“Let’s Make Peru Peruvian Again”: Cultural Mediators and Indigenous Literature

Abstract

Usandizaga studies the role of some cultural mediators in Peruvian culture, given the subordinated situation, after the conquest, of native cultures and languages. In Perú, cultural mediators close to the marginalized world assumed different roles—multilingual writers, translators and transculturators—and made that world visible in the cultural panorama. In the case of José María Arguedas, his attempt to transculturate from within the Andean culture generates a tension that explains his cultural and artistic power. In the case of Gamaliel Churata, his cultural project Boletín Titikaka proposes a new idea of the nation connected with indigenous culture, and his great work El pez de oro, which moves across genders, proposes an alternative and precolonial search founded on Andean philosophy and expression. Finally, more contemporary ways of connecting local and global voices are studied in projects that bring together the emergence of various cultural forms, especially poetry, sometimes entirely in local languages, as a peculiar way of modernity.

Translated by Cristina Fernández Hall.