Finding Cholita is a fictionalized ethnography of the Ayacucho region of Peru covering a thirty-year period beginning in the 1970s. It is a story of human tragedy resulting from the region's long history of discrimination, class oppression, and the rise and fall of the communist organization Shining Path._x000B__x000B_American anthropologist Dr. Alice Woodsley works in remote, Quechua-speaking Ayacucho villages in Peru. Vibrant and given to intensive questioning, she attempts to locate her goddaughter, Cholita, who is known to have joined Shining Path and to have murdered her biological father, who fathered her through rape. Woodsley learns through the people she meets and newspaper accounts about the emergence of Shining Path, its increasingly violent and cultlike tactics, and the equally violent response of government counterinsurgency forces._x000B__x000B_Woodsley devotes herself to documenting the stories of the countless Andean peasant women who were raped by soldiers. Her involvement goes beyond witnessing, as she therapeutically ministers to the women to relieve the pain of their sexual horror. Transcending the boundaries of fiction, memoir, and ethnography, Finding Cholita is an exceptional story of survival and redemption in the Andes.