Political Commitments

In his portrayal of authorial self, Arguedas mentions the influence of his political views in his writing. As said before, even though he shared the political views of socialism, he did not have an explicit political project; neither was he an active militant of any political party. Edmundo Murrugarra, a former student of Arguedas’ who considers that the author was more a cultural militant than a political militant. According to Murrugarra, Arguedas foresaw that the social

202 José María Arguedas, The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, translated by Frances Barraclough (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2000), 261-62.

transformation in Peru was going to come through Andean cultural resistance more than a political revolution.²⁰³ However, the letters he wrote to the Trotskyite and peasant leader, Hugo Blanco, show Arguedas’ social commitment to Peruvian political change. There is, though, a valid question: to what extent did he write these letters influenced by the political arena of that moment?

This was the time of the success of the Cuban Revolution. When Arguedas visited Cuba because he was invited to be on a jury for the “Casa de las Americas” literary award in 1968, he was impressed by what he saw there and wrote a poem in Quechua called “Cubapaq” (To Cuba).²⁰⁴ The 1960s was a polarizing time in which many writers in Peru felt they had to espouse a political party, and Arguedas, being engaged with suffering people naturally empathized with the communist project in Cuba and socialist movements around the world. Nevertheless, he did not want to be under the direction of any political party in his country. Arguedas is more attuned with cultural politics but not with partisanship. He demonstrated his concern about all political parties in Peru through the characters in his novel El Sexto, because in this novel he portrays badly political characters he met in prison. In a letter written to Murra in 1960, he says:

I'm almost certain that the publication of that novel would raise against me all the powerful forces of the current politics of Peru: the right, the APRA Party, the Communist Party. I would remain with the support of the not so fanatical of the three parties and the opinion perhaps of those called free men. El Sexto was a dreadful political prison.²⁰⁵

203 Edmundo Murrugarra, “Arguedas militante político por una nueva civilización,” Perspectiva Internacional, 27 (January, 2010), http://perspectivainternational.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/arguedas-militante-politico-por-una-nueva-civilizacion/.

204 The book José María Arguedas: Cubapaq- A Cuba (La Habana: Fondo Editorial Casa de las Américas, 2012), contains letters, articles, pictures, etc., that show the relation Arguedas had with Cuba; in this book the poem Cubapaq has been published in both Spanish and Quechua.

205 “Estoy casi seguro que la publicación de esa novela levantaría contra mí todas las fuerzas poderosas de la política actual del Perú: la derecha, el partido aprista, el partido comunista. Me quedaría con el apoyo de los no muy

fanáticos de los tres partidos y con la opinión quizá de los llamados hombres libres. El Sexto fue una prisión política espantosa.” José María Arguedas, Lima, Perú, to John Murra, November 21, 1960, in John V. Murra and Mercedes López Baralt, Las Cartas de Arguedas, 50.

In this letter he is mentioning the three more important political tendencies of Peru at the time: the “right” that was represented by the peruvian aristocracy; the APRA Party (Partido Aprista Peruano), founded by Victor Raul Haya de la Torre in 1930 that followed the Latin-American anti-imperialists ideals of that time; and the Peruvian Communist Party, founded by Jose Carlos Mariátegui in 1928. Even though Arguedas agrees with the advocating of social justice from the communist party and admired the ideals of Mariátegui, he rejects the methods and self-righteousness of any party. His option was to be in the margins of the partisan arena.

In other letter to his friend Murra in 1961, expresses some doubts about his portrayal of the parties in the novel:

I'm afraid of being unfair or exaggerated. Both parties – Apra and Communism – were then and now, one of them is even more, were rigid, exclusionary and as ruthless as their persecutors; but they fought for social justice; were intoxicated by exclusionary messianism. I loved and feared them both. That is clearly exposed in the story [El Sexto].

I am worried, however, about what I do make the characters say, because it is not the case now of characters, let’s say "freely" created but of individuals that symbolize or represent ideologies and party methods that exist and that have to feel portrayed and whom readers have to hold them as examples.²⁰⁶

There are no novels by Arguedas that he considers just fiction. Literature was simply a tool for the expression of a testimony based on his experiences. Probably the only letters where Arguedas expressed political ideas with passion are the ones written to the Communist (Trotskyite) activist Hugo Blanco, who led the 1962 a Quechua uprising in the hacienda La Convencion, Cuzco that redistributed land to peasants and set up its own local government that served as a model for

206 “Tengo miedo de ser injusto o exagerado. Ambos partidos—Apra y comunismo—eran entonces y ahora, uno de ellos lo es más aún, eran rígidos, excluyentes y tan implacables como sus persecutores; pero luchaban por la justicia social; estaban embriagados de mesianismo excluyente. Los amaba y les temía a ambos. Eso está claramente expuesto en el relato. Me preocupa sin embargo lo que hago decir a los personajes, porque no se trata ya en este caso de personajes, digamos “libremente” creados sino de individuos que simbolizan o representan ideologías y métodos de partidos que existen y que han de sentirse retratados y que los lectores han de tomarlos como ejemplos.” José María Arguedas, Lima, Perú, to John Murra, February 21, 1961, in John V. Murra and Mercedes López Baralt, Las Cartas de Arguedas, 53.

the future Agrarian Reform in 1969. Hugo Blanco, was jailed from 1963 until his 1971 deportation to Chile and he exchanged two letters with Arguedas only at the end of 1969. Blanco was a political activist, a man of action, while Arguedas was a man of ideas. Indeed, it was only through his literature that Arguedas promoted a political change.

