Gender and Mestizaje in the Andes
[In the following excerpt, Archibald explores Arguedas's tendency to use mestizo characters as symbols of merging influences, and sexual lust and impropriety as symbolic of the Andean migration to the coast with a “redemptive anarchy” that was transforming Peru.]
JOSé MARíA ARGUEDAS: MESTIZAJE AND SEXUALITY
Increasingly, scholars look toward novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas for help in addressing the new dimensions of Andean society. The most prominent Andean actor in Arguedas' anthropological work is the mestizo. After attending “El primer congreso internacional de peruanistas” [“The First International Congress of Peruvianists”] in 1952, Arguedas expressed disappointment with its limited focus on lo indigenista and lo hispanista. Once again the mestizo was left to the margins of Andean history, figuring ambiguously in the shadows of what were designated as the two primary Andean actors. This omission comments on the mestizo's illegitimacy and on the persistence of the strictly binary terms of colonial ideology. As the suspicion that has historically surrounded the mestizo suggests, illegitimacy possesses enormous subversive potential. Rather like underground figures, Arguedas comments that they inspire debate and controversy, but no official study. He remarks on the incongruity of this exclusion in a society where mestizos increasingly represent a majority of the population and are, he believes, its most active protagonists. Arguedas stresses the urgency of this issue with unusual severity. He writes that “el estudio del mestizo es uno de los más importantes de los que la antropología está obligada a emprender en el Perú” (1975:2) [“attention to the mestizo is one of the most important studies that anthropology should undertake”]. This apprehension of the increasingly pivotal social role played by the mestizo is overwhelmingly relevant to contemporary Peru, and certainly counts among Arguedas' most important anthropological contributions.
Arguedas not only promoted the study of mestizos, but his own writing is the product of a profoundly mestizo consciousness. It is this consciousness that has allowed him to give expression to a reality that seems to elude articulation. The historian Nelson Manrique comments on this quality of Arguedas' work:
Creo que uno de los hechos centrales que han multiplicado la vigencia de Arguedas es que, de alguna manera, sentimos que él expresa problemas fundamentales, que tienen que ver con nuestra propia identidad. Es decir que no habría ese problema si, para entender qué es lo andino, bastara con que nos hiciésemos la introspección. Pero precisamente la imposibilidad de entendernos sólo mirando hacia adentro, hace per cibir que en Arguedas hay un conjunto de elementos que se nos escapan y que son tanto más complejos, porque no es simplemente que Argueas sea la voz de los indígenas. …
(1991: 57)
[I believe that one of the central factors that has multiplied the relevance of Arguedas is that, in some way, we feel that he expresses fundamental problems which are related to our own identity. That is to say that this problem would not exist if, in order to understand what it means to be Andean, introspection was enough. But precisely the impossibility of understanding ourselves by looking within, makes it clear that in Arguedas there are a group of elements which escape our understanding and which are quite complex because Arguedas is not simply the voice of the Indian. …]
Over the past fifteen years or so scholars have begun to reevaluate Arguedas' intellectual production, pointing to its nearly prophetic quality. Arguedas had previously often been categorized as a nostalgic indigenista writer. There is one aspect of Arguedas' writing, however, that has received very scant critical attention: his representation of sexuality. This representation is not secondary but rather central to his understanding of mestizaje. From the figure of Marcelina in Los ríos profundos to the homosexual rapes in El sexto, to the series of debased sexual practices detailed in Amor mundo, sexuality figures as a central trauma around which narrative activity converges.
Arguedas' most well-known novel, Los ríos profundos, tells the story of the maturation of Ernesto, a boy attending a boarding school in the Andes. The school is responsible for the production of good Peruvian citizens. This takes place not only in school lessons, and in the school games between “Chile” and “Peru,” reliving and correcting the traumatic defeat of the Peruvians in the War of the Pacific in 1883, but also in the unacknowledged yet tolerated sexual abuse of a demented woman, Marcelina, that occurs every night by the schoolboys. At one point in the novel a group of mestiza women lead a rebellion against the privileged whites for hoarding salt. The leader of that rebellion, doña Felipa, is wearing a yellow shawl. The shawl passes from doña Felipa to the demented woman Marcelina—an event that symbolizes the subversion of the heroic narrative about the mestizas. After her death by the plague, Ernesto refers to Marcelina with the epithet of respect, “doña Marcelina,” and feels that he is “casi un heroe” [“almost a hero”]. It is a hideous romance, dating back to the violence and subjugation of the Spanish conquest, and one that according to Arguedas continues to be central to the Andean psyche.
