Chango

The Changos, also called Camanchacos, were maritime peoples of the desert Pacific coast from Camaná in Peru to northern Chile. Their way of life reached back to the eight-thousand-year-old Chinchorro fishing tradition, famous for its mummies. Chango was not a tribe but a loose Spanish label, used from the mid-seventeenth century for independent coastal communities with shared customs; the Aymara called them Camanchacos after the coastal fog.

They knew no agriculture: families lived off fish and shellfish, salted fish as charqui, and hunted seals for skins stretched over wooden frames into fishing rafts, trading dried fish, guano and shells inland for maize and wool.

Fishing villages stood on the Collasuyo coast when Tiwanaku expanded in the ninth century. Organized in autonomous family bands, they kept much of their old way of life under Inca and Spanish rule; in 1835 Alcide d'Orbigny found Chango raftsmen off Cobija carrying silver to ships.