Lima is home to one of the world’s oldest and largest slum settlements surrounding any capital city. Since the mid-twentieth century, the indigenous push out of Peru’s rural highlands and lowlands caused this sprawling urbanity. Today, over four million people live in shanties wedged along sandy hillsides, many without water or sanitation. Residents lug jugs and buckets up steep paths flanked by open sewage and rancid garbage. It’s a grisly scene that Lima-based printing collective Amapolay wants us to learn about. “We use our folk art tradition to raise awareness of issues affecting our communities.” And they bring the age-old technique of screen printing to a here-and-now application.Amapolay designers turn out stark graphics and neon colors of indigenous life to literally highlight their heritage at risk. Hardly a sudden development, Peru’s treatment of indigenous communities has long been inhumane. From the earliest colonialism through today, its array of Andean and Amazonian tribes, dominated in size by the Quechua, have been crushed by poverty, by neglect of basic rights, by their desperate move toward urbanization.Demonstrations in these marginalized communities spread across the country in 2022, triggering brutal, lethal and punitive action from the government. President Dina Boluarte imposed martial law to quell opposition, and last year she abandoned democracy with her sweeping autocratic power grab, cancelling investigations into the government’s 1980s human rights abuses, eliminating oversight of organized crime, and giving loyal legislators the right to appoint judges. With due process in the balance, corruption the norm, and a militarized police force prepared and prompted to commit what global human rights groups cite as lethal and systemic racism, nations and tribes are in grave danger.Changing this equation means reversing the direction of the recent past, and giving young frustrated people a future. Self-taught Amapolay mastered visual arts and printmaking by developing their own contemporary language, a style deeply rooted in Peruvian and Latin American pop culture. Their boldly outlined, vividly colored posters transmit profound concerns about nations and tribes from the Amazonia Basin and the Andes Mountains. Using the Chicha Style that blends traditional icons with urban style, the artists attract those they are trying to reach, youth. Live demonstrations are common for Amapolay as they collaborate with groups, cultural spaces, institutions, artists and galleries around the world.