José María Arguedas: a Literary Voice for the Indigenous Movement — theculturetrip.com

Enter your writing to The Culture Trip Award & you could win $3,000! #tctaward We are offering a $3,000 prize for a student or recent graduate whose article on The Culture Trip attains the highest readership within 3 months of publication, $2,000 for the second most-read article and $1,000 for the third most-read article. José María Arguedas was born in 1911 in Andahuaylas, northern Peru. A mestizo (a mix of Spanish and Quechua descent), he was raised in a world steeped in indigenous culture and tradition, which gave him a unique understanding of the discrimination faced by such marginalised communities. When he was 3-years-old, his mother passed away, leaving Arguedas in the care of his father - a lawyer whose job took him travelling for weeks or months at a time- and a stepmother who made no effort to disguise her dislike for both indigenous people and Arguedas himself. Forced to sleep in the servants’ quarters, Arguedas developed meaningful relationships with the indigenous kitchen staff, to the point where he had greater fluency in Quechua than Spanish, his mother tongue. He described the importance of those relationships in his 1941 novel, Yawar Fiesta (‘The Feast of Blood’), describing the staff members as his ‘protectors’.

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