Unexpected (And Perhaps Unwanted) Revisionisms: La

Contramarcha Vanguardista de Gamaliel Churata y Arturo Borda

Elizabeth Monasterios

MLN, Volume 130, Number 2, March 2015 (Hispanic Issue), pp. 316-339 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2015.0028

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/582092

[ Access provided at 8 Nov 2020 19:22 GMT from CUNY Graduate Center ]
 Unexpected (And Perhaps
Unwanted) Revisionisms:
La Contramarcha Vanguardista de
Gamaliel Churata y Arturo Borda1
❦

Elizabeth Monasterios

It is hard to imagine that much is yet to be said in the study of the

Latin American avant-garde. This article addresses the unprecedented
situation of two countries—Perú and Bolivia—that have begun the
process of rethinking their literary canon and correcting historical
errors which, throughout the twentieth century, silenced the work of
two writers who brought into avant-garde aesthetics both indigenous
and marginal subjectivities that, besides being outside the “spirit” of
Western art, had the capacity to theoretically dispute its universality. I
am referring to the Peruvian Gamaliel Churata (1897–1969) and the
Bolivian Arturo Borda (1883–1953).
Gamaliel Churata was the pseudonym that Arturo Peralta Miranda
(one of the most intriguing figures of the Andean cultural process in
the first half of the twentieth century) adopted in 1924. In the Aymara
language Churata means “the chosen one” and Gamaliel (in Hebrew
“reward of God”) refers to Gamaliel the Elder, one of the Pharisee
1
Sections of this work were presented in Spanish at the Symposio Internacional de
Estudios Transandinos (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 2013) and at the Sexto Congreso
Internacional de Peruanistas (Georgetown University, 2014). I am very grateful to
Maya Aguiluz Ibargüen, Marco Bosshard, Sarah Castro-Klaren, Jorge Coronado, Luis
Salazar Mejía, Helena Usandizaga and Juan Zevallos, for the questions they posed
and for their valuable feedback. This English version owes a great debt to Agatha
Monasterios-Ramírez, who revised sections of the text, and Marvin Liberman, who
generously edited the final version.

MLN 130 (2015): 316–339 © 2015 by Johns Hopkins University Press

 M  L N 317

doctors of Jewish law who exhorted the Israelites to “not persecute”

the apostles nor to “prevent their preaching” (Acts 5.38–39). Such a
combination of Aymara epistemology and biblical context should not
be perceived as messianic. It is rather a result of the exceptionality
that surrounded this writer’s intellectual formation, rooted in Puno
under the tutelage of his heterodox father, Don Demetrio Peralta. In
the early twentieth century Don Demetrio had founded the “Sociedad
Fraternal de Artesanos” (where indigenous anarchism met) and, in
rejecting gamonalista Catholicism, he became an anarcho-evangelist
preacher. His children, therefore, grew up radically politicized in
favor of indigenous demands and under the influence of the New
Testament’s liberating rhetoric. In Bolivia, where Churata lived for
over thirty years (first in 1918, when he was only twenty-one years old,
and later, in exile, from 1932 to 1964), he assumed the nickname of
“barbarian” for having founded, along with Carlos Medinaceli, the
literary group Gesta Bárbara (Potosí, 1918), which, as he would put
it, was “una contramarcha . . . allí maduró el genio bárbaro . . . allí
conocimos a España y descubrimos a América” (Churata “Period-
ismo” 105, 113). In Peru, Churata was a contemporary of the writers
known as the “Generación Centenario” (José Carlos Mariátegui, Luis
Alberto Sánchez, José Sabogal, Luis Valcárcel, César Vallejo, etc.), yet
he never actually joined them. Instead, he led from Puno a cultural
countermarch, which he termed as “vanguardismo del Titikaka,” and
which Luis Alberto Sánchez once identified as “el hecho más curioso
e insólito de la literatura del Perú.” The choice of writing “Titikaka”
and not “Titicaca” was in response to a project to disengage Spanish
spelling by approaching the barbaric and plebeian writing of Felipe
Guaman Poma de Ayala while, at the same time, preserving an Aymara
sonority within the structure of Spanish language.
The other writer who forced a rethinking of the literary canon, in
this case from Bolivia, was the charismatic and irreverent Arturo Borda,
known among his contemporaries by the nickname of “el Loco” in
reference to his desire to incorporate the marginal-popular-urbane into
the horizon of nationality and, with that force, demolish the modern
history of Bolivia, the Hispanic hegemony, and the elitism of art and
literature. Besides being a writer, Borda was also a prolific artist (it is
said that he produced around three thousand paintings), journalist,
social activist, anarchist, and someone who rejected the role of “intel-
lectual” or “bohemian” as a construction designed to sanitize and tame
rebellion when expressed through artistic means. In open defiance to
domesticated languages, Borda thought of himself as a lari, an Aymara
expression alluding to anonymous and marginal existences, to those
318 Elizabeth Monasterios

