Arguedas’s portays Peru in this time, as a country immersed in a new pardigram, one of modernization and turmoil in order to articulate these changing times Arguedas frames the narrative through the eyes of a young boy named, Ernesto. The narrative concentrates on the boys life that has been structured between a soico-political dichotomy, he demonstrates the countries turmoil and opposing conflictions. As his unique identity is tested and pulled in polar directions. Ernesto was raised by an Indegenious community and is suddenly cut off from his familial ties and thrown into a religious institution Ernesto regects the white society that he biologically is apart of as he strongly identified with the indigenous culture he was uprooted from. The intensity with which Arguedas portrayed the indigenous and bicultural people in Deep Rivers is unique as he creates this mood within his writing that portrays the experiences of bicultural and indigenous people as a tragic sense of life one that is beautiful and yet undermined by sorrow. Arguedas’s literature rivals, popular thought that is pushed by white colonial societies, as he views the indigenous Andean culture as one that is not a static reality; instead be believes the culture holds advocation for ideas of change and how these possibilities for change interact with a complicated relationship to tradition and modernity.  These themes are echoed within Ernesto as he tries to define his own identity he feels the cultural divides with such intensity and anguish as he is caught between the life he longs to return to and the life in which he actually lives. Ernesto’s subjective experiences help illustrate Arguedas’s respectful interpretations of native culture and spirituality, as when Ernesto is seeking comfort he is drawn in by Quechua music played in the town’s native quarter or when he visits the Pachachaca River, Arguedas describes these encounters as sincere love within spiritual values. Music and nature not only function as insight into other cultures but also as thematic devices that propel the notion of complexity and the binds between dividence. Seen through the moment in which Ernesto wonders if the calandra larks song, can be composed of the same matter that he is constructed of, and if it were possible that the lark comes from the same broken world of human beings that he has been thrown into. These passages articulate the deep alienation a bicultural or indigenous Andean person might feel in these rapid transitional times. 

Q: How do you feel about the ending of the novel being that it is one that is ambiguous one that stops at the point of change, when a new stage is about to begin in the character’s evolution and growth? Do you feel the material is too complicated to expand far enough where there can be a complete ending as the complexities of race through a bicultural lense will always envoke debate and the nature of the topic will have to navigate through new conversation/understandings of race, privilege and intersectionality.