Introduction: The Limits of the Integrative Dream

In this chapter I propose to read José María Arguedas’s literary works as the culmination of the historical sequence of indigenismo that follows from Mariátegui’s integrative socialist project, which in essence conceived of the possibility of constructive mediations between the urban mestizo and the rural Indian through the agency of a new revolutionary subject.

In the first section, I consider the polemics between Arguedas and Julio Cortázar, in which the tension between regionalism and universalism emerges in the context of clarifying how intellectual labor relates to social imperatives. I show that Arguedas is led to conceive of a new universalism that would be not the opposite but the obverse of regionalism. In searching for novel possibilities of mediation between Western and pre-Hispanic forms, such a view also, like Mariátegui’s own project, imagines a collective identity for the Peruvian nation. In the second section, I trace how Arguedas aims to extend Mariátegui’s ideal of appropriating Indigenous cooperativist productive modalities, while refusing the derision of cultural concerns as proper to a residual romanticist nostalgia. In doing so, I show how he underscores the indissociable link between subjective cultural–normative factors and objective economic-productive determinations. In the third and fourth sections, I trace how an anthropologically informed conception of the Indian world in its relation to the West mediates this correction, as cultural determination becomes part of the scientific ideal of socialism. Following Ángel Rama, I show how “transculturation” becomes the lever through which Arguedas begins to think of a possible reconciliation between what he calls the “magical and rational” conceptions of the world. This leads Arguedas, like Vallejo, to search for a new language in what he calls a “superior universalism,” a “more absolute act of creation” that would preserve and potentiate the ethos of labor present in Indigenous culture. In the fifth section, I begin to assess the way in which Arguedas progressively develops the search for a new language commensurate to this “superior universalism” by thinking different forms of revolutionary transcultural subjectivity, starting from the figure of the militant Indian subject who returns from the city, as depicted in his short story Agua.