Juan Velasco Alvarado of the land, the day of winter solstice. The education reform of 1972 provided for bilingual education for the indigenous people of the Andes and the Amazon, which consisted nearly half of the population. In 1975, the Velasco government enacted a law making Quechua an official language of Peru equal to Spanish. Thus, Peru was the first Latin American country to officialize an indigenous language. However, this law was never enforced and ceased to be valid when the 1979 constitution became effective, according to which Quechua and Aymara are official only where they predominate, as mandated by law – a
Juan Bautista Alvarado was born in Monterey, Alta California, to Jose Francisco Alvarado and María Josefa Vallejo. His grandfather Juan Bautista Alvarado accompanied Gaspar de Portolà as an enlisted man in the Spanish Army in 1769. His father died a few months after his birth and his mother remarried three years later, leaving Juan Bautista in the care of his grandparents on the Vallejo side, where he and Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo grew up together. They were both taught by William Edward Petty Hartnell, an English merchant living in Monterey. In 1827 the eighteen-year-old Alvarado was hired as secretary to the territorial legislature. In