Carmelo Virgillo

SOURCE: "Primitivism in Latin American Fiction," in The Ibero-American Enlightenment, edited by A. Owen Aldridge, University of Illinois Press, 1971, pp. 243-55.

[In the following essay, Virgillo examines the distorted image of the Native American in romantic Latin American literature of the nineteenth century.]

L'enfant de la nature abhorre l'esclavage;
Implacable ennemi de toute authorité,
Il s'indigne du joug; la contrainte l'outrage;
Liberté c'est son voeu; son cri c'est liberté.
Au mépris des liens de la société,
Il réclame en secret son antique apanage.
Les Éleuthéromanes—1772

These lines, written over two centuries ago, on the eve of the French Revolution, upheld the Indian as the product of a happy primeval society—a tangible dream for the freedom-starved European who longed to cut the bonds of social injustice. Today it is difficult to think of anybody who has been more abused and enjoys less autonomy than the American Indian, who, far from having impressed anything on the white man, remains, no doubt, the least recognized and understood inhabitant of the New World. This tragic fact is particularly true of most of Latin America, where the primitive who once was absolute master of his surroundings is today either extinct or excluded, a stranger in his own country. Ironically, his survival depends largely, if not exclusively, on his giving up the little land still in his possession and on his merging into the mainstream of modern, urban-minded civilization which refuses to understand the primitive's plight for his freedom and independence.

In spite of the efforts of today's writers to present a realistic picture of the Indian, most of us still rely on the stereotyped version fashioned by nineteenth-century romantic literature, and this, in general, has been the downfall of the oldest native American.

After briefly outlining the earliest misconceptions surrounding the primitive, and discussing the role France played in creating the myth of the Noble Savage, we shall examine four representative romantic Latin American novels in an effort to show this distorted image and the consequences of such a distortion. The novels are José de Alencar's 0 Guarani (1857) and Iracema (1865, Brazil), Juan León Mera's Cumandd (1879, Ecuador), and ZorriIla de San Martin's Tabare (1886, Uruguay).

As far as we know, the misconceptions about the Indian date back to 1492, when Columbus returned to Spain with six tribal dignitaries dressed in full regalia and presented this stereotyped group as the definitive image of the native inhabitant of the New World. In the ensuing years, the primitive was paraded through Europe, where he came to be regarded as a real curiosity, while reports from the New World were so subjective and far-fetched as to create more confusion than anything else about the Indian. France, from the start, took a special interest in the primitive, and soon the poets of the Plefade were singing the praises of the "enfant de la Nature," idealizing him but not really shedding any light on him or his society. Montaigne, however, was to take a more realistic look at the primitive, and, after meeting some Tupinamba Indians from Brazil at the court of Charles IX in Rouen, was so impressed with their wisdom and simplicity that he came to regard the American aborigine as the epitome of instinctive goodness, which he claimed resulted from an ideal free society close to God because it was close to Nature. Thus began the myth of the Noble Savage, and there are those who report that Montaigne, inspired by his encounter with the savages and by their account of society in the wilderness, was to trace a clear outline of what was later defined as "class struggle" and "social revolution."

It wasn't, however, until the Enlightenment that the primitive and his society became the center of much interest, particularly in France, where, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the original sketch of Montaigne had become the blueprint of a real social revolution in the works of the enlightened philosophes. In Rousseau's Discours (1750) and three years later in his Discours sur l'ingalite parmi les hommes the primitive appears definitely established as the embodiment of natural goodness and representative of an ideal equalitarian society from which the white civilized man had much to learn. Obviously, what Rousseau really advocated was not that civilized man adopt the savage and his society but that the distorted product of an unjust, unnatural society become undistorted, keeping all the virtues of civilization but at the same time returning to the simplicity of the primitive. Unfortunately, Rousseau was taken literally, and a generation of eleutheromanes, or nature maniacs, came into being. As we all know, many of these fled the shores of Europe to seek shelter in the world of the savage, only to return to their native countries shocked and disillusioned by cold reality. As I see it, the situation did not become critical for the primitive until this disillusionment affected the arts, particularly literature. We see this in Chateaubriand, who, upon his return from North America, disenchanted with the natives and with the perils of his journey to the wilderness, refashioned in his works both the primitive and his environment to fit his neurotic self in search of an imaginary world. Thus begins the systematic destruction of the oldest native American. For, too intent on recreating the beauty of the exotic settings in which he had wished to become lost but had failed, and set on forgetting the primitive he had actually met, Chateaubriand turned the native into a prop whose main purpose was to highlight the scenery and give vent to the writer's "mal du siecle." In short, Rousseau's happy Indian had been replaced by a sad would-be Indian whose only real identity lay in his feathers and moccasins.

In American primitivist fiction this image is paramount in the works of James Fenimore Cooper and other Indianist writers inspired by him in whose hands the Noble Savage becomes the tool of sentimentalism. Conforming to romantic tradition, the primitive is cast as a rebel fighting the oppressing forces of civilization, namely the white man, who wants to enslave him and deprive him of his natural freedom. As one might have expected, the Indian hero is fashioned after his white European counterpart, thus conforming to the white man's standards of valor, intelligence, and physical prowess. However, alongside this "noble" savage there appears a "savage" savage who couples the worst elements of the white villain of romantic European tradition with the least desirable traits of his own race. He is deceitful, animalistic, ignorant of the white man's ways, and unwilling to bow to the conquistador. He is labeled as a bad Indian, therefore a nonentity.

In the same tradition of his North American brother, the Latin American primitive appears in nineteenth-century fiction as possessing the instinctive natural goodness attributed to him by Rousseau and the fatalistic, hypersensitive, and quasi-pathological personality created for him by Chateaubriand. Unreal as this fictional primitive might sound, he fulfilled an urgent need for the Latin American countries, which had just achieved independence from Spain and Portugal. A national literature had to be created to unite the indigenous elements in each country. In view of the fact that no one had been subjected more to the treachery of the European colonists than the Indian, he was the logical choice for a symbol of national identity in the struggle against the foreign invader. What better opportunity to clear the conscience of the wealthy oligarchy and forge a national tradition at the same time than to turn the clock on the mistreatment of the primitive and place the blame for this on the founding fathers—the European conquistadores who had started abusing the primitive centuries before! Ironically, it was the powerful land-owning intellectuals of Latin America, converted for the occasion into romantic writers, who brought the Indian skeleton out of the closet hoping to redeem him artistically. The result was the creation of an unbelievable Indian who might be called a combination Tonto and René.

