Category Archives: arguedas

Arguedas Tour: Andahuaylas

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To get to Andahuaylas from Abancay, we headed West and so abandoned the road towards Cusco, which continues East. Before embarking on this brief trip, we weren’t sure what the condition of the roads would be, but they were all uniformly good: asphalted and well maintained. We sped along in a minibus, taking in the amazing landscape, and occasionally picking up people who flagged the bus down from the verge. It wasn’t long ago, however, that the roads would have been of pressed earth at best. And in Arguedas’s time, travel would mostly have been on foot or horseback.

And yet none of these towns or cities has been exactly isolated and cut off from broader regional, national, or even global influences. In Andahuaylas, the town proudly projects its historic identity as Chanka, rather than Inca, but this is as much a reminder of the many waves of soldiers and administrators, merchants and missionaries, migrants and travellers who have passed through these valleys and over these mountain passes.

This is where Arguedas was born. His grandparents’ house, a two-storey structure of adobe with a large sign on the side, is just a couple of blocks uphill from the Plaza de Armas. In the plaza itself is a statue of the writer, on a bench, looking up from the open book he is holding out in his hand, apparently about to interrupt his fellow author, Ricardo Palma, who in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century wrote many costumbrista historical short stories that were collected under the title of Peruvian Traditions, and whose statue, apparently unaware of its surroundings, is somewhat incongruously at the other end of the bench.

There is a story that Palma was born just outside of Andahuaylas, in a place called Talavera. But Andahuaylas clearly belongs to Arguedas, whose image and name are to be found repeatedly through the town: an Avenida José María Arguedas, a Parque José María Arguedas, a Biblioteca Municipal José María Arguedas (with a comprehensive display of his books), a Librería José María Arguedas, the (relatively recently accredited) Universidad Nacional José María Arguedas. 

There is even supposedly a football team named after Arguedas, and we spent quite some time trying to track down and buy a shirt, but sadly to no avail.

And it is in Andahuaylas, too, that Arguedas is buried. His tomb is in front of a fairly large mausoleum, its walls decorated in relief with images associated with him or his novels (the yawar fiesta; the foxes from up above and down below). Next to it is a large statue, gold in colour, which portrays Arguedas in a suit and poncho, clasping a book, apparently declaiming to the city below. Across the street is another statue, a more abstract figure of what seems to be a peasant saluting back to the writer.

Arguedas’s body was not always in Andahuaylas. It was originally, upon his death in 1969, buried in Lima. But in 2004 it was semi-clandestinely disinterred (against the wishes of his widow, his second wife, Silvia, yet supported by his younger sister, Nelly) and transported by land back to the highlands. 

Upon its arrival, the body was put under guard in the town hall (to prevent it being taken back to the coast), and for five days there was pilgrimage and party as people from all around came, singing and dancing, to pay their respects. On the tombstone, when he was finally reburied, is the inscription in Quechua: “Llaqtaypinam kachkani”; “Now I am with my people.”

But of course, for all the fondness and affection Arguedas had for Andahuaylas, or for the southern highlands more generally, not only did he not in fact stay here so very long–he was part of those waves of movement to and fro–these were also sites of trauma and even horror, as both his biography and his novels attest. Arguedas’s tone is seldom sentimental, and if it is, there is always the threat of violence, the yawar mayu or bloody river, for instance, that could turn everything upside down.

Especially somewhere like Andahuaylas (for instance, on the sign hung on his birthplace), Arguedas is frequently referred to, in Quechua, as “tayta” or “taita”: father or dad. In the account of his re-internment, we are told that peasants came from surrounding communities “singing to Father Arguedas. [. . .] Arguedas was their father,” “cantando al taita Arguedas. [. . .] Arguedas era su taita.”

But in life, the writer had no acknowledged children. (In the 1990s, a woman, Vilma Victoria Arguedas Ponce, claimed that she was his illegitimate daughter.) If he had been a father, he would surely have been a stern one. Pictures of Arguedas seldom if ever show him smiling, with the exception of one photograph in which he is holding a cat. Statues in both Andahuaylas and Puquio have him instead lecturing or declaiming, book in hand: yet another man in Peru exhorting on the basis of the written word. “Tayta” also conveys the sense of authority or even boss.

