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Alessandra Yupanqui was born and raised in Lima, Peru, the city with the largest number of Quechua speakers in the country. Raised between urban life and her family’s Andean roots, she now shares her Indigenous Quechua heritage with hundreds of thousands of people online.
Yupanqui is a content creator, TedX speaker and co-founder and editorial director of Sapiens.lat, a digital media outlet that democratizes information on sustainability with an Indigenous focus, combining storytelling and journalism to amplify solutions from the Global South.
She leverages her voice to push back against extractivism, asking her readers and followers to question the mainstream idea of progress.
“Accepting that we are Earth-dependent dismantles our arrogance as a species,” she says.
“It forces us to question the obsolete fantasy of infinite growth on a planet with finite resources, that paradigm that the ‘modern world’ sells as sophistication when in reality, it is basic blindness to the biological cycles that sustain even the economy.”
What makes Yupanqui’s work so compelling is the perspective behind it. Nearly four years ago, after moving to a high-Andean community in Cusco during its worst drought in four decades, she was confronted with a truth she could no longer ignore: the urgent need to move beyond anthropocentrism.
She then created her own social media platform to uplift Andean Indigenous culture – not as something from the past, but as a living, modern culture with vital insights for today. In a country where racism remains deeply rooted despite the Indigenous ancestry shared by much of the population, her work is grounded in a clear belief: communication can shape culture.
The community she has built – nearly one million people across platforms – is proof of that.
Drawing upon her Indigenous identity and upbringing, Yupanqui sees humans not as owning life but “part of a web of logical reciprocities with the living.”
“Real cooperation is built horizontally and over the long term, transferring resources, information, legitimacy, governance and decision-making spaces. In this, we need each other.”
Yupanqui was celebrated as one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 for social impact in 2025.
She has collaborated with organizations such as Amazon Watch, Amazon Frontlines, Oxfam, Oceana, Pulitzer Center and the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Her projects have been featured in media outlets such as El País, Forbes, BBC and Deutsche Welle.