Thus a literature was born filled with disconsolate, frustrated primitives whose main problem seemed to stem from their inability to mix with the white race. This sentimentalism appealed, no doubt, to the sensitive feelings of the lady of the mansion who would while away her time enthralled by heart-warming tales of ill-fated friendships between Indians and whites. She had plenty of time to do this, for in her household and out in the fields numerous Indians slaved away to provide her with wealth and leisure. In Brazil many hearts among the land-grabbing upper classes must have been stirred by José de Alencar's sentimental novels filled with touching scenes of brotherly love between white Portuguese noblemen and their Indian companions. Taking a closer look at this relationship one notices, however, that the Noble Savage as portrayed in these works, though physically compatible with his natural environment, is otherwise fashioned after the white man's conception of the romantic hero. In short, on the outside he may be a primitive, but inwardly he is a European with all the attributes of white nobility. In 0 Guarani, Indian Peri, a handsome son of the wilderness, saves the life of Cecilia, daughter of the Portuguese fidalgo Dom Antonio de Mariz, who therefore befriends the Indian because down deep Peri is a nobleman in the body of a savage. On another occasion the Indian's intelligence is praised: vigorous as the vegetation of his native soil, says Alencar, Peri is guided by common sense and prudence worthy of civilized man. After another act of supreme altruism, Dom Antonio is carried away by his enthusiasm and tells Peri that his deeds would classify him as a veritable fidalgo, then throws his arms around the Indian and assures him that his savage heart should not feel ashamed to beat over the heart of a Portuguese nobleman. As can be seen here, contrary to the enlightened man's concept that true nobility, symbolizing virtue, comes naturally to the unspoiled savage, it would appear that it is instead an attribute associated with civilized man in general and white European aristocracy in particular. At best all the primitive can expect is to equal it.

If in the romantic Indianist novel, supposedly fostering national unity, the author's intention was to advocate a harmonious coexistence of all the inhabitants of his country, no trace of this can be seen in the four works representing the very best in their genre. Definitely not in 0 Guarani, where Indian Peri is portrayed as a misanthrope who prefers to live a sad and lonely existence in a cabin near the white settlement of Dom Antonio. Peri saves Cecilia from the hostile Indians at whose hands her family perishes but declines her invitation to go live with her in Rio, certain that he could not survive in the world of civilized man. In Iracema Martim marries an Indian maiden and settles in her world. He soon discovers, however, that the wilderness and the accompanying bucolic life are not meant for a civilized Portuguese. He returns to civilization with his child and his Indian companion, proving that if the Indian cannot get along in the white man's world, the same is true of civilized man, who has no alternative but to put up with the ills of his complex white world.

In Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, happiness for the American Negro is defined as being sheltered by a devout white patriarch who teaches him how to sing religious hymns, behave like a child, and learn what is good for him. Thus Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man is reinterpreted to mean the rights of the non white to imitate the white. What started as a sentimental novel has come to mold the Negro's image in the eyes of the majority of white Americans. May we suggest that the Latin American counterpart, the romantic Indianist novel, did just as great an injustice to the primitive south of the border.

In Juan León Mera's Cumandá, one is shown what happiness means to the Záparo tribesmen inhabiting the reducción of Fray Orozco. The once-proud Indian warriors appear as a community of zombies who have switched from an Indian cacique to blind obedience to a white Dominican friar of whom they must ask permission before they can take one step. As we recall, attending pagan tribal festivities for the Ziparos becomes a major issue until Orozco's son Carlos decides to attend and the Indians are allowed to go. Let us remember that such Dominican reducciones were a very poor substitute for the Jesuit Latin American utopias which Spain and Portugal had seen fit to eliminate for a number of reasons. Foremost, it would seem, was the threat which the enlightened Christianity of the Society of Jesus posed to those two powers who, far from wishing to educate the savage and bring about his self-sufficiency, preferred instead to make him dependent on them to better exploit him.

According to the pattern of the primitivist novel in Latin America, the difference between a human being and an Indian is almost always determined by the savage's acceptance of the orthodox Christian faith, which will raise him from the rank of tigre to that of hermano. This is not really saying that he is elevated to the status of the white man. In military terms one might call an Indian convert a noncommissioned officer. Spain's destiny, claims Zorrilla de San Martin in Tabare, was to fight the savage monster that lurked in the New World and bring Christianity into the wilderness. Tabare is outstanding among his tribesmen, not because he is a blue-eyed mestizo, but more because deep inside his savage body there beats a Christian heart, for his white mother was a Christian. Likewise, Cumandi's Christian faith sets her apart from the Indians who raised her, and she remains unbelievably pure and angelical in the midst of the wildest savages a writer's mind could possibly conceive.

Christian salvation invariably serves as the deus ex machina of the sentimentalist novel, providing the author with the opportunity of gathering the loose ends of his plot while carrying the melodrama to its inevitable climax. In Iracema Martim, realizing that becoming an Indian warrior has brought down a divine curse upon him and his Indian bride, who eventually dies, rejoins Christianity more fervently than ever, and for good measure converts even his good Indian friend Poti. In 0 Guarani Peri accepts conversion to Christianity on the spot in order to escape from his master's burning home and be allowed to carry Cecilia with him to safety. Christianity plays an important role also in the denouement of Cumandd. The heroine, really Fray Orozco's daughter Julia, loses her life in a horrible sacrifice while Orozco, whose timely arrival could save her, gives top priority to converting Indian Tongana, spending precious hours to save his soul.

As one can see, the Enlightenment's Noble Savage—instinctively good, naturally free, and socially independent—is reshaped in Latin American fiction to fit the image of an animal on trial whose redemption depends on serving God in Heaven and white man on earth, being protected and guided by both. Having come to this conclusion, one naturally assumes that under such tutelage the Indian lived happily ever after.

In much the same fashion as television and movie writers nowadays create productions filled with Negro neurosurgeons and Oxford-educated Indians, Latin American landowner-writers filled their books with noble, disproportionate Indian chiefs suffering from mal du siecle and not necessarily social injustice. This expedient is an easy way out because it allows the sentimentalist writer to blame everything on fate without having to suggest any solution to the racial conflicts that were the core of his plots. Moreover, the writer points to the revolt of the oppressed—the primitive—as a source of divine as well as human punishment, thus advocating the status quo in a genre that should suggest revolutionary measures. This is evidenced in Cumandd, in which the 1790 Indian uprising in Ecuador is seen by Mera as having brought down the wrath of God upon thousands of innocent people, among whom are some of his characters. From this it would appear evident that the Latin American Indian is doomed and his fate considered inevitable and quietly accepted as such.

If one examines closely the ill-fated, marked-for-death protagonists of a romantic primitivist novel one cannot help but notice the following cliche: to be an Indian, to have any Indian blood, or to become involved with an Indian engenders cataclysmic results, as it brings down divine wrath. In reality, this can only be interpreted as the social stigma placed upon the primitive by the writer. It is quite interesting to note how consistent this cliche is in Latin American primitivist fiction. Indian Peri's love for Cecilia causes her death as God suddenly sends down a horrible deluge that drowns the ill-fated lovers just as they are about to fulfill their dream. In Iracema Martim's love for the Indian vestal is the cause of the near extermination of her family as well as the cause of her own death.