who inhabit the borders between the social and the untamed ways of
life. Hence he often identified himself as “Caliban.”
This brief introduction serves to illustrate that we are entering
into dialogue with prolific writers who resist conventional aesthetic
parameters. They are not simply “novelists,” “chroniclers,” “poets,”
“storytellers,” “playwrights” or “essayists,” but in fact explore these and
other scriptural modalities while always distorting the conventions of
classical forms. Churata, besides being a cultural activist, journalist,
and promoter of the Boletín Titikaka,2 the ayllu Orkopata,3 and the
“vanguardismo del Titikaka,”4 is the author of a monumental book
(more than five hundred pages) written between the late nineteenth
to the mid-twentieth century and only published in La Paz in 1957:
El pez de oro. Retablos del Laykhakuy.5 Borda, drawing equally from lit-

2
This Avant-garde magazine was published by the ayllu-Orkopata, a collective that
brought together mestizo and indigenous intellectuals in the province of Puno. Between
1926 and 1930 the Boletín Titikaka published 34 issues devoted to exploring a new aes-
thetic, referred to as “Andean aesthetics,” and the politicization of the Andean cultures.
So far, the most serious studies of the magazine are those of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez
(“Guía del Boletín Titikaka,” 1981); David Wise (“Vanguardismo a 3800 metros: el caso
del Boletín Titikaka,” 1984); Cynthia Vich (Indigenismo de vanguardia en el Perú: un estudio
sobre el Boletín Titikaka, 2000) and Juan Zevallos Aguilar (Indigenismo y nación. Los retos
a la representación de la subalternidad aymara y quechua en el Boletín Titikaka. 1926–1930,
2002). Also important are the contributions of Vicky Unruh in Latin American Vanguards.
The Art of Contentious Encounters, Jorge Schwartz in Las vanguardias americanas, Dante
Callo Cuno’s “Presentaciones” to the facsimile edition of the Boletín, and the work of
Yazmin López Lenci (1999) and Dorian Espezúa Salmon (2004 and 2007).
3
Literary criticism consistently refers to this collective in terms of “Grupo Orkopata.”
Examining Churata writings, however, I’ve noticed that it is much more appropriate to
identify it as “ayllu Orkopata,” respecting Churata’s own perception. In one of his last
public appearances in Puno, Churata used the term “escuela Orkopata” to identify the
collective, and characterized it as the “ayllu” from where emerged the countermarch
he termed Vanguardismo del Titikaka. (Churata Motivaciones 64).
4
In a forthcoming book, entitled La vanguardia plebeya del Titikaka. Gamaliel Churata
y otras beligerancias estéticas en los Andes, I fully study the formation and operation of this
avant-garde, which broadly speaking was a cultural countermarch capable of causing
an “avant-garde debate” and an “indigenist debate” than exceeded all expectations and
demands critical attention. An advance of this research can be seen in my article “La
vanguardia plebeya del Titikaka” (1912).
5
By words of the author we know that the writing of El pez de oro started in the Puno
classrooms, in the early twentieth century, when Churata was a child (Churata Motiva-
ciones 64). Based on this biographical data, many critics have assumed that the book was
written during the author’s youth. In the first edition of El pez de oro, however, Churata
entered 1927–1957 as the time-period in which the book was written, coinciding with
the years of publication of the Boletín Titikaka and the Bolivian exile (El pez de oro
148). These details help to understand that this is a book written over many years of
political and cultural activism first in Puno, but also in La Paz, where Churata lived the
process which ended in the Bolivian National Revolution of 1952, entered in contact
with Quechua and Aymara intellectuals, and participated in the single most important
event in the history of Bolivian indigenous education: la escuela-ayllu de Warisata.
 M  L N 319

erature, the visual arts, and his anarchist political activist standpoint,
wrote, between 1902 and 1927, another monumental book published
posthumously in 1966 in three large volumes that are a total of 1,659
pages: El loco.

