HUAMPAMI, Peru (AP) — In his first year at San Marcos University, Hermenegildo Espejo barely spoke, and certainly not in class.

His Spanish was rudimentary, his accent an embarrassment. Classmates in Lima, a two-day trip from his Amazon home town, laughed at his grammatical stumbles, his odd pronunciation.

"I didn't understand anything. I couldn't pronounce words well," the 22-year-old Peruvian Indian recalls, wincing as he gazes out a taxi window on a rutted jungle road near his home.

Six years later, Espejo is a thesis away from an undergraduate degree in linguistics at Peru's top public university. And while his Spanish is now excellent, it is not his priority. He aspires to produce the first unified grammar of Awajun, his native tongue.

Espejo's story highlights the two biggest challenges Latin America's indigenous peoples face in their struggle to preserve their cultures: keeping their native languages alive and empowering themselves through education.

Throughout Latin America, native languages are disappearing and Indians are under intense pressure to speak Spanish. At the same time, Indians have little access to post-secondary education. They are ill-prepared by substandard schools, afflicted by high dropout rates and usually short on financial help.

More than a fifth of the 557 languages spoken by Latin America's natives are at serious risk of extinction, according to the ambitious "Socio-Linguistic Atlas of Latin America's Indigenous Peoples" that UNICEF is publishing this month. Across Latin America, more than 100 native peoples have abandoned their mother tongues and now speak exclusively Spanish or Portuguese, says Inge Sichra, the book's lead author.

In coastal Peru, speakers of the Andes' dominant native languages are routinely shamed into abandoning them, says Peruvian anthropologist Rodrigo Montoya.

"Racism isn't a historical relic. It's not something from the past, a colonial inheritance that's lapsed. No sir, racism is a concept fully in force," he says.

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