If love between the members of two cultures—the Indian and the white—leads to disaster, no better fated is the fruit of that love: the mestizo. While in romantic European literature the hero is ordinarily forced by fate to pay for an unintentional yet unpardonable sin, in Latin American romanticism this victim of fate is the mestizo, and his unforgivable sin is his mistake of racial integration. As we see, the primitivist who claims to be writing a national epic based on the union of the two cultures, the European and Indian, is actually doing no more nor less than painting a bleak picture of such a union. It would appear from this genre that the Latin American hybrid race has resulted from an unfortunate set of circumstances which could not be avoided or helped since they were predetermined by destiny. While on the one hand the North American James Fenimore Cooper does not try to conceal his disapproval of racial integration, the Latin American primitivist shows greater subtlety in dealing with this issue. According to Leslie A. Fiedler, Cooper rejects the idea of marriage even in Heaven between white Cora and Indian Uncas in The Last of the Mohicans, thus making his position quite clear. Hypocritically, Cooper's Latin American counterpart will strongly endorse the union of his racially incompatible lovers after death, although seldom if ever allowing them to marry on earth. This is evidenced in 0 Guarani where Isabel, the sensual, illegitimate mestizo daughter of Dom Antônio, shows the indelible traits of her race: she is madly in love with a white nobleman, Dom Alvaro. When he reciprocates this feeling, he is immediately punished by José de Alencar, who sends him off to die at the hands of non-Christian Indians. Isabel then chooses to poison herself and lies down next to Alvaro to achieve in death what was impossible in life. Dom Antônio also pays with his life for having loved the Indian maiden who was Isabel's mother. Similarly, Tabar6's blond, blue-eyed mother dies as the result of her abduction and physical union with the mighty Indian chief Carace. Tabere makes the mistake of falling in love with a white girl, and this is enough to bring upon him the usual curse that marks him for inevitable death. In Cumandd the heroine dies as a result of her marriage to Indian warrior Yahuarmaqui.

The fear of miscegenation seems to haunt the Latin American primitivist writer. Poorly concealed behind unfulfilled love, this fear is evident in almost every plot and could not fool even the least-aware reader. Death, however, is the writer's check valve, and he uses it generously to prevent physical union from occurring while he appropriately remains within the boundaries of romantic tradition. When Christianized Peri is finally alone in the jungle with his beloved Cecilia, death surprises them in the form of a deluge which, with biblical implications, cleanses the evil which is about to be committed on earth. The pair die unfulfilled but pure. Julia Orozco also dies by water before her marriage to Yahuarmaqui is consummated. Mestizo Tabare and Blanca will never be joined in marriage because a sword puts an end to Tabare's life at the very moment when Blanca might have been able to make a plea for her noble savior. However, Tabare is allowed to die in Blanca's arms in the presence of a sympathetic monk, which should be of some consolation to him. An unusual circumstance is employed in Alencar's Iracema to justify physical union between two races. Martim first implores Christ to save him from succumbing to the Indian maiden Iracema's passionate advances. When this fails to work Martim then begs the maiden herself to put him to sleep with her magic potion that can induce wishful dreams. This precursor of LSD eventually accomplishes what Martim's conscious mind would never have allowed.

Undoubtedly the Latin American primitivists all agree on the strong attraction between the Indian and the white man, and this is made obvious by the contrast between the physical characteristics of the lovers. To be sure, the white maidens are depicted more along the lines of Sir Walter Scott's fair lasses than the rugged, southern, dark-skinned Spanish and Portuguese belles. Peri is spellbound by the divine features of Cecilia, the stereotyped white conquistadora—very blond, blue-eyed, and ethereal. For her he rejects his most beautiful Indian maidens and even leaves his mother. Isabel, half-Indian and quite dark, confesses that she envies Cecilia's fair features and deep inside hates the Indian in herself, a hatred which she turns against Indian Peri. Peri, recognizing why he is hated, cannot help but hate her. By the same token, chief Yahuarmaqui chooses white Cumanda over hundreds of maidens to be his favorite wife. Writer Mera states openly that Cumanda's superior beauty sets her apart from her fellow tribesmen. Zorrilla de San Martin would have one believe that Tabare feels attracted to Blanca because he sees in her the Virgin Mary-like image of his own mother. Actually, what the writer has in mind and is afraid to express is the plight of the unfortunate mestizo who would like to forget the Indian half of him and is desperately attracted to the fair race.

Reinforcing our proposition that the Noble Savage in romantic Latin American literature is but a mere artistic creation of little human consequence, Emilio Carilla states: "El indio aparece—literariamente—defendido, idealizado, pero no exactamente como ideal de vida o cultura."

In short, the Indian is seen as a tool of the sentimentalist writer who uses the primitive as a bad copy of the white man. The Noble Savage's salvation, as nineteenth-century romantic Indianist fiction suggests, is seen as his adaptation to the world of his white master, whose characteristics he must inherit if he is to survive. For it is the Noble Savage who must conform to the distorted society of the European and not the other way around, as Montaigne and later the French encyclopedists advocated. To be sure, the corrupt and class-conscious society which the eighteenth-century philosophes condemned so vehemently appears to have been transplanted to the once-peaceful wilderness of the New World. The native American described by Diderot and his fellow encyclopedists as the "implacable ennemi de toute authorite" would appear in the works discussed in this paper as a subculture resigned by fate to play second fiddle to blond, blue-eyed consquistadores, envious of the master's white skin and desperate to lose its native traits. These traits, sentimentalist novelists would have one believe, the Noble Savage would gladly relinquish for the chance to be a little less dark, less pagan, less instinctive, less free, less natural, less Indian. The Noble Savage, as portrayed in Latin American primitivist fiction, is an allegory rather than a human being of flesh and blood. He is an abstraction symbolizing both evil and virtue, as some fictional Indians are made out to be more savage than others, but always stereotyped and unreal. In the melee it is difficult to imagine what the Noble Savage is really like, and, since most of us have still to understand him as an individual with his own particular needs and desires, it is easier for us to keep on destroying him physically just as he has been destroyed artistically.

Braulio Mufioz

SOURCE: "The Indian and the Literary Tradition" in Sons of the Wind: The Search for Identity in Spanish American Indian Literature, Rutgers University Press, 1982, pp. 33-74.

[Muiioz is a Peruvian-born American writer and educator who wrote his book Sons of the Wind, as a response to "the almost total neglect of the Indians'point of view in the understanding of Latin American culture." In the following excerpt from that work Mu;ioz discusses the pre-Columbian origins of the indigenista novel.]