There is something more appealing about the image back on the bench in the Plaza de Armas: of the writer distracted from his reading and looking somewhat quizzically at Ricardo Palma, as if to say not only “What are you doing here?” but “What are we doing here?” Perhaps this would be a moment of self-recognition or self-reflection.

And though the very notion of an Arguedas Tour may seem to be a sort of pilgrimage that merely contributes to the hagiographic regard in which Arguedas is held by many, within Peru and without, I hope it also puts the figure of the writer in motion a little, perhaps even destabilizes it a touch.

We saw so many Arguedases or signs of Arguedas: in bookshops and bars, plazas and parks, libraries and schools. But with all this repetition, do they really have to coalesce? Which Arguedas shall we take away with us, make travel, leaving others quietly where they are?

Arguedas Tour: Abancay

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To get from Puquio to Abancay, 300km or so further inland, on the road to Cusco, you have first to cross a long stretch of puna, or high-altitude moorland, that divides the southern tip of Ayacucho from Apurímac. Here, at 4,000m or more above sea level, the land is cold and desolate, unsuitable for most agriculture (except some potatoes), and sparsely populated. As we set off in the early morning, there was still ice on the slopes where the rising sun had yet to reach. 

But then you drop down into the valley through which runs first the River Chalhuanca and then the Pachachaca (which ultimately, via the Apurímac, leads to the Amazon and then the distant Atlantic), the climate and temperature change until, just before you once more start ascending to reach Abancay itself, you find yourself amid fields of sugar cane.

Here, too, straddling the river, is the colonial-era bridge (built in 1654) that features in what is perhaps Arguedas’s best-known novel, Deep Rivers (Los ríos profundos), from 1958. As Arguedas’s narrator, Ernesto, describes it:

“The Pachachaca bridge was built by the Spaniards. Its two high arches are supported by pillars of stone and lime, as powerful as the river. [. . .] On the pillars of the arches, the river breaks and divides; the water rises to lap at the wall, tries to climb it, and then rushes headlong through the spans of the bridge. [. . .] I didn’t know if I loved the river or the bridge more. But both of them cleansed my soul, flooding it with courage and heroic dreams.” (62-3)

The bridge also features in the novel’s plot as the portal for key entrances and exits. Ernesto’s father crosses it when he leaves his young son behind in Abancay, depositing him in the local church-run boarding school that is the setting for most of what follows. It is across the bridge that the rebellious Doña Felipe flees, pursued by the National Guard, after leading an uprising in which she and her fellow chicheras (women who serve corn beer in informal bars) redistribute the salt hoarded in depositories to the colonos (Indigenous serfs) on the haciendas. 

And then the bridge is closed off at the end of the novel, for fear of a spreading plague, but the colonos from outlying haciendas cross the river anyway, advancing on the town to demand a midnight mass from Father Linares, the priest and Rector at Ernesto’s school.

The haciendas are gone now, though one has been turned into a museum. We were only able to see it from the outside, but it had pillars and verandas worthy of an antebellum plantation house in Georgia or Mississippi.

Otherwise, today Abancay is a thriving little metropolis with lots of new construction, both commercial and residential, and multi-storey buildings of concrete and glass. In the center of town, it was hard to reconstruct the geography of Arguedas’s novel.

There was a building a block or two from the main plaza that may have been the site of the school featured in the novel. If so, it is now an Art School, in whose massive atrium (possibly once a courtyard as Arguedas describes it) is an enormous mural featuring the writer (alongside also Micaela Bastidas, the wife of the legendary eighteenth-century anti-colonial rebel, Túpac Amaru) surrounded by scenes and images from his fiction: masks, condors, chicheras, dancing, and even the bridge over the Pachachaca itself.

in the evening we went to a restaurant on whose door, and above whose bar, was emblazoned the phrase “Todas las Sangres” (All the Bloods), the title of Arguedas’s longest and perhaps most fully-realized novel. But this was part of a kaleidoscope of décor–including, as I remember, pictures of both Che Guevara and (I think) Brigitte Bardot in the men’s loos–in an establishment that seemed to be trying to be the city’s trendiest or most Bohemian, and that was hardly traditional Andean.

