Jose Maria Arguedas Altamirano , was born on January 18, 1911 in the city of Andahuaylas, department of Apurímac. His father was a landowner from the region who, having been widowed by the future writer's mother, married a rich landowner from San Juan de Lucanas for the second time. Arguedas's childhood was marked by the difficult relationship he had with his stepmother. She felt obvious contempt for her stepson, and on one occasion she sent him to live with the indigenous servants of the hacienda. They cared for him lovingly and passed on his idiosyncrasy, based on his love for nature. In 1926 his father admitted him to a school in Ica, which means a distance from the environment that had shaped his childhood.
His life in Lima
In 1931 Arguedas moved to Lima and entered the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, with the purpose of studying Literature. Following the death of his father, which occurred the following year, Arguedas is forced to earn a living and starts working as an assistant in the Post Office. In 1935 he publishes Water , the first storybook of his. In 1936 he founded with Augusto Tamayo Vargas, Alberto Tauro del Pino and others, the magazine Word , whose pages reflect the ideology advocated by José Carlos Maríategui. In 1937 he is imprisoned in "El Sexto", because of his intervention in an anti-fascist march that took place at the university , obtaining his freedom in 1939. Shortly after, having achieved his degree, he began his teaching career and at the same time married Celia Bustamante. Just married, he is invited to participate in the indigenous congress of Patzcuaro, in Mexico, remaining in this country for a period of two years.
His work at the Ministry of Education began in 1941 and thanks to him he was able to collaborate with the reform of secondary education plans . Before the end of that year, Arguedas publishes Yawar Fiesta , his first novel. In 1948 he is appointed head of the Folklore and Fine Arts section in the Ministry of Education. He finished his Anthropology studies in 1950 and later became part of the faculty at the University of San Marcos, teaching Ethnology. In 1953 he is appointed director of the Institute of Ethnological Studies of what is now the National Museum of Peruvian Culture. In 1954 he published the novella Diamonds and flints , his third work. The writer makes his first trip to Europe, on a UNESCO scholarship, to carry out various studies, both in Spain and France. During the time he remained in Spain, Arguedas did research for his doctoral thesis:The communities of Spain in Peru . In 1958 he publishes The deep rivers , an essentially autobiographical novel, for which he received, in the course of 1960, the “Ricardo Palma” award.
The following year he publishes El Sexto . Thanks to this novel, Arguedas won, in 1962, and for the second time, the “Ricardo Palma” award. That same year, he also attended West Berlin (Germany), where the first colloquium of Ibero-American writers was held, organized by the Humboldt magazine. .
In 1963 he is appointed professor of the Faculty of Letters of the University of San Marcos and also director of the House of Culture of Peru, where he carries out a remarkable professional work; however, he resigned the following year, as a gesture of solidarity with the president of the National Commission of Culture. In the year 1964 he published his most ambitious work:All Bloods , novel of great narrative consistency, in which the writer wants to show us all the variety of human types that make up Peru. For 1965 Arguedas is named director of the National Museum of History. After divorcing his first wife, he married Sybila Arredondo, who accompanied him until the end of his life.
Maria Arguedas and depression
Despite all his personal and professional achievements, he makes his first suicide attempt. The writer had been suffering periods of severe depressive crisis for many years. One of them was when, in 1948, they reduced his class hours and the salary he received in the Ministry of Education under the accusation of being a “communist”. He too had experienced another crisis in 1942, but for different reasons. From this attempt at self-elimination, his life is no longer the same. He isolates himself from his friends and resigns from all the public positions that he held in the Ministry of Education, with the purpose of dedicating himself only to his chairs at the Agrarian University and the San Marcos University. To cure his spiritual ills, he gets in touch with a Chilean psychiatrist, who recommends that he continue writing as a treatment. In this way he publishes another book of stories: Love world (1967) and, later, his posthumous work:The fox from above and the fox from below . In 1968 he finished his teaching at the University of San Marcos, and, almost simultaneously, he was elected head of the Department of Sociology at the Agrarian University. That year he was awarded the “Inca Garcilaso de la Vega” prize, for having considered his work as a contribution to the art and letters of Peru.
However, around this time his existential anguish becomes acute and he again has the idea of suicide in mind as witnessed by his “First Diary”, which he will insert into his posthumous novel. He finally resigns from his position at the Agrarian University and on November 28, 1969 he shoots himself in the head , because of which he died, after spending five days of painful agony. On the day of his burial, as the writer had requested in his diary, an Indian played the violin before his coffin and then gave a brief speech, in words that conveyed the feeling of the indigenous people, who deeply regretted his departure. of the. The writer had a relatively short life, but he is survived by his magnificent works, which make him one of the three great representatives of the indigenous current in Peru, along with Ciro Alegría and Manuel Scorza. Other works:Runa yupay (1939); Peruvian myths, legends and tales (Anthology – with Francisco Izquierdo, 1947); Songs and tales of the Quechua people (1949); Quechua poetry (Buenos Aires, 1964); Katatay (1972); Formation of an Indo-American national culture (Mexico, 1989). In 1978, the Ayacucho Library in Caracas published Deep rivers with a prologue by Mario Vargas Llosa and in 1983 the Horizonte de Lima publishing house published his complete works in five volumes.
A notable poet and representative of magical realism, like Juan Rulfo -of whom he was a friend-, José María Arguedas introduces a richer and deeper inner vision into indigenous literature. The prestigious short story writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro wrote, regarding The deep rivers and, in general, about the work of José María Arguedas, the following:“What we admire in Arguedas, mainly, is the love with which he writes. Every object in nature, be it a stone, a river, a plant, is for him a source of dazzle. These objects that for us, city men, mechanized and subjected to a manufacturing landscape, are nothing more than disorder or chance, have for Arguedas an infinite number of nuances, secrets, signifiers and names”.