The treatment of the Indian in indigenista novels is the culmination of a long literary tradition developed by Indian, Spanish, and Spanish American writers. Over the centuries, this tradition has shown important continuities as well as ruptures caused by different views of the Indian and his world. The main continuities and ruptures in the literary tradition up to the end of the nineteenth century are discussed in this chapter with reference to the underlying social factors that affected them. Before proceeding, however, it is important to state as clearly as possible who is considered Indian in this work in order to avoid a possible misunderstanding of the discussion that follows.

Figures concerning the actual size of the Indian population before the Spanish conquest vary, and no definitive one has been reached; estimates range from about 13 million to about 150 million. What is certain is that a large number of Indians died during the first decades of colonial rule due to massacres, plagues, and forced labor. Calculations prepared by the Berkeley school of historians and demographers show that in Central Mexico alone there were an estimated 25,200,000 Indians in 1519, the year Cortes landed in Veracruz; 13 years later, there were 16,800,000 Indians left. By 1580,60 years after the conquest, the Indian population had been reduced to only 1,900,000! These figures give an idea of the genocide that accompanied the conquest of Spanish America.

Despite the tremendous demographic collapse, Indians were able to endure. This was particularly the case where they had developed large and integrated societies; that is to say, in the regions generally referred to as nuclear America: the Andes zone in South America, Central America, and central and southern Mexico. After the first centuries of colonial rule, the bulk of the Indian population was circumscribed in these areas, where their demographic density made possible the retention of their culture as they retreated from the coastal regions to the less accessible highlands. Where their numbers were small, as in large portions of present-day Argentina, for example, the Indians dissolved both culturally and biologically into the mestizo within the first centuries of colonial domination.

Population estimates of present-day Indians also vary. Some argue that there are only about 10 million Indians left in Spanish America compared with about 160 million or so whites and mestizos. But these estimates should be viewed with caution, for there is no general agreement as to who is Indian in Spanish America. Are, for example, those who walk barefoot Indians? Those who do not speak Spanish? Those who are dark? Those who dress like Indians? Indeed, as it has been pointed out by several writers, figures concerning existing Indian populations vary according to the criteria each investigator uses in calculations.

There are three basic criteria for classifying a person as an Indian: biological, cultural, and social. Biologically speaking, there are few pure Indians in Spanish America; yet, phenotypically speaking, no one can deny their great number in the area. In fact, were Spanish Americans to classify Indians phenotypically, as blacks are classified in the United States, for example, the majority of Spanish Americans could be classified as Indian; Haya de la Torre and his followers based their claim for an Indo-America on these grounds. The biologic basis for classification does not, however, do justice to the complexity of the Indian problem in Spanish America. Phenotypic characteristics are crucial classification factors only when used in conjunction with other cultural and social criteria.

The interpretation of the Indian problem as a cultural one has been widespread in Spanish America since the first years of indigenismo, the movement whose goal was to redeem the Indian. Racial prejudice, it has been argued, is really cultural prejudice. If Indians were to learn Spanish, dress in western fashion, and so forth, they would cease to be Indian and become mestizo; their Indianness would fall off like a change of skin. No doubt, this view of the Indian problem has some basis in reality, but it ignores too much. Deculturation is not sufficient for a change of skin. As a mestizo, the deculturated Indian will still be discriminated against by the whiter population and remain at the bottom of his nation's economic ladder.

The noble battle waged by indigenistas against those who argued for a biological interpretation of the Indian problem soon became spurious. For sociologically speaking, one of the things to remember when dealing with discrimination in Spanish America is that there are people who look, think, feel, and live differently from Westerners and who are considered Indians by these Westerners. While it may be true that pure Indians are slowly facing biological extinction, be it through intermarriage or rape, it is also true that less pure Indians encounter discrimination in Spanish America because of their phenotypic appearance. Sociologists would do well to remember W. I. Thomas's insight: If the situation is defined as real, it is real in its consequences. In Spanish America, if a person is defined as Indian, he is treated as one and discriminated against whether or not he is biologically pure. Biology does play a part in discrimination in Spanish America, however mistaken its basis may be. In attempting to disprove racist arguments, adherents of the cultural conception of the Indian problem downplay its biological aspects.

Ever since the famous essays by Mariategui, there have been social scientists who argued that racial prejudice hides unequal and unjust economic relations between two groups of unequal power. This thesis, too, has basis in reality, and the most cursory view of Spanish American history bears it out. Today, for example, the majority of the poor are darker skinned than the privileged few. The Indian problem was clearly used to mask economic interests in the case of the cientificos in Mexico who, following positivist and evolutionist philosophies, argued that by natural laws the white (fittest) rose to the top of the economic ladder and the Indian (unfit) remained at the bottom. Exploiting Indians and dark mestizos for the benefit of the small oligarchic group was thus justified. But to argue from there to a purely economic interpretation of the Indian problem in Spanish America is to be guilty of bad faith, and the staunchest proponents of the thesis know this and acknowledge the limitations of their analysis. Even if racial discrimination is often fostered and sustained by the class system in Spanish America, the fact that there is discrimination based on phenotypic characteristics can not be ignored.

What seems clear is that neither of these factors alone sufficiently explains the Indian problem in Spanish America. Phenotypic characteristics and cultural prejudices make it possible to justify an unjust economic order where the Indian is usually at the bottom. Alternatively, the low economic position of the Indian supports the ruling class's negative attitude toward the Indian's culture and the phenotypic characteristics that single him out.

With these issues in mind and for the purpose of this study, I shall adopt the following criteria when referring to Indians: Indians are those so defined by the rest of the Spanish American population and who evidence phenotypic characteristics and cultural traits associated with the definition. This concept of Indianness follows from that of race as a social rather than a genetic category while at the same time allowing for the impact of phenotypic characteristics on classifying people into distinct races.

A brief excursus on pre-Columbian history is necessary for two reasons: First, the role of the writer and literature in Spanish America can be understood only when seen in its sociocultural context of which the ancient world and its demise are a part; second, many Indian novels in the nineteenth century and particularly the twentieth century cannot be understood without reference to Indian life before Columbus. The major problems of much of the research on Spanish American society and culture steam from the basically ahistoric approach of the research. What everyone knows must be rescued from what is taken for granted: The fact that the Indian's life has involved endless suffering with little or no change for the better over the centuries must not prevent historians from recounting it. We cannot close our eyes to what has been and expect to grasp what is.…

[Pre-Columbian] nuclear America was governed by a succession of small groups of people who cemented their power through force. The majority of the Indians did not enjoy the full benefit of their labor, and many suffered the consequences of being a conquered people. Even in the Andes, if the Indians were not slaves, they also were not free. It is important to keep in mind that tribute, repression, and even slavery were not brought by the Spaniards to the New World; there never was a utopia in nuclear America. The twentieth-century novelist's exaltation of pre-Columbian America hides the truth about the past in order to criticize the present more. But for all this, it must not be forgotten that the Spanish conquest cut short the development of a remarkable people and condemned them to perpetual suffering. The coming of the Europeans did not bring respite to the Indian; rather, it augmented oppression to unheard-of proportions.

