A review by abbydee
An Indian Among Los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir by Ursula Pike

I always wanted a little more from this book. Pike frequently hits nails on heads, articulating uncomfortable truths in the simplest possible way, but I’m still hungry for something more than a rewrite of her Peace Corps journals. A little broader consciousness, some fruit of the thirty years since her trip to Bolivia and the opportunity to contextualize that experience with hindsight. But she seems more interested in re-creating her own naivete and wrong-footedness. These are banal emotions for travelers, because everyone comes from a culture and feels a little awkward and exhausted outside of it. Though I must say Pike does an impressively, spectacularly bad job navigating the Bolivian small-town small town. Or maybe a good job having a memorable experience in a place she knew she could leave without consequences. Pike acknowledges her own confusion, sometimes poorly navigated, and the strange, double-edged virtues of the Peace Corps tour of duty. She is frank about what she wanted from this experience and the way her expectations changed while she was in South America. But the lens still feels very zoomed on a dramatic, isolated dalliance in her life, and I wonder what broadening that perspective might lend to the telling.