All this, too, is appropriate. For though there is definitely a current of nostalgia that runs through Arguedas’s work, it is wrong to accuse him (as Mario Vargas Llosa does, in an afterword to Deep Rivers) of being stuck in the past.

On the contrary, Arguedas proudly called himself an “hombre quechua moderno,” a “modern Quechua man.” And in his fiction he is interested in what is new that arises from both the connection and clash of cultures, as for example here when young boys from different parts of the country find themselves together in a provincial boarding school at a time of maximum tension and instability. Meanwhile, the bridge over the Pachachaca may seem to incarnate stability when compared with the rushing waters below, but in fact it, too, is a vector for both heartbreak and escape, rescue and rebellion.

Faced with tradition and modernity, continuity and even violent change, like Ernesto he is never quite sure which he prefers.

Arguedas Tour: Puquio

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Arguedas’s life was full of movement, and this transience began in his early childhood. Son of an itinerant mestizo lawyer, whose wife (Arguedas’s mother) died while young José María was still an infant, he was constantly on the move, often cared for by relatives. Initially, his travels and displacements took him around the southern highlands, and the provinces of Apurímac, Ayacucho, and Cusco. Later, he would be enrolled in secondary schools on the coast, first in Ica and then in Lima, with a stint in Huancayo (in Junín) in between.

Some of this time was spent in or near the town of Puquio, in Ayacucho, which today is on the road that connects Nazca to Cusco (and on, even as far as Brazil). Puquio was the home of Arguedas’s stepmother, who holds a special place in the writer’s childhood trauma and mythology: apparently resentful of his very existence, she relegated him to the kitchen with the household’s Indigenous servants, who taught him Quechua and “treated [him] just as if [he] were on of their own.” This association with Peru’s Indigenous culture would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Arguedas would go on to revisit Puquio both as an anthropologist, undertaking fieldwork and research in and around the town, and as an author, making it the setting for his first novel, Yawar fiesta, whose title combines Quechua (Yawar) and Spanish (fiesta): “Blood Festival.”

Yawar fiesta is as much about the town as it is about any individual characters. Indeed, arguably most of the characters are collective: the “mistis” or “principales” who are the landowners and merchants; the subprefect who represents the state; the town residents who have migrated to Lima, but now return for its annual celebration of national independence; and above all the “comuneros,” members of the town’s four ayllus, or Indigenous communities. The ayllus both collaborate and compete to put on the show that gives the novel its title: a bullfight that the other characters disdain as barbaric and dangerous, but which, when plans to modernize or “civilize” it fail, the mistis ultimately embrace as if it were their own.

Moreover, the novel opens with a visual description of the town as seen by a traveller arriving at the pass that gives access to the valley in which the town is set, offering a view in which the rooves and spires of the ayllus stand out: “‘Indian town!’ exclaim the travelers when they reach this summit and spy Puquio” (1).

We must have passed through or near this pass on our way to Puquio, but in the early dawn as our coach from Lima approached the town, it was not about to stop for us to take in the view. Later, however, we had lunch at a restaurant on the other side of the valley, from which we could see a similar vista to the one Arguedas describes. And although the landowners’ dominance has long faded, with agrarian reform and the break-up of the haciendas, the four distinct communities, each with their own small plaza and church, are still clearly visible.

It doesn’t take too long to walk around Puquio, which has scarcely grown (only from 14,000 inhabitants to just under 16,000) in the decades since Arguedas was here. We visited all the plazas and churches. There are few modern buildings, though apparently the town hall had to be rebuilt after it was bombed by Sendero Luminoso in 1992. Few if any buildings are more than two stories high. On the outskirts of town, on a small hill, is a bullring, fenced off and contained.