The literature of nuclear America, marking the onset of Indian culture, shows a remarkable development. To be sure, as in most societies of that time (ca. 1000 B.C.-A.D. 1500), literary production and enjoyment among the Indians reflected the social stratification of the society between the aristocratic few and the rest of the population. The most accomplished pre-Columbian literature was basically a literature of theopolitical ruling classes.

From the remnants of this literary tradition, it can be deduced that pre-Columbian literature lacked what might be called a critical tendency. Tragedies, for example, which involve a close analysis of the sociocultural complexities of society are conspicuously absent. Even the fable, perhaps one of the most indirect ways of criticizing ruling powers, did not develop here in that direction. Moreover, due to its theopolitical character, thematic changes in literature within regions (for example, Aztec and Incan societies) seem to have developed as different cultures competed with one another. This is one of the factors supporting the view that cultural unity of what is now Spanish America was not even remotely considered in pre-Columbian times. Finally, it should also be noted here that pre-Columbian literature did not develop as literary genres, such as poetry, drama, epic, and so on; the Indians combined theology, medicine, history, myth, and literature in a single work.

Written pre-Columbian literature was developed to the highest degree by the Mayas. In addition to inscriptions on stone, the Mayas had a large number of sacred books or codices. Evidence so far indicates that they did not develop an alphabet; the characters of the codices represent ideas or objects rather than sounds. But like Aztec writing, Mayan writing was moving toward syllabic phonetics through the use of rebus writing, where sounds of a word are represented by combining pictures or signs of things whose spoken names resemble sounds in the words to be formed. Unfortunately, most of these codices were burned by the conquering Spanish priests; only three are extant today.

Besides written texts, the Mayas, Aztecs, Incas, and other pre-Columbian people had a large body of myths, legends, poetry, and traditional history that was transmitted orally from generation to generation. The excerpts on philosophy and art that follow are examples of the few remnants of ancient nuclear America's cultural developments. They are part of an oral tradition that was finally written down during the early days of conquest. The first text relates Quetzalcoatl's vision of Ometeotl, the dual god and fundamental being in Nahuatl cosmology. He is depicted as having a masculine countenance and features that are at the same time feminine. Ometeotl is master of what is near and far, master of everything that is. He is the origin; he dresses in stars like a maiden and vests himself in black and red, colors symbolizing wisdom.

And it is stated and said that
Quetzalcoatl called upon, as his
proper god, one who dwells in the
interior of the heaven.

He invoked her, surrounded by a skirt of stars,
him who gives light to all things;
Mistress of our flesh, lord of our flesh,
She who clothes herself in black,
He who clothes himself in red,
She who established the earth firmly,
He who gives activity to the earth.

Thither did he direct his words,
thus did he know himself,
toward the place of the duality
and of the nine crossbeams
in which the heaven consists.
And as he knew,
He called on him who dwelled there,
directed supplications to him,
living in meditation and in retirement.

The second text concerns the Aztecs' conception of knowledge, tradition, and of those who develop and transmit it. The figure of the tlamatini, he who knows something, pre-figures the more modern Spanish American writer-critic. Master of black and red, the symbols of wisdom, the tlamatini illuminates the world and man as "a full torch that does not smoke." He thinks and writes down his thoughts in the sacred books of paintings. He is a teacher who attempts to give humans a proper face, a proper personality and character so that they "become prudent and careful." He desires to know and guide his pupils on the path to the mysteries of the Upper World (Topan) and Under World (Mitlan); he shows forth his light over the world and knows what is above us and the region of the dead. It is thanks to him that men humanize their desires, fortify their hearts, and receive a strict instruction.

The tlamatini: a light, a torch,
an ample torch that does not smoke.
A mirror pierced through,
A mirror full of holes on both sides.
His is the ink black and red,
his are the codices,
he is the master of the books of paintings.
He is himself the scripture and the wisdom.
He is the way, the true guide for others.
He leads persons and things,
he is the guide in human affairs.

The good tlamatini is careful (like a doctor)
and guards the tradition.
His is the wisdom handed down,
he is the one who teaches it,
he follows the truth
and he does not desist from counseling.
he makes strange faces wise,
he makes them develop it.
He opens their ears, he illuminates them.
He is the master of guides,
he gives them their path,
and one depends on him.

He puts a mirror before the others,
he makes them prudent, and careful;
he makes them acquire a face.
He establishes things,
regulates their path,
disposes and orders.
He turns his light upon the world.
He knows that which is above us (Topan)
and the region of the dead (Mitlan).

He is a thoughtful man;
everyone is comforted by him,
is corrected, is taught.
Thanks to him, the people humanizes its desire
and received a strict instruction.

Comforter of the heart,
comforter of the people,
help and remedy,

he brings healing to all.

Among the many tlamatinimi who enlightened pre-Columbian America the best known was Nezahualcoyotl. Born in 1402, the son of a king, he became one of the most influential men of his time. He opposed the Aztecan practice of human sacrifice and the wars of flowers, while seeking the possibility of overcoming death. He searched for a root that would allow man to escape time and change. The third text shows Nezahualcoyotl's awareness of the effects of time on man and world.

Perhaps one with root truly lives upon the earth?
Not forever on the earth;
Only for a short time here.
Even if it be of jade it will be broken,
even if it be of gold it will be shattered,
even if it be the plumage of a bird that rends itself.
Not forever on the earth;
only for a short time here.

Only for an instant does the meeting endure,
for a brief time there is glory.…
None of your friends has root,
only for a short time are we given here as loans,
your lovely flowers.…
Everything that flourishes in your mat or in your chair,
nobility on the field of battle,
on which depends lordship and command,
your flowers of war …
are only dried flowers.

I am inebriated, I weep, I am afflicted,
I think, I say,
within myself I find it;
if I would never die,
if I would never disappear.
There where there is no death,
there where death is conquered,
there will I go.
If I would never die,
if I would never disappear.

Nezahualcoyotl's fears and anxiety foreshadow the fate of his people a few years after his death: With the arrival of the Spaniards, Indian cultures disappeared. In their haste to dominate, the Spaniards were swift to destroy, not only native political and economic structures, but the Indian's cultural world as well.

Fortunately, not all Spaniards came to destroy; some came to salvage what was being destroyed. Among the latter were priests and other humanists, who guided the efforts of young Indians writing down some of their fading literature. To be sure, precisely because of this guiding effort, the literature written down by the Indians for the most part treated their destroyed culture nostalgically and made excuses for that destruction. (In these works one finds the earliest manifestations of the Dream of a mestizo Spanish America.) Even recording pre-Columbian history was aimed at preserving and incorporating it into the new ideology supporting the new order. Nonetheless, among the bulk of recorded history and lore, there are crucial remnants that are an awesome testimony of the conquest.

