Jose Maria Arguedas

José María Arguedas (Andahuaylas, January 18, 1911-Lima, December 2, 1969) was a Peruvian writer, poet, professor, and anthropologist. He was the author of novels and short stories that have led him to be considered one of the great representatives of Peruvian literature. The critic Martin Seymour-Smith considers Arguedas "the greatest novelist of our time", who wrote "some of the most powerful prose the world has ever known".

Introduced into literature a richer and more incisive interior vision of the indigenous world. The fundamental question that arises in his works is that of a country divided into two cultures (the Andean of Quechua origin and the western one, brought by the Spaniards), which must coexist. The great dilemmas, anxieties and hopes that this project raises are the core of his vision.

His work as an anthropologist and social researcher parallels his importance and the influence he had on his literary work. His study of Peruvian folklore, particularly Andean music, should be highlighted. In this regard, he had very close contact with singers, musicians, scissors dancers and various dancers from all regions of Peru. His contribution to the revaluation of indigenous art, reflected especially in the huaino and dance, has been very important.

He was also a translator and disseminator of ancient and modern Quechua literature, all occupations that he shared with his positions as public official and teacher. His novels include Yawar fiesta (1941), Los ríos profundos (1958), Todas las sangres (1964) and The fox above and fox below (1971).

Biography

José María Arguedas Altamirano was born in Andahuaylas, in the southern highlands of Peru on January 18, 1911. Coming from a Creole and aristocratic family on the maternal side, he was orphaned at the age of three. Due to the infrequent presence of his father - trial lawyer and traveler, and his bad relationship with his stepmother, since his stepmother mistreated him along with his stepbrother, he took refuge in the affection of the Andean servants, which made him enter the Quechua language and customs that shaped his personality. His primary studies were carried out in San Juan de Lucanas, Puquio, Ayacucho and his secondary studies in Huancayo and Lima.

He entered the Faculty of Letters of the University of San Marcos, in 1931; there he graduated in Literature, and later studied Ethnology; He received a bachelor's degree in 1957 and a doctor's degree in 1963. Between 1937 and 1938 he was imprisoned for a protest against an envoy of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and joined the communist party. Parallel to his professional training, in 1941 he began to teach, first in Sicuani, Cuzco, and then in Lima, in the Alfonso Ugarte, Guadalupe and Mariano Melgar national schools, until 1949.

He also served as an official in the Ministry of Education, demonstrating his interest in preserving and promoting Peruvian culture, especially Andean music and dance. He was director of the Casa de la Cultura (1963-1964) and director of the National Museum of History (1964-1966). In the field of higher education, he was a professor of Ethnology at the University of San Marcos (1958-1968) and at the La Molina National Agrarian University (1962-1969). Overwhelmed by emotional conflicts, he ended his days by shooting himself in the head on December 2, 1969, at the age of 58.

His narrative work reflects, descriptively, the experiences of his life collected from the reality of the Andean world, and is represented by the following works: Agua (1935), Yawar fiesta (1941), Diamonds and Flints (1954), The Deep Rivers (1958), The Sixth (1961), The agony of Rasu Ñiti (1962), All the bloods (1964), The dream of the pongo (1965), The fox above and the fox below (published posthumously in 1971). All his literary production has been compiled in the first five volumes of his Complete Works (1983). In addition, he made translations and anthologies of Quechua poetry and short stories, as his works on anthropology and ethnology and his non-literary production in general are compiled in the second part of his Complete Works (2012).