El pez de oro, First Edition Cover El Loco, First Edition Cover

La Paz: Editorial Canata, 1957. (Fig. 1.) La Paz: Honorable Municipalidad de La
Paz, Bolivia, 1966. (Fig. 2.)

Until recently, both books had largely been out of print, a situation
which transformed them into a type of extinct creature that contem-
porary readers had little or no ability to access. A handful of critics,
however, never ceased to remind Peruvian and Bolivian literary histo-
riography that one of its most important chapters was yet to be writ-
ten. In Bolivia, Carlos Medinaceli, Carlos Salazar Mostajo, Guillermo
Lora, Jaime Saenz, Blanca Wietüchter and the research team that in
2012 published Hacia una historia crítica de la literatura en Bolivia first
noted the importance of Borda for Bolivian literature.6 In the fifties,
Medinaceli, Díez de Medina, José Enrique Viaña, and other members

6
Rodolfo Ortiz, a member of that team and doctoral candidate at the University of
Pittsburgh, is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on Borda that will offer the
first comprehensive study of his work.
320 Elizabeth Monasterios

of Gesta Bárbara alerted Bolivia to the exceptionality of Churata’s

work and its undeniable contribution to Latin American literature,
and in 1957 the country honored him with the Premio Nacional de
Literatura that he declined for not giving up his Peruvian nationality.
In Peru, Puneño writers always knew that Churata was destined for
great attention, but in terms of academic research, it was only in the
seventies, with the publication of Antología y valoración (1971)7 and the
thesis of Omar Aramayo (Universidad Nacional del Altiplano, 1979),
that his work began to be studied. Cornejo Polar, unquestionably the
scholar who has most effectively incorporated Andean literature into
scholarly research, addressed Churata’s work in passing as “uno de los
grandes retos no asumidos por la crítica peruana” (140).
Recently, and in moving acts, Peruvians and Bolivians initiated the
long road towards rethinking their national literatures in dialogue with
writers who had been willfully ignored, marginalized, and even exiled
from the Republic of Letters, mostly because their biographies and
literary projects challenged the perception that Bolivian and Peruvian
intellectual elites had of the “writer” and of “literature.” The journey
taken inside the Congreso de la República del Perú on February 3,
2012 was poignant because it permitted an entire country to symboli-
cally clear its greatest literary debt. So did Estrella Peralta (Churata’s
daughter) comprehend this when, in response to Congressman Yonhy
Lescano Ancieta, who on behalf of the Congress and the Peruvian State
apologized to the memory of Gamaliel Churata for having been mis-
treated and exiled from Peru, she uttered these unforgettable words:
Nunca en el Perú se ha dado este hecho tan singular y significativo.
No hay tampoco precedentes que en América Latina, un Estado-nación
soberano y democrático haya tenido la entereza y valentía de reivindicar
a un escritor después de su muerte física. Es también la primera vez que
el estado peruano pide disculpas, pide perdón a la memoria de un intelec-
tual peruano, por haber sido agredido en vida, maltratado e injustamente
desterrado durante más de treinta y dos años . . . .
Aunque no es el momento para hacer un recuento de los años de dolor
humano y lucha contra la adversidad, creemos que Gamaliel Churata no
mereció el trato que recibió desde adolescente de parte de una sociedad
con mentalidad estrecha y colonial. Tampoco que haya sido subrogado
de su función de bibliotecario y menos perseguido por una dictadura que
ahora viene a ser una ignominia para la historia del Perú . . . .