This testimony remains in the Spanish American memory, bearing witness to the fact that the mestizo culture was born of rape. To forget this past would entail the mestizo's self-denial; a self-denial that has never been possible, despite many attempts.

In their testimony, the Aztecan cultural elite, for example, tell how the Spanish conqueror treated the treasures of their civilization. In a naïve attempt to save his empire, Moctezuma took the Spaniards to his treasure house in Teucalco; there, the Spaniards carried out all the cultural treasures. "Immediately, the gold was taken from war shields and from other emblems. They made a huge mound of gold and set everything else afire. They burned, burned everything that was not gold, no matter how valuable: Thus everything went to ashes" [Miguel LeónPortilla, Visión de los vencidos: Relaciones indigenas de la conquista, 1958]. Unable to stop the ransacking of their cultural world, the tlamatinime contemplated the destruction of their ancient knowledge of the world, the vision of the heavens. The books of Chilam Balam preserve the lament of the ancient teachers over the destruction of their lessons by a horde of "damned bearded foreigners: Lost will be science, lost will be wisdom" [El libro de los libros de Chilam Balam, trans. Alfredo Barrera Visquez and Silvia Rendón, 1969] and they describe the violence and destruction of the gods:

You tell us
that our gods are untrue.
This is a new thing
that you tell us,
it disturbs us,
it fills us with grief.
For our ancestors,
those who were before us,
those who lived on the earth,
were not accustomed to tell us so.
And now should we destroy
the ancient rule of life? …
Truly we cannot believe it,
we do not accept it as the truth
even though it offends you.

In the end, however, an end that came centuries later, the Indians had to admit the death of their gods; the destruction all around them demanded it. Their fears were to become prophecies:

Let us die then,
Let us perish then,
For our gods are already dead!

True, beneath their vision of doom, the Indians kindled a hope of enduring, of returning—a forever truncated hope. "This is our genealogy," says the testimony of the Cakchiqueles, "which will never be lost because we know our origin and shall never forget our forefathers [Anales de los cakchiqueles, trans. Adrian Recinos, 1950]. But remembrance is a double-edged sword; when the past becomes a refuge, the future turns opaque. Memory can be a catapult to action, but it is also the pastime of a people without a vision of the future. In the long travail that constitutes the Indian's history since the conquest, the effects of memory of the past have alternated like Ometeotl. For long periods, it has been a sedative: The Indian and his descendant, the mestizo, have retreated to the memory of better times and failed to act in the present. At other times, memory has spurred the same Indian and mestizo to rebellion. (By prohibiting Indian plays where the Incan past was recalled, as in Peru in 1782, the Spaniards showed awareness of the revolutionary potential of collective memory.) Over the years, however, the Indians have lost even the memory of their past. In the twentieth century, the Indians are a people with almost no conscious history; whites and mestizos have become the keepers of the memory. Consequently, the potential for liberation stored therein has left their hands. Here lies one of the reasons why Indian rebellions in the twentieth century have increasingly been directed by mestizos and not by Indians themselves.

Pre-Columbian literature is an important aspect of the literature of today's Spanish America; it records the Indian's glory, hopes, fears, and fate. Surely, pre-Columbian literature translates the vision of a world that neither a white nor a mestizo can totally penetrate, but it constitutes a voice from the past that present-day Spanish Americans can hardly ignore. As such, this literature has become a source of pride as well as shame, guilt, and hatred for modern Spanish Americans. In these testimonies, Spanish America relives the conquest and colonization. As things stand, it is highly unlikely that today's Indians will ever produce a literature that presents a vision of the world in terms other than Western. Indian literature production ceased in the early days of the conquest and, from then on, the literature of Spanish America was to be written in Spanish or by individuals with basically a Western world view.

Two important aspects of the Indian's literary legacy should be stressed. First, much of this literature already points to the coming of a mestizo culture, which was permeated by an apologetic tendency from the very beginning. This effort to forgive and forget the violence of origins began with Spanish American history, since the audience intended for these works was not the Indians themselves but their white masters. Secondly, it must also be stressed that the literature of protest in Spanish America and the role of the writer as social critic began with using literature as a testimony of the genocide days of conquest. The tradition began, therefore, with the protest, however veiled, of a disintegrating civilization aware of its tragedy. And the dual tendency to apologize while protesting that is present in the first Spanish American literature has permeated all subsequent literary production by or about Indians in the region.

A detailed account of the Indian's social conditions during the 300 years of colonial domination is not possible here; suffice it to note the following: The Indian's welfare deteriorated drastically as colonial rule became more secure. As a subject to the Spanish crown, the Indian was required to pay tribute either in gold or work or both, a situation from which Spaniards living in America profited by making the Indian work without wages. Millions of Indians died because of disease, wars, and physical exhaustion resulting from extreme forms of forced labor under the mita, repartimiento, and encomienda systems. Moreover, the Spanish conquerors saw themselves as racially superior, and, therefore, they exploited the Indian not only physically by securing his labor without payment but psychologically as well by demanding the obedience and submission of a slave. In other words, the genocide days of the conquest were extended to the colonial period. For centuries the social, economic, and political privileges of colonial society rested on the servitude of the Indian people.

In the literature of conquest, the Indian was depicted as a mixture of warrior and savage. Through this literary image, the Spanish chroniclers sang of Spanish courage and the triumph of civilization. In their literary vision, the writers of this period transformed the Indian's culture and psychology to fit preconceived models. Alfonso de Ercilla y Zuiiiga (1533-1594), the most gifted writer of this period, for example, presented the Indian in his long poetic work La araucana (1569-1589) as an unhappy cross between a European classical mythopoetical being and a savage. In this work, it is not uncommon for savages to deliver their thoughts in the most classical Spanish, and less gifted writers were equally inaccurate in their portrayal of the Indian. This image of the Indian remained in Spanish American literature for centuries to come.

This view of the Indian was a matter of course, given the literary tradition and the audience of the time. As were most writers of the period, Ercilla was a Spaniard who wrote for a Spanish audience for whom the classical form was required for writing good poetry. As Concha Melendes has noted in her well-known analysis of literature about Indians written during this period, the authors carried with them their classical culture "intercepted between the physical object and their vision" [Concha Meléndes, La novela indianista en Hispanoamerica: 1832-1889, 1939].

During the ensuing years of colonial domination, the Indian's image did not change substantially; however, elements introduced in the literature of Spanish America by Indians who survived the demise of their society were further accentuated. As noted, the work of Indian chroniclers was tinged with nostalgia and apology for the violence committed by the Spaniards. One hundred years into the colonial period, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the illegitimate son of an Incan princess and a Spanish captain, fully developed this dual tendency in his famous Comentarios reales, published in 1609.

