial plaza was an example.
                  About 45 percent of the population, mostly of indigenous or mixed race,
                  receives government food aid, but Toledo called for a phasing out of
                  popular handouts.

                  "We are proud people who don't need to live like beggars asking for alms .
                  . .," he said. " We don't need handouts; we need honest jobs!"

                  Staff researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report.

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