Infancy and childhood

José María Arguedas Altamirano was born on January 18, 1911 in the city of Andahuaylas, in the southern highlands of Peru. He was the son of Víctor Manuel Arguedas Arellano, a lawyer from Cuzco who served as a judge in various towns, and Victoria Altamirano Navarro, who belonged to a landed and wealthy family from Andahuaylas. When his mother died (when he was 3 years old), a victim of "hepatic colic", he went on to live in the house of his paternal grandmother, Teresa Arellano, in the city of Andahuaylas. In 1915, when he was appointed first instance judge of the province of Lucanas, department of Ayacucho, his father moved to said seat, where shortly after he married a wealthy landowner from the district of San Juan (Lucanas), province of the same name in the department of Ayacucho, Grimanesa Arangoitia Iturbi widow of Pacheco (1917). Little José María then traveled to Lucanas, to meet with his stepmother; the trip was quite an event for him, as he would always remember. The family settled in Puquio, capital of the province of Lucanas in the department of Ayacucho. José María and his brother Arístides, two years older than him, were enrolled in a private school. The following year, 1918, the two brothers continued their studies in San Juan de Lucanas, 10 km from Puquio, living in their stepmother's house. In 1919, Arístides was sent to study in Lima and José María continued to live with his stepmother.

In 1920, after the rise to power of Augusto B. Leguía, the father of José María ―who was from the opposite party (pardista)― lost his position as judge and had to return to his profession as a trial lawyer and traveler, bustle that only allowed him to make sporadic visits to his family. This stage in the life of the boy José María was marked by the difficult relationship he had with his stepmother and his stepbrother Pablo Pacheco. She felt obvious contempt for her stepson, and constantly sent him to live with the indigenous servants of the hacienda, from which she only picked him up when his father arrived, as Arguedas has recounted in the first meeting of narrators held in Arequipa in 1965.^{[citation required]} For his part, the stepbrother abused him physically and psychologically and on one occasion even forced him to witness the rape of one of his aunts, who was also the mother of one of his schoolmates (the "escoleros" mentioned in several of his stories). Apparently, that was just one of the many sexual scenes that he was forced to witness, since the stepbrother had many lovers in the town. The figure of this half-brother would endure in his literary work, personifying the abusive, cruel and lustful gamonal. Arguedas would later say about that character:

When my sister-in-law arrived, something truly terrible happened (...) From the first moment I fell very badly because this guy was from indigenous factions and I as a boy had a little brown hair and was white compared to him. (...) I was relieved to the kitchen (...) I was forced to do some domestic work; to take care of the calves, to bring the horse, as a young man. (...) He was a criminal, of those classics. I treated the Indians very badly, and this did hurt me a lot and I came to hate him as all the Indians hated him. He was a gamonal.

Some, however, consider the alleged mistreatment of the stepmother to be a fiction; among them Aristides himself.

In mid-July 1921, José María ran away from his stepmother's house together with his brother Arístides, who had returned from Lima; They both went to the Viseca farm, owned by their aunt Zoila Rosa Peñafiel and her husband José Manuel Perea Arellano (her father's half-brother) whom he was very fond of, located 8 km from San Juan de Lucanas. There he lived for two years, in the absence of his father, living with the peasants whom he grew fond of and with whom he participated in farm work for fun. He would keep a special memory of two peasants: don Felipe Maywa and don Víctor Pusa. For José María they were the happiest years of his life.

Adolescence and early youth

Abancay Square.

After fleeing with his brother Arístides from his stepmother's house, in 1923 he left his retirement when he was picked up by his father, whom he accompanied on his frequent work trips, visiting more than 200 towns. They passed through Huamanga, Cuzco and Abancay. In the latter city, he entered the Miguel Grau School of the Mercedarian Parents as a boarder, studying the fifth and sixth grades of primary school, between 1924 and 1925, while his father continued his itinerant life and his brother Arístides continued his education. of him in Lima. This stage of his life was poignantly captured in his masterpiece, The Deep Rivers:

My father could never find where to fix his residence; he was a provincial attorney, unstable and errant. I met more than two hundred villages with him. (...) But my father decided to go from one village to another when the mountains, the roads, the playing fields, the place where the birds sleep, when the details of the village began to be part of the memory. (...) Until a day when my father confessed to me, in addition apparently more energetic than other times, that our pilgrimage would end in Abancay. (...) We crossed the Apurimac, and in my father's blue and innocent eyes I saw the characteristic expression they had when the discouragement made him conceive the decision of new trips. (...) I was enrolled in college and I was sleeping in boarding school. I understood my father would leave. After several years of traveling together, I had to stay; and he would go alone.