Garcilaso's work is one of the most knowledgeable accounts of Incan culture, but, like the work of all Indian chroniclers, the Comentarios reales tends to apologize for the conquest. In fact, Garcilaso viewed the conquest of the Incas by the Spaniards as the end of a long process of preparing the Andean Indians for salvation—a preparation that had begun with founding and expanding the Incan empire itself. Some of the passages most critical of the Spanish conquest deal with the lack of missionary zeal on the part of Spanish conquerors. Conquest and colony were thus justified by an appeal to the sublime Christian God and superior Western culture. It is no accident that Garcilaso presented his case to whites and no longer to Indians; that he did so in a highly stylized and erudite Spanish (he identified Cuzco with Rome in the preface and in several places within the text, and biblical and Greek references abound) shows to what extent he had internalized his father's culture as his own.

As did other chroniclers, Garcilaso emphasized the past, not the present or future of the Indians: The beautiful narrative of the Comentarios reales is nostalgic. But in a masterful dialectic move, Garcilaso transformed this nostalgia into a vision of utopia; in this work, Incan leaders appear godlike, and their society approaches perfection—except for a few drawbacks such as their pagan religion. In transforming the past into a utopia, Garcilaso made one of his most important contributions to Spanish American culture. For by positing an Incan utopian past, Garcilaso subtly but forcefully protested against the injustice of the Indian's conditions in his time. True, Garcilaso's protest was devoid of militancy and did not seek to marshal soldiers for a cause; it only attempted to enjoin the sympathies of the conquerors. Nonetheless, showing the Spaniards that the Incas had had a complex culture and a high sense of justice, honor, and pride constituted a tacit act of protest against the Indian's present state and the Spaniards' arrogance.

This view of a utopian Indian past has been used again and again as an ideological weapon; it was used by Bolívar and his generation in the nineteenth century and by the indigenista movement and various political parties in the twentieth century. In this sense, Garcilaso's work must be seen as one of the foundations of the indigenista novel. Also, by maintaining the dual tendency noted, Garcilaso contributed to developing the Spanish American tradition of the writer as critic (witness to injustice) and literature as a means to socioethical ends, while maintaining ambivalence toward the benefactors of this protest.

If Garcilaso wrote with nostalgia, Fray Bartolome de Las Casas, a Spanish Dominican priest, did so with compassion. Of all those who defended the Indian throughout Spanish American history, none surpasses Bartolome de Las Casas in kindness, perseverance, and courage. His denunciation of the violence that accompanied the Spanish conquest of America has always inspired intellectuals, men of science, and social revolutionaries and influenced their attitude toward the Indian problem in Spanish America.

Bartolome de Las Casas's work, however, situated as it was in the period of conquest, could not free itself from some idealization of the Indian and his world. In his passionate defense, the Dominican priest presented the Indian as virtuous, innocent, and submissive. He set Indian life before conquest in a quasi-utopian world, in a state of social tranquility reminiscent of the childhood of the human race. With the pangs of civilization not having reached such a world, the Indian was thought to live in a most harmonious relationship with nature in a self-contained paradise.

No two other men were to influence ideas about the Indian of the Américas held by the nineteenth-century European romantic writers as did the Dominican Bartolome de Las Casas and the mestizo Garcilaso de la Vega. They gave European writers the image of the noble savage, the uncorrupted, happy, natural man. This image of the Indian before his encounter with the civilization that put him in chains helped European romantic writers to rise above history to the realm of abstract human nature.

When nineteenth-century Spanish American writers rediscovered the Indian, such a rediscovery did not involve the Indians around them, that is, the poor and exploited Indian. Rather, it involved the Indians of the French intellectuals; in other words, the virtuous, noble, savage Indian whom their European mentors first knew through the work of Bartolome de Las Casas and Garcilaso de la Vega. As a consequence of this importation, the Indian of literary creation in nineteenth-century Spanish America was the transformed, rarefied, ahistorical Indian presented in the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand, Marmontel, and others. Thus, the real Indian was overlooked by the Spanish American literary imagination and was largely supplanted by an imagined Indian—a poetic Indian extracted from the works of conscientious and pious men. In this importation of the Indian character, the profound cultural dependency of the Spanish American cultural elite during the nineteenth century is most clearly seen.

This romantic rediscovery of the Indian by Spanish American writers coincided with movements for independence from Spain; in fact, both political ideology and literary romanticism were mutually reinforcing. The leaders of the revolutionary movement were romantic visionaries who made the Indian a symbol of their cause. In their manifestos, programs, and personal correspondence, these caudiIlos evoked a romantic Indian past; a poem by the Venezuelan patriot Andres Bello (1781-1865) is significant:

Not for long would the Spanish foreigners
usurp the Kingdom of the Sun,
nor, in seeing his throne in such disgrace,
the ghosts of Manco Capac moan.

To reiterate, the wars for independence in Spanish America were led by members of the creole and mestizo elite who claimed the political and economic power that had always been in the hands of the Spanish king and his representatives. Ideologically, the wars for independence were fought with vague notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity that Spanish American elites had learned from the French Revolution. These revolutionaries advanced the interests of creole and mestizo elites who were guided by tenets of economic liberalism because they found colonial rule fettered their economic development.

The changes in political and economic power that took place during the wars for independence did not, however, substantially change the lot of the majority of the Spanish American people. The Nation became fragmented, largely due to the lack of radical social transformations. Indians, blacks, and the majority of poor mestizos, who had fought the war, gained little or nothing either as a class or an ethnic group. When, in February 1825, Bolívar claimed in Lima that the revolution had broken the Indian's chains, he was carried away by his own rhetoric. In fact, in the transfer of power from the Spanish kings to the local oligarchies, the Indian lost both economically and politically. For, if in the past, the Indian had been exploited, he at least had had the protection of colonial laws that gave him some security for his lands. With the abolition of the legal colonial structure, the Indian was more thoroughly exploited by his new masters who introduced laws aimed at dispossessing him of more of his lands. In the ensuing years, through deception and outright violence, the Indian lost much of his land to creole and upper-class mestizo landlords.

It is important to emphasize that during the period of activity to found a united Spanish America, the Indian was used not only physically as a soldier but symbolically as well. In both cases, he was used to advance the interests of his eventual exploiters. Of course, since real Indians were an indispensable support for the revolutionary armies, the leaders of these revolutions did not ignore the Indian's situation while the fighting was going on. Some steps were taken to better his lot although, more often than not, these steps were ineffective and even counterproductive. After the revolution, when the transfer of power permitted old aristocrats to become presidents of new republics, the Indian was no longer a viable political or military force. And once his symbolic and military role had been exhausted, the interest granted his condition by the elites also began to fade. Thus, the Indian reverted to his position of beast of burden in the eyes of the new Spanish American society.

