Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the relationship between the myths of genesis of Andean/Quechuan culture, as identified in the anthropological work of Rulfo Kulsch, and the story, structures and symbols in Ciro Alegría’s novels, Los perros hambrientos and El mundo es ancho y ajeno.

Paper long abstract:

Taking as a theoretical starting point Walter Mignolo's work on hybridity and the translanguaging of culture, this paper will argue that the meaning(s) of any text is dependent on the cultural perspective/knowledge through which an analysis is made. Its aim, therefore, is to examine the local/indigenous symbols and narrative structures that are inscribed within Alegría's two novels: Los perros hambrientos and El mundo es ancho y ajeno. In the first part, the paper will examine the symbols of transculturation in the novels, such as 'la serpiente' or 'San Isidro', that have acquired double meanings within the region (stemming from Western and Quechua mythology). In the second, it will analyse how the symbols and narrative structure of the novels re-articulate Quechuan/indigenous legends, concentrating mainly on the myth of genesis de-coded by the anthropologist, Rodolfo Kusch, from the manuscript created by Joan Santa Cruz Pachacuti yamqui Salcamayhua. In this respect, it will be argued that the reader must look beyond the codes of realism (the realist and indigenismo descriptions of Andean culture) and examine other aspects of the novels in order to locate the double-cultural codes that underpin them. As a conclusion, I shall explore the possibility that through such re-articulations of different codes the texts express a palimpsest of mentalities. As such, the paper challenges the notion of the subaltern and silenced indio by asserting that, in some examples, seemingly Western texts, like the novel, produced within the Andean region are very often constructed out of the local cultural paradigms that they are purported to have silenced or imagined.