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The Indian-Oriented Novel in Latin America: New Spirit, New Forms, New Scope*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Joseph Sommers
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Extract

Fixed attitudes toward literature in Latin America display a consistent tendency to become unfixed in relatively short order. This is particularly true in the case of fiction dealing with Indian themes.

During the 1930s and the following decade, a number of diverse factors coincided to encourage cultivation of this facet of the Latin-American novel, in a manner quite different from nineteenth-century romantics who had glorified and idealized a remote, unreal indigenous past. Mounting socio-economic pressures, newly-awakened political movements, a widespread national consciousness, strengthened among novelists by the successes of the criollista writers of the 1920's (Gallegos, Güiraldes, Rivera) — all combined to encourage concentration on the Indian as a social problem.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Inter-American Studies , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , April 1964 , pp. 249 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 1964

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Footnotes

*

The author is indebted to the Foreign Area Fellowship Program of the Social Scienoe Research Council for the opportunity to engage in research in Mexico during 1962-1963.

References

1 Archer, William H. and Wade, Gerald E., “The indianista novel since 1889,” Hispania, XXXIII, 3 (1950), 220.Google Scholar

2 Arguedas, José María, Los ríos profundos, Buenos Aires, Losada, 1958.Google Scholar

3 Bastos, Augusto Roa, Hijo de hombre, Buenos Aires, Losada, 1960.Google Scholar

4 Asturias, Miguel Angel, Hombres de maíz, Buenos Aires, Losada, 1949.Google Scholar Subsequent references are to 3rd edition, 1957.

5 Castellanos, Rosario, Oficio de tinieblas, Mexico, Joaquín Mortiz, 1962.Google Scholar

6 Three products of Asturias's anthropological studies are a folklore collection with literary presentation, Leyendas de Guatemala (1930), and Spanish translations, in collaboration with J. M. González de Mendoza, of Raynaud's versions of the Popol Vuh and Anales de los Xahil. The former translation appeared in Mexico (1939) under the title El libro del Consejo. The latter work has seen editions in Paris (1928), Guatemala (1937), and Mexico (1946).

7 Asturias, Hombres de maíz, p. 124.

8 Ibid., p. 86.

9 Arguedas has a long bibliography of anthropological articles in such magazines as Revista del Museo Nacional of Lima on Quechua songs, folklore, popular and religious art, and social change. He has also published a Bibliografía del folklore peruano (Mexico, 1960), and a book, Canciones y cuentos del pueblo quechua (Lima, 1949).

10 Aldrich, Earl Jr., “The Quechua World of José María Arguedas,” Hispania, XLV, 1 (1962), pp. 62–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Arguedas, , Los ríos profundos, pp. 10, 11.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., p. 13.

13 Ibid., p. 111.

14 See Hugo Rodríguez Alcalá, “Hijo de hombre de Roa Bastos y la intrahistoria del Paraguay,” Cuadernos Americanos, CXXVII, 2 (1963), pp. 221-234.

15 Bastos, Roa, Hijo de hombre, p. 270.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., p. 37.

17 Ibid., p. 19.

18 Ibid., p. 15.

19 Ibid., p. 15.

20 Ibid., p. 234.

21 Ibid., p. 81, 100.

22 Ibid., p. 234.

23 Ibid., p. 188.

24 Castellanos, , Oficio de tinieblas, p. 9.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., p. 362.