As political activity to found a united Spanish America gave way to the Dream, so, too, the combination of symbolism and reality, literature and politics, which the Indian represented, gave way to a purely literary romanticism. Significantly, the Argentine Esteban Echeverria (1805-1851) laid the foundation for the romantic literary movement in 1834. That is, the romantic movement achieved a comfortable separation from politics and a degree of cohesiveness as a literary school only when the local oligarchies were secure in their positions of power. The Indian, whose image during the wars of independence supported a call to combat, throughout the rest of the nineteenth century became a purely nostalgic and exotic element in Spanish American letters.

Due to its abstractness and generalities, when the romantic notion of human nature that fostered the brotherhood of mankind was transported from Europe to Spanish America, it enabled the Spanish American writer to disregard the Indian's real situation. As a literary movement, romanticism in Spanish America failed to deal with the Indian's psychology, culture, or objective social position. Bent on proving their national pride, many of the post-independence romantic writers took flight into the Indian's golden past. And by doing so, they idealized the Indian until he was little more than a product of their imagination. In this context, the Ecuadorian writer Juan León Mera (1832-1894) was able to write that "everything indigenous exists as a historic remembrance, and I do not see any inconvenience in its being useful in a poetic work, be it as a principal or secondary theme [in Cometta Manzoni's El indio en la poesia de America espanola, 1939]. There can be little doubt that for the romantic writers the Indian was long since dead. One of the last writers in this tradition, the Uruguayan Juan Zorrilla de San Martin (1855-1931), presents the romantic writers' view of the Indian [in Augusto Tamayo Vargas, Literatura en Hispano America, vol. 1]:

He is silent
Silent forever, like time
Like his race,
Like the desert
Like a grave that the dead has abandoned.

The Indian seemed to be no more than a memory. But if this view could be held with some justification by Argentine or Cuban writers in whose countries the Indian population during the nineteenth century was small and rapidly disappearing, the fact that Juan León Mera was able to share such a view is indicative of the romantic period as a whole—his Andean country Ecuador was one where the majority of the population was Indian.…

A final point should be made before discussing the social factors that made indigenista novels possible. While Indian novels in the nineteenth century were basically romantic, indigenista novels in the twentieth century were basically realist. This literary rupture, as might be expected, followed in the footsteps of a similar rupture in the European tradition, namely, the broad transformation from romanticism to realism in literature.

European realism arrived in Spanish America in the 1860s. By the time it developed into a significant school there at the turn of the century, its influence in Europe, especially in France, where it had been the strongest, had diminished; nonetheless, the strong influence that French writers had on Spanish American letters during the wars for independence continued under realism. Like Chateau-briand and Marmontel in the romantic period, Balzac and especially Zola became the mentors of Spanish American writers of Indian novels during the realist period.

To be sure, transplanting European realism in Spanish America did not take place without fundamental changes. In Europe, for example, such French writers as Balzac and later Zola shared their eminence with the great realists of Russia, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. In Spanish America, the Spanish cultural elite, always fond of French letters, was not decisively influenced by Russian writers. Tolstoy's work, with its heavy dose of mysticism, did not constitute one of the pillars of realism in Spanish America, nor did Dostoyevsky's insights into, and fascination with, psychology gain many followers.

In addition to the Spanish American elite's predilection for French letters, there were other reasons for the lack of influence by Russian writers. For one thing, at the time realism arrived in Spanish America, the cultural elite was going through a period of optimistic faith in science. And scientific positivism as a philosophy of art or politics was too strong to allow mysticism in Tolstoy's tradition. Influenced by Mexico's positivist thinkers (the cientificos) and Peru's Gonzales Prada, a wave of anticlericalism swept across Spanish America, announcing the age of enilightenment. Instead of mysticism, therefore, it was anticlericalism that later became one of the principal characteristics of the indigenista movement in Spanish America.

The near absence of Tolstoy's influence did not mean, however, that nonscientific concerns were unimportant to the indigenistas; even at the height of the movement, Spanish America's indigenista writers never ceased to preach morality. What happened was that the old individual morality, basically Catholic and mainly concerned with salvation and the soul, gave way to a kind of social morality concerned with the Indian's salvation. From the 1860s until at least the 1950s, realists, indigenistas prominent among them, were perhaps the most moral of all writers in Spanish America. In this sense, Zola, and not Balzac, became the true master of indigenismo. From its very inception, indigenismo was engaged in a moral crusade to stamp out the evils of society; literature was a tool for regeneration. This original moral stance of indigenismo survived the demise of its initial ally, scientific positivism, and continued invigorated under Marxist socialism. It is true that socialist writers did not openly call for moral regeneration, nor did they draw their inspiration primarily from a religious conception of the world; nonetheless, a deep moral stance is evident throughout their work. Marxism in the hands of these writers, particularly in the Andes, became the light that showed how to destroy the evils of society. These writers endeavored to liberate man from social sins.

European realism underwent other changes with its introduction in Spanish America; two of these changes were the near absence of pessimism before the evils of society and the negligible treatment of sexual behavior. Spanish American indigenismo, for example, inspired as it was first by scientific positivism and its faith in science and progress and later by socialism based on Marxist thinking, could not have easily become pessimistic. In fact, as Marxism displaced positivism in the 1930s, indigenista literature became even more optimistic, so that the denunciation of social evils was paired, if not with a program, then with a hope for their solution and abolition.

As to the shady side of sexuality, Spanish American elites had not yet thrown away their long cherished pudor, their sense of shame. Naturalistic writing on sex was not in good taste; besides, to the indigenista writers, worse than sexual perversion was the corruption of social, political, and economic institutions, the exploitation by the rich of the workers in general, and the Indians in particular. The crudest scenes ever depicted in Spanish American literature up to the middle of the twentieth century were those in Jorge Icaza's Huasipungo (1934), a novel about the social, economic, political, and spiritual exploitation of Indians by the ruling classes in Ecuador. The Indians in this novel appear almost subhuman, with the result that such a presentation is an indictment against the ruling classes, which are portrayed as greedy and morally corrupt.

Perhaps the best way to characterize the changes in perspective that accompanied the shift from romanticism to realism in Indian novels is to view them as obeying different gestalts. On the one hand, the romantics view Spanish America as a country composed of beautiful and unexplored landscapes, noble and savage Indians, and heroes who die romantic deaths; in short, according to this view, Spanish America is suspended in an ideal world. The realist school, on the other hand, depicts a society led by a morally bankrupt elite supported by a corrupt military machine and clergy, all of whom live off the Indian's labor. According to this view, Spanish America is divided into a wealthy and corrupt minority and a sick, exploited, hungry, and dehumanized majority. To the indigenista writer, especially under the influence of Marxism, Spanish America had a long history of corruption and oppression; however, deliverance is foreshadowed, that is, the solution and transcendence of evil in the future.