In the summer of 1925, when he was visiting the Karkequi hacienda, in the Apurímac valleys, he suffered an accident with the wheel of a sugar mill, as a result of which he lost two fingers on his right hand and atrophied the fingers. remaining fingers.

In 1926, together with his brother Arístides, he began his secondary studies at the San Luis Gonzaga school in Ica, on the deserted Peruvian coast, a fact that marked his departure from the mountain environment that had shaped his childhood until then, since until then he had visited the coast only sporadically. He studied there until his second year of high school and suffered firsthand the contempt of the costeños towards the serranos, both from his teachers and from the students themselves. He fell deeply in love with a girl from Ica named Pompeya, to whom he dedicated some acrostics, but she rejected him, saying that she did not want to have love affairs with mountain people. He took revenge by coming first in the class in all courses, thus collapsing the belief in the intellectual incapacity of the Andean man.

In 1928 he resumed his nomadic life again in the mountains, always with his father. He lived between Pampas and Huancayo; In this last city he attended the third year of secondary school, at the Santa Isabel school. It was there that he formally began as a writer by collaborating in the student magazine Antorcha ; It is also said that at that time he wrote a 600-page novel, which the police would take from him some time later, but of which no trace has remained.

He attended his last two years of high school (1929-1930) at the Colegio Nuestra Señora de La Merced, in Lima, almost without attending classes because he traveled frequently to Yauyos to be by the side of his father, who was overwhelmed due to economic hardship. He passed the final exams, thus finishing his school studies practically studying without a teacher.

College Life

Exterior view of the historic Casona de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, where José María Arguedas studied, and later served as a professor.

In 1931, already 20 years old, he settled permanently in Lima and entered the Faculty of Letters of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. There, contrary to what he expected, he was received with cordiality and respect by his classmates, among whom were the future philosophers Luis Felipe Alarco and Carlos Cueto Fernandini, and the poets Emilio Adolfo Westphalen and Luis Fabio Xammar. Following the death of his father, which occurred the following year, he was forced to earn a living by going to work as an assistant in the Post Office. He was just a job as a document carrier, but the 180 soles a month salary alleviated his financial needs for five years.

In 1933 he published his first short story, «Warma kuyay», published in the magazine Signo. In 1935 she published Agua , his first book of short stories, which won second prize from the American Magazine of Buenos Aires and inaugurated a new era in the history of literary indigenism. In 1936, together with Augusto Tamayo Vargas, Alberto Tauro del Pino and others, he founded the magazine Palabra , whose pages reflect the ideology advocated by José Carlos Mariátegui.

In 1937 he was arrested for participating in student protests against the visit of the Italian General Camarotta, head of a police mission in Fascist Italy. Those were the days of the dictatorship of Óscar R. Benavides. He was transferred to the "El Sexto" prison in Lima, where he remained in prison for 8 months, an episode that he later evoked in the novel of the same name. But despite sympathizing with communist ideology, he never actively participated in militant politics. While in prison, he took time to translate many Quechua songs that appeared in his second published book: Canto kechwa .

Educator, ethnologist and writer

After losing his job at the Post Office and having obtained his Literature Degree in San Marcos, Arguedas began his teaching career at the "Mateo Pumacahua" National School in Sicuani, in the department of Cuzco, as a professor of Spanish and Geography and with the salary of 200 soles per month (1939-1941). There, together with his students, he carried out a work of collecting local folklore. It was then that he discovered his vocation as an ethnologist. At the same time, he married Celia Bustamante Vernal on June 30, 1939, who together with her sister Alicia was a promoter of the Peña Cultural "Pancho Fierro", a legendary meeting place for artists and intellectuals in Lima.

In 1941 he published Yawar Fiesta (novel), his third book and first novel at the same time. Between October 1941 and November 1942 he was added to the Ministry of Education to collaborate in the reform of the secondary study plans. After representing the Peruvian teachers in the First Inter-American Indigenous Congress in Pátzcuaro (1940), he resumed his work as a Spanish teacher in the national schools "Alfonso Ugarte", "Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe" and "Mariano Melgar" in Lima. In those years he also published in the press many folkloric and ethnographic articles about the Andean world.

