Submission Date

5-15-2026

Document Type

Paper

Department

Modern Languages (Spanish)

Adviser

José Cornelio

Committee Member

Rebecca Evans

Committee Member

Nicole Fadellin

Department Chair

Matthew Mizenko

External Reviewer

Matthew Bush

Distinguished Honors

This paper has met the requirements for Distinguished Honors.

Project Description

This project analyzes José María Arguedas’s novel Todas las sangres (1964), focusing on the sociological and utopian dimensions that were explicitly questioned during the roundtable discussion on the novel held at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP) on June 23, 1965. In that forum, participants offered pointed critiques of the plausibility of the social reality represented in Arguedas’s narrative. Moving beyond these objections, I argue that the literary reality Arguedas constructs—through what Antonio Cornejo-Polar has conceptualized as the “choral novel”—captures the enduring force of the colonial legacy and the historically and culturally heterogeneous condition of Peruvian society, dimensions that the sociological frameworks mobilized during the roundtable largely failed or refused to recognize. Indeed, the most influential critiques advanced in that discussion imagined Peru as engaged in a homogeneous and dialectical process of development, a perspective that obscured both cultural heterogeneity and the persistent imprint of coloniality. Against this backdrop, I propose that Todas las sangres opens an alternative framework for understanding the social and cultural complexities of a nation that cannot be reduced to a homogenizing model of modernization as imposed by the Peruvian nation-state. Through the articulation of fluid identities and acts of resistance directed against a long-standing colonial inheritance and the unchecked power of global capitalism—embodied in the Wisther-Bozart mining company—Arguedas, via the narrative voice of the protagonist Demetrio Rendón Willka, imagines a sovereign and modern Peru grounded in a non-dialectical heterogeneity. Rather than erasing the Indigenous world, this vision positions Andean cosmology as a central and constitutive force in the political and social formation of a free Peru.

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