With their own way, both these writers tried to protect Indigenous and Ancient Native cultures of their Latin American countries. Asturias rewrote Mayan mythological stories and his legends are very marked by indigenous beliefs. Arguedas wrote a large part of his novels in Quechua, the Peruvian Indian language. Moreover they both oriented their writings towards social and political contestation. Doing so they also tried to make their fiction looks like a possible and hopeful future. Arguedas’ writings are however far more realistic and explicit than Asturias’ prose impregnated of magic and complex undercurrents. Arguedas clearly hope for the day when Justice would come and destroy the feudal order, punishing the oppressor. By the way I really laughed when reading the fate of the tyrannical Master! Asturias makes allusions to exile, modernity and technological peril, religious fanaticism. We could also assume that the condemnation of Utuquel for his heretic speech or the immensity of the sacrifice done by the nun Clara of the Indians were examples of the Indians’ oppression. I will prevent myself to make any more assumptions about Asturias’s prose because I really need some explanation before being able to fully understand its deep meaning.

However, my final idea is that these readings answer to this week’s title – Popular Culture as Folk Culture – in the sense that they emphasize the importance of ancient, traditional and native cultures undermined by colonizers. We get one more time this idea that indigenous cultures are being threatened and that this is the whole identity of a people which is in danger and might disappear. Here again, popular culture is defined as the culture of an oppressed and authentic people, as it was similarly suggested in our former readings.