My friend Carmen’s father comes from Puquio, and her family still has a house there, a few blocks from the main square. It is rundown and barely habitable; the family has neither the time nor the resources to figure out what exactly to do with it. But it is also a very material connection, remnant and reminder for a generation that moved to the coast and reinvented themselves there, becoming fully limeños, but never fully forgot their ties to the sierra.

There are plenty of signs of Arguedas in Puquio. A school is named after him, and a restaurant has the name “Misitu,” after the untamed bull that the comuneros bring down from the mountains in Yawar fiesta. In the main square is a statue of the writer, standing and wearing a flowing poncho, book in hand, apparently reading or declaiming to us below. In another square is a statue of a condor atop a bull, another version of the yawar fiesta (or turupukllay) that Arguedas’s novel mentions, but doesn’t describe at length, but which here and elsewhere has come to stand in for the novel as a whole. So this remembering is in part a misremembering.

Similarly, some have suggested that Arguedas’s own childhood reminiscences are unreliable. In José María Arguedas: Biografía y suicidio, Hugo Chacón Málaga argues at length that the writer’s mother was actually an Indigenous woman with whom his father must have had an affair. Whatever the truth of the matter (it seems unlikely to me), the point is that Arguedas’s story about the past was generative for his subsequent work: a story that, either way, is about fictive kinship, imagined relations that come to outweigh the real.

As the sun went down, we went to a small café run by a friend of Carmen’s. He called on a couple of musicians, who played huaynos (Andean ballads or laments) on a guitar and a charango, chatting and drinking with us for several hours. The songs came from various regions of the southern highlands, and the talk was both of Puquio and of other places, both near and far. It was a very Arguedian way to spend the evening.

Arguedas Tour: Chimbote

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I took an overnight bus to Chimbote, a small coastal city that is just over 400km, from Lima, a little more than a third of the distance to Ecuador. I arrived about 6am, and though the bus station is some distance from the centre of town, I decided to walk. I did, after all, have the whole day to kill.

For the most part, I walked along by the water, looking over a rocky beach to the Bay of Chimbote, which is guarded from the immensity of the Pacific Ocean by a small chain of islands, the largest of which is called Isla Blanca, “White Island,” in reference to the guano in which it is covered. The neighbourhoods by the shore were ramshackle and run down, if no longer as precarious as they would have been in Arguedas’s day.

Chimbote is the largest fishing port in the world. In fact, four of the world’s top ten fishing ports by volume of commercial fish landed are in Peru. A fifth is not far away, in northern Chile. This stretch of coast, its waters fed by the Humboldt current and full of nutrients, is one of the most productive on the planet.

A massive fishing fleet, comprising hundreds of boats, was anchored out on the bay. I don’t know how many more boats were out at sea. Over my brief time in the city, I saw little sign of the catch being unloaded. Perhaps I happened to be there during a lull in activity. Perhaps, at 6am, the boats had already been unloaded.

Arguedas came to Chimbote in the mid to late 1960s and set his final novel, The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, here. He was equal parts fascinated and horrified by the city’s vertiginous expansion at the time, which drew people from all over Peru who sought work on the boats, in the processing factories, or in the bars and brothels that sprung up to cater to this horde of internal migrants.

In Arguedas’s novel, this chaotic industrialization of the fishing industry and its myriad ramifications for its motley cast of characters are overseen by the book’s titular foxes, mythic figures drawn from the legends set down in the seventeenth-century Huarochirí Manuscript, which Arguedas had translated from the original Quechua and published in a bilingual edition in 1966. 

The foxes, in anthropomorphic guise, figure in the book’s plot (for instance, visiting one of the fish meal factories) but are otherwise helpless to do much more than look on. Even from the perspective of many centuries of history, preceding the Spanish arrival and invasion, Arguedas conveys the sense that something new and irrevocable is underway in Chimbote, which may well presage the future of a messily multicultural and globalized Peru.

I’m not sure that Arguedas was entirely right in his doleful prediction, which certainly contributed to the existential anguish to which the letters and diaries interspersed through the narrative attest. He did see the increasing predominance of international capital (ironically perhaps aided and abetted by the land reform of the 1970s that undercut the rural oligarchy). And the kinds of petty corruption, the tendencies to mercantile and financial oligopoly, that run through Arguedas’s novel are now only all the more firmly etched at a national level.

