SOURCE: Fernández, Christian. “The Death of the Author in El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo.” In The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, edited by Julio Ortega and Christian Fernández, translated by Fred Fornoff, pp. 290-306. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Fernández provides great detail about Arguedas's life, but ends by arguing that the diary entries included in The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below should be read as fiction and not as Arguedas's actual diaries.

José María Arguedas was a man who lived between two worlds and two cultures: the indigenous world and the white world.¹ He was born on January 18, 1911, in Andahuaylas, Apurímac, the son of Víctor Manuel Arguedas Arellano, a lawyer from Cuzco, and Victoria Altamirano Navarro de Arguedas, who died in 1914, when Jos...