7
Prepared by the Instituto Puneño de Cultura, this volume brought together an
impressive selection of Churata’s writing published between 1928 and1960, followed
by critical materials that were crucial in drawing attention to his work.
 M  L N 321

Aunque Manuel González Prada, César Vallejo, José Carlos Mariátegui,

Clorinda Mato de Turner, Adela Montesinos, Magda Portal, Ciro Alegría,
Carlos Oquendo de Amat, Alejandro Romualdo, sobre todo Javier Heraud
y José María Arguedas, para no mencionar más ilustres escritores peruanos,
jamás recibieron un trato adecuado en vida ni después de muertos, el Es-
tado Peruano jamás pidió perdón por las atrocidades y abusos cometidos
contra ellos. Pero con Gamaliel Churata y de esta manera, se inicia una
revisión de la historia, del imaginario colectivo, para así establecer un
distinto tiempo histórico.
. . . Que un Estado democrático, que un Congreso soberano elegido por
el pueblo peruano reivindique a Gamaliel Churata, es también reivindicar
a escritores, artistas y poetas contemporáneos, a sus condiscípulos como
Alejandro Peralta, Diego Kunurana, Mateo Jaika, Carlos Dante Nava, Au-
relio Martínez, Inocencio Mamani, Eustaquio Aweranca. Especialmente a
Alberto Mostajo, a su amigo Manuel Z. Camacho, a Teodomiro Gutiérrez
Cueva “Rumi maqui” y a Francisco Francisco Chuquihuanca Ayulo. Todos
ellos junto con Gamaliel Churata, le dieron al Perú, una fisonomía distinta
a una imposición intelectual francamente colonial desde Lima. (2012)

Equally poignant was that in December of 2009, when the Ministry for
Cultures of the Plurinational State of Bolivia commissioned a team of
experts from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés and the Univer-
sidad Católica Boliviana to develop a “literary canon” by collecting
fifteen representative novels from Bolivian literature, El loco obtained
a place in that critical selection. Three years later, on December 28,
2012, the Ministry of Cultures gave the country a collection entitled
“Las 15 novelas fundamentales de Bolivia” that finally pulled El loco
out of its imposed silence, providing the modern reader with the
opportunity to appreciate the exceptionality of a text that throughout
the twentieth century had been misunderstood and (with few excep-
tions) outlawed from literary criticism.
Paraphrasing an expression once used by Bosshard in reference
to Churata’s book, it can be said that both in the case of El pez de
oro and El loco, we are faced with frightening texts. It is frightening
that their edgy writing goes back to 1902 in the case of Borda, and
about 1907 for Churata, even before Breton, Marinetti, or Huidobro
had opened the way for the avant-garde. Equally disturbing is their
unbearable irreverence in denouncing the “pongueaje intelectual”
that had postponed any possibility of historical, aesthetic, and social
dignity in America, as well as their stubborn resistance to conventional
artistic paradigms. These books, as I said, are not novels, not diaries,
322 Elizabeth Monasterios

nor poetry, theater or essays, but possess features of all these genres,
distorted by the “artistic nervousness” of writers interested in capturing
characteristic aesthetic sensibilities of Andean cultures in the case of
Churata, and of urban-popular marginalities in that of Borda. As if
this would not be enough to exasperate the reader, they unsettle the
conventionality of literature with multilingual texts that in addition to
mixing Spanish with Aymara, Quechua, Quechu-Aymara, and Latin,
offer fragmented, yet coherent narratives, with no claim of represent-
ing “hero adventure” or “finished work,” and are deeply critical of a
colonizing modernity. With these characteristics, they fully enter into
the category of bizarre and unacceptable.

Today, in the era of social movements and indigenous ascent to

political power, such “extravagances” have entered the literary canon,
re-orientating the study of Peruvian and Bolivian literature as well as
that of the unfolding of the avant-garde in Latin America. Current
criticism will have to address the fact that in 2012 El Loco became part
of the Bolivian literary canon and required reading for high school
students. Similarly, scholars will have to address the fact that between
2011 and 2014, after nearly sixty years of editorial silence, two criti-
cal editions of El pez de oro were published (one by José Luis Ayala,
who used it to inaugurate the Gamaliel Churata Library, and another
prepared by Helena Uzandizaga for Ediciones Cátedra), along with
several unpublished texts;8 a profuse body of research on his work;
and scholarly conferences, symposia, and blogs that altogether form
a rich bibliography and a field of study that is impacting not only
Latin American academia, but also its American, European and Asian
counterparts.

