A brichero is a professional seducer of foreign, mostly Western, tourists. The term comes from the English 'bridge', a bridge between Peru and the West. Bricheros entertain tourists and live from gifts, meals, hotel nights and excursions. The practice was born in the late 70s and early 80s, initially as a way for men to leave Peru.

According to philosopher Juliette Maurice, the tourist's own trait is to despise tourism, and this contempt hides an internalized self-hatred: we don't want to be a tourist. Meeting a tourist who looks like us, for example a French tourist, feels like facing a mirror, and the more we refuse that image, the more we risk matching it.

Juliette Maurice devotes a chapter to philosophers who, since the first circumnavigations and discoveries of the 16th century, argued that after Magellan real journeys were no longer possible. Culture keeps a platonic idea of Travel with a capital, where the tourist is a degraded, disappointing version of the traveler, a distinction she finds potentially dangerous.

During a university year in Arequipa from the Lille sociology faculty, Roguet befriended guides, DJs and musicians who showed her secret places and an ayahuasca ceremony. Later her friend Gonza confessed he was a brichero and that all their friends were. The practice had been happening under her eyes, and it became the subject of her thesis.

Most are artisans, tour guides or musicians, which gives them spontaneous-looking first contact. They perform a 'last Inca' exoticism, saying the Pachamama put the woman on their path, and tailor the pitch: climbing for a mountain lover, Andean cosmovision for a hippie, Inca technology for an architect. Encounters are professionally built and repeated.

Roguet says the staged Indianity is stigmatized within a Peruvian society marked by structural racism, where skin color situates people in every interaction. Upper-class men in Lima especially hate bricheros, seeing them as everything Peru should get rid of to westernize and develop. Tourists fascinated by bricheros completely ignore this racism.

Proposed by anthropologist Yves Vincain, it describes a voluntary suspension of disbelief: we know a situation is staged but still want to believe something authentic is happening, like greeting Mickey at Disneyland. Tourism actors are 'enchantment engineers' who create a destination, which is distinct from the real territory with its political and economic news.

Roguet says the romance adds huge value to the trip, a story to tell back home, so tourists protect the enchantment. Women pay for meals, gifts and hotel nights without ever explicitly negotiating a sexual service, so tourists are never customers and bricheros never sex workers. Some cut short world tours to stay months in Cusco.

Bricheros strategically use arguments about neocolonization, mass tourism and historical injustice, telling tourists they come to have fun in a poor country and fix nothing. To prove they are not colonizers, the women pay for beers, meals and hotels. This guilt strategy works on graduate, progressive women aged 20 to 30, uneasy about being white in Peru.