José María Arguedas

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Spanish: 'Deep Rivers'

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To explore the culture of the ancient Andean society was for Arguedas a passionate work of the very roots of the complex Peruvian ethnicity; that is to say, a searching out of the social and cultural identity, not without confrontation with that other sector of Peruvian life: the Hispanic or occidental tradition in which, of course, are the dominant patterns of national identity and ethnicity. Despite appearances, we are not dealing with simple regionalism or typical indigenismo but are looking through the privileged perspective of Arguedas into the boundaries of the past, the cultural inheritances with which he shows a possible way for social change, a way that includes a need for social justice and recognition of the rights of the oppressed Indians as a part of cultural liberation. In his works Arguedas communicates this passionate concern, a strong appeal that transcends Peru and its social dilemmas….

In Deep Rivers Arguedas is at his best; the intensity of this novel is unique and has the rare force of its authenticity; it is not in vain that the book recalls a world that is elemental in its atrocious miseries and violence and at the same time carries a complexity of feeling and sensation in its capacity for a deeper life through a rich communication. This labyrinth of feelings is of course the opposite of Borges's labyrinths, but here we have the best case of a less cosmopolitan and more profoundly rooted side of the Latin American novel. In Deep Rivers … Arguedas projects a picture from inside, but his intention is not merely to give us a better picture; rather his aim, through literature, is to elucidate the drama and beauty of life as a common responsibility. (p. 484)

Julio Ortega, "Spanish: 'Deep Rivers'," in World Literature Today (copyright 1979 by the University of Oklahoma Press), Vol. 53, No. 3, Summer, 1979, pp. 483-84.

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The Indigenista Fiction of José Maria Arguedas

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On Arguedas' Poetry