In 1944 he presented a depressive episode characterized by decay, fatigue, insomnia, anxiety and probably panic attacks, for which he repeatedly asked for leave from his teaching center until 1945. He described this episode in his letters to his brother Arístides and briefly in his diaries inserted in his posthumous novel The fox above and the fox below; In one of those letters (dated July 23, 1945) he said:

I'm still wrong. It's been three years since my life is an alternative of relative relief and days and nights when it seems I'm going to end. I don't read, I barely write; any intense concern strikes me completely. Only with a prolonged rest, in special conditions, could perhaps, according to the doctors, heal until my health is recovered. But that's impossible.

José María Arguedas

She recovered, but would eventually relapse later.

According to César Lévano, at this time Arguedas was very close to the communists, whom he supported in various tasks, such as training workers' circles. The Apristas accused him of being a "known communist militant", an accusation that undoubtedly had a lot of echo because at the end of 1948 the newly installed dictatorship of Manuel A. Odría declared Arguedas "surplus", dismissing him from his teaching position at the school. Mariano Melgar. The following year he enrolled in the San Marcos Institute of Ethnology and resumed his intellectual work. That same year he published Songs and Tales of the Quechua People . In the following years he continued to hold various positions in official institutions in charge of conserving and promoting culture.

In March 1947 he was appointed General Curator of Folklore of the Ministry of Education, to later be promoted to Head of the Folklore, Fine Arts and Office Section of the same Ministry (1950-1952). He carried out important initiatives aimed at studying popular culture throughout the country. Through his direct management, Jacinto Palacios Zaragoza, the great Ancashino troubadour, creator of the 2-handle Andean guitar, recorded the first Andean music album in 1948. The Municipal and Segura theaters opened their doors to Andean art.

Between 1950 and 1953, he taught courses on Ethnology and Quechua at the National Pedagogical Institute for Men. In 1951 she traveled to La Paz, Bolivia, to participate in a meeting of the ILO (International Labor Organization). In 1952 he made a long trip with his wife Celia through the central Andean region, compiling folkloric material, which he published under the title Magical-Realistic Tales and Songs of Traditional Festivals of the Mantaro Valley, Jauja and Concepción Provinces. In 1953 he was appointed director of the Institute of Ethnological Studies of today's National Museum of Peruvian Culture, a position in which he remained for ten years; He simultaneously directed the magazine American Folklore (organ of the Inter-American Folklore Committee, of which he was secretary).

In 1954 he published the short novel Diamonds and Flints, along with a reissue of the Water stories, to which he added the story Orovilca. Some 13 years had passed since she had not published a book of literary creation; from then on he resumed such creative work in a sustained manner, until his death. But his return to literature did not turn him away from ethnology. In 1955 his story "La muerte de los Arango" won first prize in the Latin American Story Contest organized in Mexico.

In order to complement his professional training, he specialized in Ethnology at the University of San Marcos, from which he obtained a Bachelor's degree on (December 20, 1957) with his thesis «The evolution of indigenous communities», work that obtained the Javier Prado National Prize for the Promotion of Culture in 1958. At that time he made his first trip to Europe, with a scholarship from UNESCO, to carry out various studies, both in Spain and France. During the time he remained in Spain, Arguedas carried out research among the communities of the province of Zamora, carrying out his field work in Bermillo de Sayago, searching for the Hispanic roots of the Andean culture, which gave him material for his doctoral thesis: « The Communities of Spain and Peru", with which he graduated on July 5, 1963.

Peak Narrative

In 1958 he published Los ríos profundos, an autobiographical novel, for which he received the “Ricardo Palma” National Prize for the Promotion of Culture in 1959. This novel has been considered his masterpiece. At that time he began to work as a professor of Ethnology at the University of San Marcos (from 1958 to 1968). In the same discipline, he was also a professor at the La Molina National Agrarian University (from 1962 to 1969).

In 1961 he published his novel El Sexto, for which he was awarded, for the second time, the “Ricardo Palma” National Prize for the Promotion of Culture (1962). Said work is a novelized account of his prison experience in the famous prison located in the center of Lima, which would be closed in 1986.