8
Although most of Churata’s unpublished materials are in possession of his family,
a good number of manuscripts, poetry, journalism, and correspondence are held by
individuals and/or in newspaper archives in Peru and Bolivia. Churata’s own assessment
of his work gives an idea of the magnitude of these unpublished materials. Months
before his death he explicitly mentioned to an audience at the Universidad Nacional
Federico Villarreal that his work consisted of 18 volumes, of which El pez de oro was the
first, followed by La resurrección de los muertos and several collections of poetry. So far,
Guissela Gonzales Fernández has assembled a collection of newspaper articles under
the title El dolor americano (2009); Riccardo Badini has published La resurrección de los
muertos (2010) and “Dialéctica del realismo psíquico,” a conference that offers a number
of clues for reading El pez de oro (Simbología de El Pez de Oro, 2006). Currently, a volume
of poetry is in preparation by Badini.
 M  L N 323

Cover of the critical edition prepared Cover of the critical edition

by José Luis Ayala (Fig. 3.) prepared by Helena Usandizaga
(Cátedra, 2012) (AFA Editores,
2011) (Fig. 4.)

VIII Congreso Nacional Lingüístico-

Literario “Gamaliel Churata” (CONALL)
24–29 de octubre, 2011, Universidad
Nacional del Altiplano (Fig. 5.)
324 Elizabeth Monasterios

But it is the place and affection that Churata has earned among
young writers in the South Peruvian and the Bolivian Altiplano which
most eloquently speaks of the impact that his work may have in the
future of Andean collectivities. In the city of El Alto, for example,
there has emerged a literary collective of young Aymara writers self-
identified as Yerba Mala,9 for whom Churata constitutes a fundamental
point of reference. We read in one of their manifestos:
(La yerba mala crece en rincones de capillas). Por este mismo motivo y
reutilizando la piedra angular esculpida por Gamaliel Churata—ese faro
que hoy resucita—, debemos lanzar la premisa: Anticipamos el amanecer
a lo oscuro (con plena conciencia de que uno es imposible sin el otro)
y, centralmente, parados sobre la propia experiencia, confiamos nuestra
íntima fuerza interior que predica: en Yerba Mala nadie cree en la Muerte.
(“Yerba Mala Cartonera” 132)

Faced with such unprecedented events, one wonders what made them
possible. How was it that almost simultaneously, two atypical writers
emerge from oblivion and yet appear to be related to each other?
Bolivia, the country where Borda lived his entire life and where Chu-
rata lived in exile for thirty-two years,10 played, of course, an important
role here, but equally important was the obsession that both had for
conceiving of an avant-garde in which all the diagonals of modern life
would enter, including the brutal subalternization of Indians and that
of the urban-popular cultures. A letter that Churata sent to Mariáte-
gui in November 1926 beautifully illustrates what I am trying to say:
Querido compañero Mariátegui: . . .
Cuando Ud. probablemente se nutría de selecta literatura, lo que sin duda
le ha procurado esa admirable pureza y agilidad de su expresión, yo vomi-

9
The group proposes an “estética cartonera” that recycles cardboard in the trash,
writes on it, and looks for a “recycling awareness” in the reader when he/she comes
to terms with this “junk” (125).
10
The exile of Churata occurred following the political turmoil surrounding the fall of
Leguía and the rise of Sánchez Cerro to power. Winner of the 1931 elections in which
Víctor Haya de la Torre was defeated, Sánchez Cerro unleashed a state repression that
equally persecuted, imprisoned and exiled APRA militants and communists. Churata,
who had initially supported Sánchez Cerro’s “military revolution” against Leguía’s
oligarchy, experienced firsthand the impact that this repression had in Puno. He was
forced to resign as Director of the Municipal Library of Puno; his home and library
were raided, losing forever “una novela de tesis socialista” and one of an “intención
vernacular” written in the late twenties (Churata, “Periodismo” 107). In early 1932 he
was imprisoned for more than a month in the Prefecture of Puno, falsely accused of
taking students of San Carlos to revolt, and in late April of that year he was already
in La Paz as in exile, penniless and with the intention to “rumbear” to Buenos Aires
(Gonzales Fernández 209).
 M  L N 325

taba (siempre sólo podré hacer eso) toda la dinamita que la esclavitud del
indio producía en mis nervios. A los quince años desafiaba a duelo a un
gamonal, a causa de los indios, y a los diecisiete me encarcelaban a causa
de haber insultado el gobierno de Benavides. Soy, pues, orgánicamente, un
vanguardista (en verdad que la palabra también me ha cansado). (Mariá-
tegui, Correspondencia 193)

