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...