But he didn’t anticipate what I think is the cultural revival of the past twenty years or so, which has been very unevenly distributed, and certainly does not seem to have touched much a place like Chimbote, but which can be seen for instance in the re-Indigenization along the tourist trail of places like Cusco and the Sacred Valley, or in the “gastronomic revolution” that has given something of a swagger to the more upscale parts of Lima. 

There has been a move to celebrate alterity, if mostly rhetorically, and if only certain (colorful, domesticated, unthreatening) alterities that the majority of the population cannot convincingly embody.

In the meantime, and as a result, places like Chimbote get hidden away, sidelined, whatever their continued economic importance. The city was bustling, but while I was there, I searched in vain for any kind of souvenir of the place. Chimbote seems hardly to figure in the national imagination, let alone in the image of the country that Peru presents to the world.

Not even the fact that this was the setting for one of Peru’s most important novels of the twentieth century seems to register here. I found no murals or other commemoration of Arguedas’s visit to the city. The few bookshops I found were full of self-help or children’s literature, and none stocked a copy of The Fox from Up Above. Chimbote may have marked, even traumatized, Arguedas, but as far as the city is concerned it is as though he had never existed.

Arguedas Tour: La agraria

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It was some time ago that I first came up with the idea of an “Arguedas Tour”: a trip through (mostly) Peru’s Southern Andes that would include as many as possible of the places associated with writer José María Arguedas. Since then, I’ve discovered I am maybe not the only one to have had this idea, but nonetheless this year I finally made good on it, with a dauntless pair of friends who enthusiastically joined in, especially for the Andean section.

Oddly, given that he is a writer for whom it is difficult if not impossible to disentangle work and life–in that most of his fiction is to a greater or lesser extent autobiographical, and indeed his final, unfinished novel, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, even interleaves pages from his diary into the fiction–there is no proper, scholarly biography of Arguedas. So we would have to piece together an itinerary from some of the principal references in his fiction, without necessarily being able to pin down precise addresses or locales. 

For instance, though Arguedas off and on spent plenty of time in Lima, I have little idea as to the neighbourhoods in which he lived. But I did visit some of his workplaces, starting with the one that was also the site of his ultimate suicide (he had made other attempts in previous years), in November, 1969: La agraria, or the National Agrarian University, which is on what was once the south-eastern outskirts of the capital city.

The bus in which I went to La agraria took me close to some of the shantytowns that sprawl uneasily up the hills that surround Lima’s city center, but the university itself occupies a spacious campus with many modern buildings in a middle-class district far enough from the sea that it basked in some unseasonal sun the day I was there. Students sat talking or working at picnic tables that had outlets charged with solar energy. I asked for directions at the library, which has a lofty glass atrium.

Arguedas shot himself over a weekend in his office or in a nearby bathroom. I thought it too morbid to inquire after more precise details, though also doubt that anyone at the university now knows. 

Arguedas’s work is surely peripheral to the main business of the university, which is overwhelmingly technical and scientific. But there is a small Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, with departments of Economics and Rural Sociology, where a meeting room bears Arguedas’s name.

Elsewhere, near the centre of the university and close to its students’ union, there is small amphitheatre, overlooking which is a bust of the writer, on a plinth. A large bouquet of colourful flowers had been placed beside it. The plaque on the plinth has a quotation from the writer’s letter to the university rector, left to be found his death: “Acompañadme en armonía de fuerzas que por muy contrarias que sean, en la Universidad–y acaso sólo en ella–pueden alimentar el conocimiento”; “Join me in the harmony of forces that, however adverse they may be, in the University–and perhaps there alone–can foster knowledge.”

On a nearby building was the first of many murals of Arguedas that I would see over the next week or so. A banner slung over a railing in front of the mural also featured Arguedas, plus imagery associated with him–a scissor dancer, a condor, some musicians–and the slogan in Quechua “Tukuy Sunquywan”: “With all of my heart.” In the midst of the technical university, a gesture to affect.