Mario Vargas Llosa comments that Arguedas' narratives display “una fascinación por lo asqueroso” [“a fascination for the disgusting”] (Vargas Llosa 1980:5-28). His comment rings true and addresses a central aspect of Arguedas' writing that many critics, reluctant to relinquish more stabilizing interpretive practices, have often chosen to overlook. Yet it is less as Vargas Llosa intimates, a matter of individual idiosyncrasy, than a confrontation of desire constituted in a violent colonial history. Arguedas addresses the force of ideological fictions, the way they constitute desire and motivate actors. Sexual abuse is a recurring theme in all indigenista writing. Typically, as I have mentioned, it serves as an ideological denunciation of a neo-colonial order, delegitimizing the “false” criollo nationalist. In Arguedas' work sexuality plays a far more complex function. At the end of Los rios profundos, as Ernesto is fleeing from the Andean school, he runs across the hut of two sisters:
La mayor levantó la aguja hacia la luz. … Ví entonces el ano de la niña, y su sexo pequeñito, cubierto de bolsas blancas, de granos enormes de piques; las bolsas blancas colgaban como en el trasero de los chanchos, de los más asqueroso y abandonados de ese valle meloso. … La hermana mayor empezó a afilar un cuchillo.
(1958: 248)
[The older one raised the needle to the light. … Then I saw that the little girl's anus, her little private parts, were covered with enormous, white, insect-bidden swellings; the white sacs hung down as they did from the rear quarters of the filthiest, most abandoned hogs in that treacly valley. … The older sister began to sharpen a knife.
(1978: 227)]
This is a disorienting scene that compresses the grotesque with the gentleness of a sisterly bond. Sexual debasement takes on an endemic quality and is suggestively conflated with the plague that is spreading across the Andes at the novel's conclusion.
In many, perhaps most, of Arguedas' works, sexuality is a force that disrupts a stable social narrative. It is frequently grotesque or disgusting. Before we limit, as does Vargas Llosa, our understanding of this narrative tendency to a matter of Arguedas' personal idiosyncrasy we should keep in mind that, as cultural critic Laura Kipnis writes, “Disgust has a long and complicated history, the context within which should be placed the increasingly strong tendency of the bourgeoisie to want to remove the distasteful from the sight of society. …” (Kipnis 1992:377). Just as the heroic symbol of the yellow shawl is displaced from the mestiza leader to the plague-ridden body of Marcelina, Arguedas it seems cannot sustain high discourse—particularly when dealing with matters of romantic interest. At one point in Los ríos profundos, one of Ernesto's fellow students asks him to write a love letter on his behalf to a criollo town girl. After writing the letter Ernesto is immediately reminded of those indigenous women who do not read or write, “Jacinta o Justina, Malicacha o Felisa” (Arguedas 1985:84), and that cultural heritage rendered voiceless by print culture.
It is not, however, simply a matter of cultural difference that Arguedas portrays. In his representations of sexuality, gender and ethnic differences overlap in highly complex and conflicting ways. Several of the short stories collected in Amor Mundo portray this quite vividly (Arguedas 1967). In “El horno viejo,” a boy's relative forces himself on a woman whose husband is out of town. Not only is he committing incest—she is his aunt by marriage—but the man has insisted that the boy, Santiago, accompany him. Though Santiago is only nine years old, the older man tells him that “[h]as de ser hombre esta noche” [“tonight you must be a man”], and instructs him to listen or watch if he wishes. The scene is further complicated by the fact that the woman's two young boys—friends of Santiago—are sleeping in the same room. Counterposed to the central activity is the sound of Santiago whispering prayers. The juxtaposition of defilement and the sacred provides a sense of shock and incongruity that effectively undermines dominant or high (ideal, sacred) discourse.
Kipnis goes on to clarify the subversive character of “lo asqueroso”:
The power of grossness is predicated on its opposition from and to high discourses, themselves prophylactic against the debasements of the low (the lower classes, vernacular discourses, low culture, shit …). And it is dominant ideology itself that works to enforce and reproduce this opposition—whether in producing class differences, somatic symbols, or culture.
