We explain who José María Arguedas was, what his most important works were and what his contribution was to the native cultures of Peru.
José María Arguedas is considered one of the greatest writers of Peru.
Who was José María Arguedas?
Jose Maria Arguedas He was a Peruvian writer, educator, anthropologist, journalist and social researcher.He is considered one of the most important exponents of his country’s literature and an essential voice in terms of representations of indigenous themes in Latin America.
Author of fundamental novels of the Latin American 20th century, such as The deep rivers (1958), Arguedas He was also an important scholar of Peruvian folklore and a great connoisseur of Quechua., a language he learned from his early childhood. Likewise, he was an educator and university professor, and director of museums and public cultural institutes.
The thought of Arguedas focused on the fight against racism and the vindication of indigenous heritagein a country deeply divided along racial lines. He was a defender of Creole culture and a disseminator of pre-Columbian Peruvian literature, as well as a leftist thinker.
See also: Latin American culture
Birth and childhood of Jose Maria Arguedas
José María Arguedas Altamirano He was born on January 18, 1911 in the city of Andahuaylasin the southern mountain range of Peru. His parents were Víctor Manuel Arguedas Arellano, a lawyer from Cuzco who worked as an itinerant judge, and Victoria Altamirano Navarro, who came from a family of Creole landowners and aristocrats. His mother died when José María was 3 years old, so his childhood was spent in the house of his maternal grandparents.
In 1915, his father was appointed first instance judge in the department of Ayacucho and there he married a local landowner. The family then settled in the city of Puquio, where José María and his half-brothers began their schooling. But in 1920, when he was 9 years old, his father lost his appointment as a judge due to a change in government and had to return to itinerant work.
The relationship between José María and his stepmother was bad from the beginning. The woman felt contempt for him and let him grow up with the indigenous servants of the hacienda, with whom Arguedas He learned Quechua at the same time as he learned Spanish.. This stage of his childhood was crucial in the formation of his literary imagination.
Another important figure was his half-brother, Pablo Pacheco, who always treated José María cruelly. He forced him to serve as his steward, beat him, and even forced him to watch how he mistreated the indigenous servants. Many years later, Arguedas He portrayed this abusive figure in the “gamonales” that appeared in his literary work.
Who were the gamonales?
In Peru in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the ranchers and landowners without ancestry were known as “gamonales”, who extended their domains in the south of the country, taking away their ancestral lands from the indigenous peoples. The gamonales were characterized by their ambition, their ignorance of the procedures of working with the land and their crude, cruel and violent methods.
See more in: Colonization of America
In 1921, Jose Maria He fled the family estate and took refuge with his paternal uncles. who were dedicated to planting a few kilometers away. He lived with them until 1923, when his father went looking for him. From then on, they made many work trips together and José María visited numerous towns in the region.
His father enrolled him in the Miguel Grau School of the Mercedarian Fathersin Abancay, where José María finished his basic education. He hoped that his son would become a religious and begin a career in the priesthood.
During the summer of 1925, José María visited his maternal grandparents’ farm. There he suffered an accident with a mill wheel: He lost two fingers on his right hand and the mobility of the remaining fingers. Even so, the following year he began his secondary studies in the city of Ica, in south-central Peru, at the San Luis Gonzaga school.
In 1926 he moved again, with his father, to the cities of Pampas and Huancayo. In the latter, he entered the Santa Isabel school, where he experienced the contempt towards the mountain people. There, too, He made his first literary attempts, in the student magazine Torch. Shortly after, she attended her last years of high school in Lima, at the Nuestra Señora de La Merced School.
The arrival of Arguedas to Lima and to literature
At the age of 20, José María decided to settle in Lima and enter the Faculty of Letters at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Initially, he had financial help, but his father died in 1932 and From then on the young man had to fend for himself. A friend got him a position as an assistant at the Central Post Office, where he worked for five years.
At the university, José María met other young enthusiasts of knowledge and culture, with whom he became friends. Among them were the philosophers Luis Felipe Alarco (1913-2005) and Carlos Cueto Fernandini (1913-1968), and the poets Emilio Adolfo Westphalen (1911-2001) and Luis Fabio Xammar (1911-1947). Because of their influence, Arguedas He carried out important readings, especially of the great Russian authors.
At that time, in addition, José María began to write stories. The first of them was published in the Lima magazine Signwith the title “Warma kuyay”, which means “childhood love” in Quechua. This story, along with two others, made up his first published work: Water (1935), with which he won, at the age of 24, second prize in the international competition of the American Magazine of Buenos Aires.
