Los ríos profundos by José María Arguedas and the indigenista tradition

Abstract

Despite José María Arguedas’s reluctance to have his work considered “indigenista”, I claim that his 1958 novel Los ríos profundos falls within this tradition while, at the same time, it reveals some significant variations. In the traditional indigenista story, the conflict resulting from the discovery of America brought Europeans and their descendents face to face with “natural” inhabitants, the natural owners of the American territory. This dispute brings fundamental values for survival into play in the case of the indigenous peoples, while the usurper’s excessive quest for acquiring or conserving material possessions accompanies negative passions like greed and avarice. This way of posing the problem, which sinks its roots into the work of Las Casas, is associated with a specific intentionality, namely denouncement aimed at urgent transformation of unbalanced power relationships in the “extratext”. The major differences between Arguedas’s work and the tradition it falls into are seen in the valency of the values at stake in the conflict, in how the agents of change and their scope for action are configured, as well as in the passions the author attempts to raise in the enunciatee.