by Jose Maria Arguedas

Jose Maria Arguedas was born in 1911 in Peru’s south-central highlands, an area in which the culture of the Quechua Indians has remained vital despite the Spanish Conquest and subsequent exploitation of the native peoples. Though Arguedas’s family belonged to the white Hispanic upper class, they were poor. His mother died when Arguedas was two years old, and his father, an itinerant lawyer whose clients were mostly Indians and mestizos, remarried shortly thereafter. According to Arguedas, his stepmother and her family despised him and relegated him to the Indian kitchen of the household, where he was welcomed and loved by the Indian servants and where he learned the Quechua language. For the rest of his life, Arguedas felt a filial attachment to the Quechua that helped shape his work. Arguedas was a professor of anthropology and, aside from novels, short stories...