These first stories, clearly indigenist in nature, arose from the indignation that Arguedas felt when reading the literary descriptions of indigenous peoples in the texts of the time. In them, as he himself explained in a 1965 conference:
“They were described in such a false way by writers whom I respect, from whom I have received lessons like López Albújar, like Ventura García Calderón. The Indian was so disfigured and the landscape so sweet and stupid or so strange, that I said: ‘No, I I have to write it as it is, because I have enjoyed it, I have suffered it’ and I wrote those first stories” (cited in Vargas Llosa, 2019: p. 83).
A year after the release of her first book, Arguedas founded the magazine Word, along with the Peruvian writers Augusto Tamayo Vargas (1914-1992) and Alberto Tauro del Pino (1914-1994). In it, they echoed the ideas about Latin America that José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930) proposed at that time.
In 1937, the year in which he obtained his degree in Literature, Arguedas participated in the student protests against the visit of an emissary from fascist Italy. At that time, Peru was under the dictatorship of Óscar R. Benavides (1876-1945), so the protest was persecuted and Arguedas imprisoned in the El Sexto prison. The experiences he endured there for eight months later fueled his novel of the same name..
His time in prison also allowed him to devote himself to a project of translating the Quechua songs of his childhood into Spanish. Along with an introductory essay he authored, these verses were published in 1938 with the title Kechwa singingIn his preliminary text, Arguedas wrote:
“I did not find any poetry that expressed my feelings better than the poetry of Kechwa songs. Those of us who speak this language know that Kechwa surpasses Spanish in the expression of some feelings that are the most characteristic of the indigenous heart: tenderness, affection, love of nature” (Arguedas, 2012).
However, as a result of his experience in prison, Arguedas He was fired from the Central Postal Administration. Ruined, he wrote to his half-brother Arístides, with whom he had a good relationship, asking for help. Thanks to his mediation, he obtained a position as a teacher of Spanish and Geography at the Mateo Pumacahua school, in Sicuani, in the department of Cuzco.
The ethnological work of José María Arguedas
In addition to being a writer, Arguedas was an important ethnologist.
During his stay in Sicuani, Arguedas continued to be interested in culture and folklore, and together with his students he made compilations of popular songs, stories and poems. There, furthermore, He married Celia Bustamante (1910-1973), a Lima educator and socialist activist whom he had met during his time in prison. In 1955, they had their only daughter, Vilma Victoria.
In 1941 he published his first novel, Yawar Fiesta, whose title in Quechua means “blood festival.” This novel is considered one of Arguedas’s most accomplished works and the initiator of the literary movement of neo-indigenism. It addresses the racial division of Peruvian society in the context of “Andean” bullfights, in which indigenous bullfighters were often torn apart by the animal.
Jaguar Party It was written in parts and sent by Arguedas to his friend and poet Manuel Moreno Jimeno (1912-1993), with the intention of participating in an international contest, but he did not win.
At that time, José María Arguedas also began to work on the reform of the educational programs of the Ministry of Education and participated in the First Inter-American Indigenist Congress in Pátzcuaro. In addition, his initial experiences as a scholar of Andean culture were reflected in numerous newspaper articles.
Around 1947, He was appointed General Conservator of Folklore of the Ministry of EducationUnder his leadership, Peruvian folklore and popular culture received a significant boost. At that time, he also collaborated closely with the Communist Party in the intellectual training of its militant cadres. This association proved dear to him later, when the military dictatorship of Manuel Odría (1896-1974) was established in 1948.
Arguedas was dismissed from his job and, upon returning to Lima, he enrolled in the San Marcos Institute of Ethnology. Shortly after, public Songs and stories of the Quechua people, the result of his previous investigations. Furthermore, between 1950 and 1953, he taught Ethnology at the National Men’s Pedagogical Institute.
At this stage of his life, Arguedas He traveled frequently throughout the Andean worldaccompanied by his wife. During these trips, he collected the materials that later formed part of his book Magical-realistic stories and traditional holiday songs. Folklore of the Mantaro Valley, provinces of Jauja and Concepción, appeared in 1953.
That same year, he received the position of director of the Institute of Ethnological Studies of the National Museum of Peruvian Culture, where he remained for ten years. Simultaneously, he directed the magazine American Folklore of the Inter-American Folklore Committee.