Alcides Arguedas

Arguedas is one of Bolivia's best-known writers. His work describes the relationship between Bolivian society and its indigenous peoples, often cynically. Through his books, full of social analysis, he sought a solution for his country's permanent state of conflict. Some of the issues for which he contributed a significant amount of thought—conflicts between cultures, the complexities of mestizaje, and the sometimes violent relationship between the indigenous and creole/mestizo worlds—were later taken up by other currents of thought, including indigenismo, albeit from a different perspective. His first literary works date from his student days, and the first book he published was Pisagua, a novel which appeared in 1903. In the subsequent year, he wrote Wata-Wara. His novelistic production would continue with Vida criolla (1912) and culminate with Raza de bronce. His essay Pueblo enfermo ("sick people" or "sick town"), published in Barcelona in 1909, solidified his importance in Latin American letters, earning praise from major writers such as Miguel de Unamuno and Amado Nervo. However, it created controversy in Bolivia, and Franz Tamayo responded critically to his ideas in a series of editorials that would later be compiled as his book Pedagogía de la educación nacional. Arguedas coined the term "radical pessimism" for his stance on indigenous issues, explaining that it came from "a mixture of fatal biological laws, historical reasons and environmental circumstances [that] have made the indigenous an atrophied or infirm race". Unsurprisingly, some critics identify Arguedas with some of the more distasteful aspects of the Bolivia of his time and reject his relationship with indigenismo However, in his most important novel, Raza de bronce ("Bronze Race"), Arguedas lays out several themes that would later be instrumental in the development of Bolivian literature: the creole-mestizo oppression against indigenous peoples, their capacity to rise in the face of these abuses, the social placement of the "cholo-mestizo" (a term, now more commonly a slur, for those mestizos whose indigenous parentage exceeds their European), and the rift between creole and indigenous societies in Bolivia. Arguedas worked on this novel almost until his death. Although he published his first edition in 1919, he continued correcting and re-editing it until he released the definitive edition in 1945. The plot of Raza de bronce is an evolution of his second novel, Wata-Wara, which went relatively unnoticed at the time of publication. In retrospect, despite widespread criticism, it was listed by experts as one of the essential works of Bolivian literature. Over the years, Arguedas found history to be a more direct medium for reflecting upon and interpreting Bolivian social reality. His first historical book, La fundación de la República, was published in 1920. This marked a turning point in Arguedas's life: from here, history and politics came to the fore and his work in literature became secondary. The first volume of his Historia general de Bolivia was published two years later under the auspices of industrialist and millionaire Simon I. Patino. He completed only five of the eight projected volumes of that collection, ranging from the colonial period to its violent 19th-century era of caudillismo. Arguedas received the Rome Prize in France for his autobiographical book La danza de las sombras in 1935.