The Ikitu people, now numbering just 519 individuals, saw their world and their language fractured during the rubber boom of the late nineteenth century. Forced labor and displacement pushed the Zaparoan dialects to the edge of extinction, leaving only a handful of fluent elders by the end of the last century. Today, the city of Iquitos bears their name, yet the language itself has lived mostly in the memories of those over the age of sixty in the village of San Antonio.
Sangama is a student as much as he is a teacher, perfecting his own proficiency even as he instructs the next generation. He is part of a rare group; in the Peruvian Amazon, the shortage of qualified bilingual educators remains acute. By establishing his own center, he addresses a gap that state institutions have struggled to fill, ensuring that the language is not merely preserved in archives but spoken in the streets.
The work involves more than just repetition of nouns and verbs. Sangama participates in a wider effort to create audiovisual content, using modern tools to capture the ancient rhythm of the Chambira and Pintuyacu rivers. He understands that for a language to survive, it must be useful to the young, a vessel for their own stories and digital lives.
As he speaks, he often pauses to adjust a child's pronunciation, his hand resting briefly on a wooden desk. In these moments, the weight of the past meets the possibility of the future. The survival of the Ikitu tongue no longer rests solely with the elderly, but with a twenty-five-year-old who refused to let his people’s name become a word without a meaning.