In a letter wrote to Blanco in 1969 Arguedas says:

Perhaps you’ve read my novel Deep Rivers, remember brother, the strongest, remember.

In this book I don’t only speak about how I cried ardent tears; with more tears and more rage I speak about pongos²⁰⁷ and farmhands of the hacienda, of their hidden and immense strength, of the fury that burns in the seed of their heart, fire that is not quenched. Those lice-ridden, flogged daily, forced to lick the land with their tongues, men despised by their own communities, those, in the novel, invade the city of Abancay without fear of grapeshot and bullets, defeating them²⁰⁸

There are few letters in which Arguedas takes a direct political stance. In most of them he writes about daily concerns with a high emotional and affective tone, or about his literary work.

However, in one of his last letters to Hugo Blanco, he tells about a possible political scenario for Peru:

I’m not well, my strength is turning dark. But if I die now, I will die more peaceful. That beautiful day will come and that one that you speak about, one in which our people will be born again, come, I feel it, I feel the dawn in the apple of my eye, in that light, drop by drop, your burning pain is falling, drop by drop without ever ending. I fear that daybreak will cost blood, so much blood.²⁰⁹

207 Pejorative name given to indigenous servants by the land owners.

208 “Quizás habrás leído mi novela Los Ríos Profundos, recuerda, hermano, el más fuerte, recuerda. En este libro no hablo únicamente de cómo lloré lágrimas ardientes; con más lágrimas y con más arrebato hablo de los pongos, de los colonos de hacienda, de su escondida e inmensa fuerza, de la rabia que en la semilla de su corazón arde, fuego que no se apaga. Esos piojosos, diariamente flagelados, obligados a lamer tierra con sus lenguas, hombres

despreciados por las mismas comunidades, esos, en la novela, invaden la ciudad de Abancay sin temer a la metralla y a las balas, venciéndolas.” José María Arguedas, Lima Peru to Hugo Blanco, Lima, Peru, November 1969, in Cuadernos Arguedianos 3 (2000): 83

209 “Yo no estoy bien; mis fuerzas anochecen. Pero si ahora muero, moriré más tranquilo. Ese hermoso día que vendrá y del que hablas, aquél en que nuestros pueblos volverán a nacer, viene, lo siento, siento en la niña de mis ojos su aurora; en esa luz está cayendo gota por gota tu dolor ardiente, gota a gota, sin acabarse jamás. Temo que ese amanecer cueste sangre, tanta sangre.” Ibid. p.84

Arguedas, writing in light of the international uprisings of 1968, appears to express a possible revolution in Peru, and the description of future times is composed of hope and pain. Even though Arguedas wrote just two letters to Hugo Blanco and he could not read the last letter Blanco sent him because his death occurred before it arrived; some people, including his second wife, Sybila Arredondo, consider that Arguedas displays his political inclinations in these letters. Sybila Arredondo believes that Arguedas was a political man, who revealed his political views in his literature and that the letters he wrote to Hugo Blanco are the evidence of his political position. ²¹⁰ It could also be argued that he practiced an appropriately different kind of politics, cultural politics, in an age of state surveillance. We should note that the tone in which Arguedas wrote to Hugo Blanco is different from the tone of the rest of his letters. It is only in the letters that he wrote to Blanco that he emphasizes a revolutionary attitude in an explicit way in a time of international political turbulence and upheaval. Besides the political environment of that time, Sybila Arredondo herself was a leftist activist who later on belonged to the terrorist movement, Shining Path.

Arguedas, being an extremely sensitive person, it is likely that Sybila Arredondo exerted a political influence over him, prompting him to write Hugo Blanco, who Sybila (and not Arguedas) met in person. In any case, Arguedas was very clear in rejecting violence and resentment throughout his work. Arguedas denounced injustice and despair but he did not call for violent action. He limits his literary work to being a testimony and an exhortation to be more compassionate about social injustice in Peru. He was not a political leader, but a witness who presented his testimony and used literature to portray Peruvian reality. For example, in his novel Deep Rivers, the protagonist, the adolescent Ernesto felt empathy for the suffering peasants who were mistreated by the landlords and describes this injustice in the novel. In the last chapter of Deep Rivers there is an uprising of

210 Interview to Sybila Arredondo in Runa 6 (1977): 15

the peasants forcing to the priest of the town to make a mass for the people who died because of the plague that stroke the village. When describing the uprising of the peasants asking for the mass, Arguedas highlights the capacity of organization of the Andean peasants and subtly warns Peruvians about the power indigenous people have to rebel when they decide to do it.

During the conversation I had with Hildebrando Pérez, Peruvian poet of the 1960s and former student of Arguedas, he said that his generation has not had the courage to produce a deep analysis of Arguedas’ work and the man himself from an ideological perspective, likely because of the fear of uncovering the myth and finding the man. ²¹¹ Arguedas was committed to social change but not to any political party or ideology. Besides, given the arrests around him and his own desire to get off the blacklist, maybe there is some degree of self-protection in his stance—

after all it is not an unreasonable to prefer working subtly to undermine the system, a strategy that in the long term could be more effective.

After reading his letters, I can affirm that what it is out of discussion is that he was mainly an intellectual with an artistic and sensitive soul. To understand Arguedas and his work we would have to embrace his sensitivity, versatility, and contradictions. We must read Arguedas without any preconceived notion or label. To reveal the man behind his texts, we will need to allow Arguedas to speak of himself through his letters.

211 Hildebrando Pérez, oral interview by author, Lima, Peru, June 3, 2008.