In 1962 he published his short story The agony of Rasu Ñiti. That same year he traveled to West Berlin (Germany), where the first Ibero-American writers colloquium was held, organized by the magazine Humboldt .

In 1963 he was appointed Director of the House of Culture of Peru, where he carried out important professional work; however, he resigned the following year, as a gesture of solidarity with the president of the National Commission for Culture.

In 1964 he published his most ambitious work: Todas las sangres, a novel of great narrative consistency, in which the writer wanted to show all the variety of human types that make up Peru and at the same time the conflicts determined by the changes that contemporary progress causes in the Andean populations. However, this novel was severely criticized during a round table organized by the Institute of Peruvian Studies on June 23, 1965, alleging that it was a distorted version of Peruvian society. These criticisms were devastating for Arguedas, who that same night wrote these heartbreaking lines:

... almost proved by two wise sociologists and an economist, [...], that my book All blood It is negative for the country, I have nothing to do already in this world. My forces have declined, I think irremediably.

One of the outrageous critics of Argueda's work was the writer Sebastián Salazar Bondy. According to the interpretation of some, these criticisms were one of the many links that added to fuel Arguedas's depression, which would lead to his first suicide attempt the following year.

Nevertheless, his intellectual work continued to receive official recognition. In that same year of 1964, his work as a teacher earned him the award of the "Palmas Magisteriales" in the degree of Commander and a Supreme Resolution signed by President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, "thanking him for the services rendered in favor of national culture." He was also appointed Director of the National Museum of History, a position he held until 1966.

In 1965 Arguedas began his divorce from Celia at the same time that he established a new relationship with a Chilean lady, Sybila Arredondo, whom he married in 1967, once the divorce decree had been ruled. Sybila accompanied him until the end of his life; Decades later, she was imprisoned in Peru accused of having ties to the terrorist group Sendero Luminoso and after being released she returned to her country in 2002.

That same year, 1965, Arguedas made numerous trips abroad and within Peru. In January he was in Genoa, at a congress of writers, and in April and May he spent two months, invited by the State Department, visiting North American universities (in Washington D.C., California and Indiana). Upon returning to Peru, he visited Panama. In June he attended the first Meeting of Peruvian Narrators, held in Arequipa, where he had a controversy with Sebastián Salazar Bondy who died days later of congenital cirrhosis of the liver. In September and October he was in France. But he took the time to publish, in a bilingual edition, his story El sueño del pongo .

Statue of José María Arguedas.

In 1966 he made three trips to Chile (in January, for ten days, in July, for four, and in September for two) and attended, in Argentina, a congress of inter-Americanists, after which he visited Uruguay for two weeks. That same year he published his translation into Spanish of the chronicle Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí by the Spanish-Peruvian scholar Francisco de Ávila.

Depression and Suicide

José María Arguedas' depression reached a crisis point in 1966, leading him to make his first suicide attempt by an overdose of barbiturates on April 11 of that year.^{[citation needed]} For some years ago, the writer had been receiving multiple psychiatric treatments, describing his sufferings in his writings:

I am extremely concerned with my poor health. (...) I have become very fatigued, unable to sleep and distressed. I have to go where the doctor again; although these gentlemen never understand well what one suffers or causes. The bad thing is that this comes to me from my childhood (carta to John Murra, April 28, 1961).

A bit of fear another little because I needed it or I think it needed me I survived until today and it will be until Monday or Tuesday. I'm afraid the Seconal won't make me the desired effect. But I think nothing I can do anymore. Today I feel more annihilated and those who live next to me don't believe it or maybe it's more psychic than organic. Same thing. (...) I'm 55. I have lived far more than I believed (carta to Arístides Arguedas, April 10, 1966).

After the suicide attempt, her life was never the same again. He isolated himself from his friends and resigned from all the public positions that he held in the Ministry of Education, with the purpose of devoting himself solely to his professorships at the Agrarian University and the San Marcos University. To treat his illness, he contacted the Chilean psychiatrist Lola Hoffmann, who recommended, as a treatment, that he continue writing. Thus, he published another book of short stories: Amor mundo (in simultaneous editions in Montevideo and Lima, in 1967), and worked on what would be his posthumous work: The fox above and the fox below.