(376)
This “power of grossness” is evident throughout Arguedas' narratives. Another short story titled “La huerta” tells the story of a demented chola (mestiza), Marcelina. Marcelina shows her “parte vergonzosa al chico” [“shameful part to the boy”] and says, “Voy a orinar para tíf” [“I am going to urinate for you”]. This is then referred to as “la suciedad sin remedio …” [“dirtiness without remedy”] (26). Why should “dirtiness without remedy” provide such a disruptive and even a liberating effect? Mary Douglas' classic study, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966), offers some insightful suggestions. Douglas writes that “if uncleanness is matter out of place, we must approach it through order. Uncleanness or dirt is that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained” (1966:40). In Arguedas' writings, uncleanness or grossness disrupts the “pattern” of the neocolonial order, belying the violence and conflict underlying its overt code of romantic love. Ethnicity and class are key elements in Arguedas' portraits of a degraded sexual atmosphere. As Sara Castro-Klarén points out, the women that Arguedas portrays are generally from lower classes, invariably of mestizo or indigenous origin and nearly always of lower social standing than their male abusers (Castro-Klarén 1989). The disruptive power of grossness in Arguedas shares much in common with Bakhtin's utopian category of the carnivalesque.
While Los ríos profundos tells the story of the maturation of a young man, it might nevertheless be characterized as an anti-bildungsroman. As in most of Arguedas' writing, the traumatic relationship to sexuality and gender trips up the protagonist's accession to subjective unity. This failure to achieve an autonomous subjectivity, however, has a curative function. Subject effects are interrogated in a way that resembles what Julia Kristeva calls “the infinite dissolution of desire” (Kristeva 1987:62). The curative effect of Arguedas' narratives is similar to her description of the psychoanalytic process insofar as it interrogates psychic investments in a way that acknowledges and acquiesces to the subject's constitution in alterity.
There is one notable exception to this tendency in Arguedas' work. In his novel, Todas las sangres, the class, ethnic, and gender tensions that pervade his other portraits of Andean culture are greatly diminished. When the traditional misti (Andean landowner) Don Bruno leads the Indian masses in revolt against the new bourgeois landowner, Arguedas provides the unlikely event of a reformed misti, and a decidedly reactionary version of national authenticity. Plot resolutions of a similar type occur with respect to gender and sexuality. At the beginning of Todas las sangres sexuality is deeply problematic. Not only are the issues of class and ethnicity raised by Don Bruno's past relationship with a servant woman, but once again the specter of the deformed or the grotesque is present by virtue of the fact that she is a dwarf. By the novel's conclusion, however, the fundamental threat of sexuality to subjecthood and social coherence is resolved. Don Bruno eventually marries the mulatta woman he had taken as his lover, redeeming past sins and establishing a social model. To use Doris Sommer's terminology, Todas las sangres is Arguedas' only novel to offer a foundational fiction (Sommers 1988).
Political realities perhaps best account for this compromise on Arguedas' part. Arguedas wrote Todas las sangres in 1963 amidst an atmosphere of social euphoria that accompanied Fernando Belaunde's election as president. For the first time, Peru had a government that promised to be attentive to popular demands. At Belaunde's request, Arguedas assumed the position of the director of the Casa de la Cultura de Peru. Yet Belaunde never challenged the privileges of elite sectors in any serious way, nor did he manage to achieve the strategic support necessary to bring about the social changes he promised. The novel's fantasy of historical continuity is perfectly consistent with this tepid populism. In 1965, Todas las sangres was the focus of a roundtable discussion (Arguedas 1985). The novel was subjected to vituperative criticism, by sociologists in particular. These sociologists complained about the confusing and anachronistic character of the novel. Ironically, thirty-five years later, if Todas las sangres seems flawed it is not because it is confusing but because it is all too tidy. The rich and conflicting ambiguity that pervades Arguedas' other texts is here “cleaned up” and put into order for the sake of a particular nationalist engagement.
