A passionate champion of the Andean community and advocate of interethnic dialogue in a deeply divided society, the writer and ethnographer José María Arguedas (1911-1969) is widely regarded as a cultural hero within his native Peru. Drawing on a tradition of cosmopolitan-cum-nationalist, Marxist-Indigenist, Peruvian thought, his literary innovations, centred on transforming the novel into a hermeneutic text for understanding rapidly changing and increasingly contradictory identities and realities, have won him great acclaim, however belatedly, amongst intellectuals and artists across Latin America. In Peru, he has inspired a generation of writers and literary critics, some of whom, such as Antonio Cornejo Polar, have, alongside the Uruguayan critic Angel Rama, forged new ways of reading (Arguedas’s) textual practices and the complex cultural conditions that shape them. It is doubly ironic then that, for all this intellectual approbation...
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Citation: Moore, Melisa. "José María Arguedas". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 May 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12259, accessed 09 June 2026.]