In 1967 he left his teaching profession at the University of San Marcos, and, almost simultaneously, was elected head of the Sociology department at the La Molina National Agrarian University, to which he devoted himself full time. He continued his feverish pace of travel. In February he was in Puno, presiding over a folkloric contest on the occasion of the Candelaria festival. In March he spent 15 days in Mexico, on the occasion of the Second Latin American Writers Congress, in Guadalajara, and eight days in Chile, in another literary contest. At the end of July he traveled to Austria, for an anthropology meeting, and in November he was back in Santiago de Chile, working on his "foxes" novel.

In 1968 he was awarded the "Inca Garcilaso de la Vega" prize. On that occasion, he delivered his famous speech and intellectual testament: I am not acculturated, in which "with greater optimism" he defines himself as mestizo: "I I am not acculturated, I am a Peruvian who proudly like a happy devil speaks Christian and Indian, Spanish and Quechua."

From January 14 to February 22 of that year, he was in Cuba, with Sybila, as a jury for the Casa de las Américas Award. That same year and the following year she had her bitter controversy with the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, and traveled several times to Chimbote, in order to document his latest novel.

At the beginning of 1969 he made his last trip to Chimbote. That same year he made three trips to Chile, the last of them for about five months, from April to October. At that time his psychic ailments worsened again and the idea of suicide was reborn, as witnessed by his diaries inserted in his posthumous novel:

I'm not going to survive the book. As I am sure that my faculties and weapons of creator, teacher, scholar and inciteer have been weakened to become almost null and only remain those that would challenge me to the condition of passive and impotent spectator of the formidable struggle humanity is fighting in Peru and everywhere, I would not be able to tolerate that destiny. Or actor, as I've been since I joined high school, forty-three years ago, or nothing. (Epilogo, 29 August 1969).

He finally resigned from his position at the Agrarian University. On November 28, 1969, he wrote to his wife Sybila:

Forgive me! Since 1943 many Peruvian doctors have seen me, and since 62, Lola, Santiago. And before I suffered a lot with insomnia and decay. But now, in recent months, you know, I can hardly read anymore; it is not possible for me to write but to jump, with fear. I can't dictate classes because I get fat. I can't go up to the Sierra because it causes me disorders. And you know that fighting and contributing is for me life. Not doing anything is worse than death, and you must understand and finally approve what I do.

That same day (November 28, 1969) he locked himself in one of the university bathrooms and shot himself in the head. After being found in serious condition, he was transferred to the Employee Hospital where he spent five days in agony and died on December 2, 1969.

On the day of his burial, as the writer had requested in his diary and in his last letters, the musician Máximo Damián played the violin before his coffin ―accompanied by the harpist Luciano Chiara and the scissor dancers Gerardo and Zacarías Chiara ― and then he delivered a short speech, in words that conveyed the sentiment of the indigenous people, who deeply regretted his departure.

His remains were interred at El Ángel Cemetery. In June 2004 he was exhumed and transferred to Andahuaylas, the place where he was born.

In 1969 ―the same year that he committed suicide― Arguedas gave an interview to Ariel Dorfman for the magazine Trilce:

I understand and have assimilated the culture called Western to a relatively high degree; I admire Bach and Prokofiev, Shakespeare, Sophocles and Rimbaud, Camus and Eliot, but more fully joy with the traditional songs of my people; I can sing, with the authentic purity of a Chanka Indian, a harawi of harvest. What am I? A civilized man who has not ceased to be an indigenous person in Peru; indigenous, not Indian. And so, I have walked through the streets of Paris and Rome, Berlin and Buenos Aires. And those who heard me sing have heard melodies absolutely unknown, of great beauty and with an original message. barbarism is a word that the Europeans invented when they were very sure that they were superior to the men of others races and other continents "recently discovered".

