SOURCE: Sandoval, Ciro A. Introduction to José María Arguedas: Reconsiderations for Latin American Cultural Studies, edited by Ciro A. Sandoval and Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval, pp. xxi-xlii. Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1998.

In the following essay, Sandoval first describes the social and political setting of Arguedas's life, then depicts Arguedas's work as representing “a drama of the unspeakable, of the undecidable, of the culturally and linguistically untranslatable.”

A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass, and the atmosphere writing. 

—H. D. Thoreau, A Writer's Journal

The Man, His Place, and His Time

José María Arguedas Altamirano (1911-1969) was born into a world shaped by particular historical circumstances, at the crossroads of modernization's thrust into Peru. These circumstances would in turn shape his character and his destiny as one of the most creative and influential writers...