“UNCLEANNESS IS MATTER OUT OF PLACE”—MARY DOUGLAS
Andean emigration to Lima has certainly challenged criollo social imagination. In the 1950s and 1960s scholars referred to the Andean settlements that ringed the city as “cinturones de miseria” [“poverty belts”]. This emigration was viewed as wholly negative, as a loss of Andean culture on the one hand and as a failure to achieve vital modernization on the other. Nowhere is this particular response to the Andean urban presence more clearly illustrated than in the novel, Historia de Mayta, by Mario Vargas Llosa (Vargas Llosa 1984). The novel is set in modern Peru and reads almost like a detective story, attempting to makes sense of a very confusing present by recuperating the past. The narrator undertakes a series of interviews that he hopes will uncover what really happened in the life of a revolutionary twenty-five years earlier. Along the way he comes across many aspects of contemporary Peru, including the Andean urban presence. The narrator comments, “Por momentos, tengo la impresión de no estar en Lima ni en la costa sino en una aldea de los Andes: ojota, polleras, ponchos, chalecos con llamitas bordadas, diálogos en quechua. Viven realament mejor en esta hediondez y en esta mugre que en los caseríos serranos que han abandonado … ?” (Vargas Llosa 1984: 62-63) [“From time to time I have the impression that I'm not in Lima or even on the coast but in some village in the Andes: sandals, Indian skirts, ponchos, vests with llamas embroidered on them, dialogues in Quechua. Do they really live better in this stink and scum than in the mountain villages they have abandoned … ?”]. These Andeans are here clearly out of place and, as the reference to “stink” and “scum” indicates, filth and disorder are inextricably related. Garbage is one of the most prominent themes in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta: “Y recuerdo, entonces, que hace un año comencé a fabular esta historia mencionando, como la termino, las basuras que van invadiendo los barrios de la capital del Perú” (1984:346) [“I remember that a year ago I began to concoct this story the same way I'm ending it, by speaking about the garbage that's invading every neighborhood in the capital of Peru”] (1986:310). Notwithstanding the fact that in contemporary Peru the state fails to fulfill some of the most basic services—such as garbage collection—the attention to filth is not simply literal. It coincides with what José Matos Mar calls “un nuevo mestizaje de predominante colorido andino” (79) [“a new mestizaje of a predominantly Andean color”]. Matos Mar describes how this Andean presence has “reducido a los sectores medios y opulentos a una situación de insularidad en sus barrios residenciales” (76) [“reduced the middle and opulent sectors to a situation of insularity in their residential neighborhoods”]. Peppered with words such as “invasión” [“invasion”] and “la capture” [“the capture”], Matos Mar celebrates the subversive character of Andean emigration. Ever the representative of the hegemonic order for Vargas Llosa by contrast these emigrants are simply out of place. Unlike Arguedas, where disorder frequently has a curative effect, for Vargas Llosa it is highly dystopic, disrupting the dominant ideologies with which he views the world.
Given Vargas Llosa's ideological leanings it is not surprising perhaps that he consistently misreads Arguedas. Since Andean culture for Vargas Llosa is “primitive,” it follows that a revindication of Andean culture would necessarily be a nostalgic gesture. Arguedas' work, however, stands as a powerful critique of the binary terms of neo-colonial ideology. His final novel, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, deals specifically with the urban reality of modern Peru, so drastically transformed by Andean emigration. It takes place in the coastal town of Chimbote where the population, due to a booming fishmeal industry, grew from four thousand to one hundred thousand almost overnight. The text alternates between the author's suicide diaries and the narration about Chimbote—establishing an irreducible heterogeneity. This heterogeneity is furthered by other aspects of the text, namely the conjunction of coastal and Andean culture. Also, Arguedas' representation of sexuality continues to resist containment by dominant discourses. The narration about Chimbote begins in a brothel. The brothel is a stage for the racial diversity of urban Peru, the place where a new mestizaje, as Matos Mar calls it, takes form. Once again the way that mestizaje coincides with an underside of sexuality precludes a sense of social and discursive propriety. It is precisely this subversion of propriety that offers social promise. In a letter to anthropologist John Murra, Arguedas comments about his final work and conveys the type of redemptive anarchy he felt the new forces represent: “Si alcanzo a mejorar, podré escribir una narración sobre Chimbote y Supe que será como sorber en un licor bien fuerte la sustancia del Perú hirviente de estos días, su ebullición y los materiales quemantes con que el licor está formado” (Arguedas 1990:380) [“If I manage to get better, I will be able to write a text about Chimbote and Supe that will be like sipping in a very strong liquor the boiling substance of Peru these days, its bubbling quality and the burning ingredients with which the liquor is formed”].
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