José María Arguedas

Works

The intellectual production of Arguedas is quite extensive and includes some 400 writings, including literary creations (novels and short stories), translations of Quechua poetry and short stories into Spanish, monographic works, essays and articles on the Quechua language, pre-Hispanic mythology, folklore and popular education, among other aspects of Peruvian culture. The special circumstance of having been educated within two cultural traditions, the western and the indigenous, together with a delicate sensitivity, allowed him to understand and describe the complex reality of the native Indian like no other Peruvian intellectual, with which he identified intensely.. In Arguedas, the work of the writer and the ethnologist are never totally dissociated; even in the most academic studies of him we find the same lyrical language as in his narrations.

The fundamental importance of this writer has been recognized by Peruvian critics and colleagues of his, such as Mario Vargas Llosa, who went so far as to dedicate a book of essays entitled La utopia archaica to his work. Also Alfredo Bryce Echenique has placed the works of Arguedas among the books of his life. Over the years, the work of Arguedas has gained greater prominence, despite the fact that he is little known outside of Peru.

Novels

• 1941: Yawar party. Reviewed in 1958.
• 1954: Diamonds and pedernals. Edited in conjunction with a book reissue Water and the story “Orovilca”
• 1958: Deep rivers. Ricardo Palma National Prize for the Promotion of Culture in 1959. It was republished in 1978 by the Ayacucho Library of Caracas with a prologue by Mario Vargas Llosa.
• 1961: Sex. Ricardo Palma National Prize for the Promotion of Culture in 1962.
• 1964: All blood
• 1971: The top fox and the bottom fox, unfinished novel and published posthumously.

Stories

• 1935: Water. Collection of stories composed of: Water, The escorts and Warma kuyay. Second prize in the international competition promoted by the American Magazine of Buenos Aires. Translated to Russian, German, French and English by The International Literature of Moscow.
• 1955: The Death of the Arangos. I count. First prize of the Latin American Talent Competition in Mexico.
• 1962: The agony of Rasu Ñiti. I count.
• 1965: The dream of putting. Talent, in bilingual edition (castellano-quechua).
• 1967: Love world. Collection of four stories of erotic theme: “The Old Furnace”, “La orerta”, “El ayla” and “Don Antonio”.

Posthumous compilations (stories)

• 1972: The stranger and other stories (Montevideo: Sandino). It contains “El barranco”, “Orovilca”, “Son solo” and “El forastero”.
• 1972: Pages chosen (Lima: Universe). Selection of the work of Arguedas, edited by Emilio Adolfo Westphalen.
• 1973: Forgottentales (Lima: Images and Letters). Compilation of lost stories in newspapers and magazines of the years 1934 and 1935, edition and notes by José Luis Rouillon.
• 1974: Complete stories (Buenos Aires: Losada). It contains the following important stories: “Water”, “The Snails”, “Warma kuyay”, “El barranco”, Diamonds and pedernals“Orovilca”, “The Death of the Arango”, “Son alone”, The agony of Rasu Ñiti, The dream of putting“The Old Furnace”, “La orerta”, “El ayla” and “Don Antonio”.

Poetry

First written in Quechua, and later translated into Spanish by the same author, Arguedas's poems consciously assume the tradition of Quechua poetry, ancient and modern, validating the vision of the world that animates it, revitalizing its essential myths and condensing in a single movement the social protest and the cultural claim.

• 1962: Tupac Amaru Kamaq taytanchisman. Haylli-taki. To our creative father Tupac Amaru. Hymn-chanting.
• 1966: Oda al jet.
• 1969: Qollana Vietnam Llaqtaman / The Excelled Village of Vietnam.
• 1972 - Katatay and other poems. Huc jayllikunapas. Poems in Quechua and Spanish versions. Posthumously published by Sybila Arredondo de Arguedas.

Ethnological, anthropological and folklore studies

These make up the majority of his written production (only 12% of this corresponds to his narrative).

• 1938: Canto kechwa. With an essay on the artistic capacity of the Indian and mixed people. Bilingual edition prepared in prison.
• 1947: Peruvian myths, legends and stories. Received by the teachers of the country and edited in collaboration with Francisco Izquierdo Ríos.
• 1949: Songs and stories of the Quechua people.
• 1953: Magic-realistic stories and traditional party songs: Mantaro Valley Folk.
• 1956: Puquio, a culture in the process of change.
• 1957: Ethnographic study of the Huancayo fair.
• 1957: Evolution of indigenous communities. Javier Prado National Promotion Award in 1958.
• 1958: Religious popular art and mestizo culture.
• 1961: Magical-Religious Quechuas Counts of Lucanamarca.
• 1966: Poetry Quechua.
• 1966: Gods and Men of Huarochirí. Beautiful direct translation into Castilian, of the myths of the creation of the world of the compilation made by the Cuzqueño priest Francisco de Ávila at the end of the centuryXVIin the province of Huarochirí.
• 1968: The communities of Spain and Peru.

In 1964, the writer founded the magazine “Cultura y pueblo” in Lima, where he also printed his thoughts and knowledge about folklore. In 2021, the Ministry of Culture digitized the complete collection of Magazine. The collection consists of 20 issues, from No. 1, corresponding to January-March 1964, to No. 19-20, corresponding to July-December 1970.

Posthumous collections (ethnological, anthropological and folklore studies)

• 1975: Lords and Indians: About Quechua Culture. Angel Rama compilation.
• 1976: Formation of an American national culture. Compilation due to Angel Rama and whose title " seeks to interpret... a central concern of Arguedas".

Editing complete works

In 1983 the editorial Horizonte, from Lima, published the complete works of José María Arguedas in five volumes, compiled by Sybila Arredondo de Arguedas. In 2012 the same publishing house Horizonte, from Lima, published another seven volumes that collect the Anthropological and Cultural Work. Also the second series, from the sixth to the twelfth volume, was compiled by Sybila Arredondo de Arguedas.

Acknowledgments

Award

• 1958. Premio Nacional Fomento a la Cultura Javier Prado for his thesis of speciality in Ethnology, «The evolution of indigenous communities».
• The José María Arguedas Narrativa Award awarded since 2000 by Casa de las Américas to spread the narrative work of Latin American writers.

Centenary of his birth

Mausoleum of ethnology José María Arguedas in Andahuaylas.

In 2011, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of José María Arguedas, different activities were scheduled in honor of the indigenous novelist. The first of these was the proposal that the Government of Peru declare 2011 as the Year of the Centenary of the Birth of José María Arguedas, however, this was left aside and on December 31, 2010 President Alan García declared 2011 as the "Year of the Centenary of Machu Picchu for the World", also commemorating the centenary of the rediscovery of the Inca citadel in 2011. The controversy over this decision continued, since many believed that it was a meanness not to award 2011 to one of the greatest scholars of deep Peru.

On his centenary day, January 18, 2011, various activities were held in his honor. In Lima, a parade was organized by the TUC (Catholic University Theater) that left the Congress of the Republic, along Abancay Avenue, towards the University Park, with the use of wagons, stilts, typical characters from Arguedian literature.. There was presented the Stage Action that took texts, testimonies, poems, fragments of works, and figures, such as the Zorro de Arriba and the Zorro de Abajo, wearing masks, and a large display of actors. Then they moved to the historic Casona de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, where the Minister of Culture inaugurated the exhibition Arguedas and popular art.

In Andahuaylas, Apurímac, more than 5,000 people paraded through the city in a parade starting at seven in the morning accompanied by folk dances and the Scissors Dance. The celebration began with a mass at 7 a.m. m. officiated in Quechua in the Church of San Pedro, followed by a ringing of bells.

In Bermillo de Sayago ―a town that served as a study for his doctoral thesis The communities of Spain and Peru―, a tribute was made with the motto «Peru in the “Sayaguesa Soul”, Bermillo de Sayago, 1958, in the light of Arguedas».^{[citation required]}

Ticket

In July 2022, the new 20 soles bill was put into circulation with the photograph of José María Arguedas that was taken by the artist Baldomero Pestana, which was controversial because the BCRP did not ask the author for permission to reproduce the image.