Borda, without necessarily channeling his writing through indig-

enous issues, vehemently questioned the Indian’s colonized condition
as well as other forms of social subalternities in mid-twentieth century
Bolivia. Like Churata, he also “vomited” indignation, and in his case
this “vomiting” gave shape to what I have ventured to call “el último
ismo vanguardista: el demolicionismo,” which, primarily pointing to
the demolition of a colonized culture and society, also demands the
demolition of “la mansendumbre de los subalternos” (El loco, tomo
I, 79).
At the time, neither Peruvian nor Bolivian intellectuals could absorb
such challenging literary interventions. “Beligerancias,” Churata would
say, which translated into a nightmare for the mid-twentieth century
reader and a challenge for one of the twenty-first, mainly because
they force us to think outside of modern reason, universal values,​​
and the conceptual framework of “national literatures.” One of the
major challenges that Borda and Churata pose to current literary
criticism is to consider cultural circuits other than those tolerated by
the nation-state. For further elaboration of this idea I would go back
to the words of Estrella Peralta and emphasize that when a nation
apologizes to the memory of a writer for having “unjustly expelled
him for over thirty-two years,” nothing guarantees that this writer will
be harmoniously reintegrated into the literary tradition from which
he was expelled. In an ironic gesture, those thirty-two years of exile
problematize the dynamics of forgiveness. They are not negotiable.
In thirty-two years of exile Churata dissociated himself from Peruvian
modern narratives and from its “national literature,” while Borda, from
the margins in which he lived, wrote, painted, and died, dissociated
himself from Bolivian modernity and its “national culture.” How, then,
should they be integrated into national frameworks they themselves
questioned and collapsed? Perhaps not even in a state of repentance
are we up to the challenges these writers posed to the Peruvian and
Bolivian literary process. A major interpellation Churata enacted upon
Peruvian literature (and by extension upon Latin American literature)
326 Elizabeth Monasterios

was to confront it for its lack of ajayu (roughly translated as “spirit”),11

a condition that emptied them from an “alma nacional” (El pez 916).
Nationality, in Churata’s words “supone población, población arguye
mayorías” (915). Therefore, “si las mayorías constituyen nación por
naturaleza . . . nadie puede gobernar sin que ellas lo consientan”
(915), much less to claim the existence of a national literature without
them. Churata continues:
Escarpada o roma, lisa o aguda, si un país tiene alma nacional ella es
alma de las mayorías. Alma colectiva: naya. Corporación multánime en que
las unidades encuentran la unidad . . . .
[E]s de necesidad sostener que cuando un país se rige sometido a sus
minorías, ese país carece de alma nacional; y nada menos admisible que
patria sin alma . . . . Por tanto, Runa-Hakhes, patria no es colonia . . . . El
nidal de la Patria está tejido del universo de sus raíces; y en ella conjuga
sólo cuanto la afirma en lo que es: en fuerza de Naturaleza.
He aquí que si sacáis al estruendoso Marañón de su cauce, ya no será
Marañón, aunque siempre agua, y acaso río . . . . Así mismo si volquéis el
Atlántico en la hoya del Titikaka, tendrá que tomar sus formas, su nacio-
nalidad, su alma, que es su gusto y su hondor. ¡Estúpido que por haberse
volcado en su álveo pretendiera que no Titikaka, que Atlántico! . . . (El
pez 916–17)
La literatura americana es portuaria y de ventolina, a merced de las
incitaciones de los meridianos mentales del viejo mundo, y ya bulevar-
diza, estepiza, niponiza, heleniza, y siempre en criollismo, nativismo,
decadentismo vanguardismo, realismo, naturalismo, acaba excéntrica,
con desasimiento que no sea en el pintoricismo episódico y vacuo, de la
coordenada india. Excluyo naturalmente de este juicio al vanguardismo
del Titikaka (el hecho más curioso e insólito de la literatura del Perú en
los últimos tiempos, según L.A. Sánchez), que de «vanguardista», en el
sentido europeo, tenía pocas, o ninguna, condescendencia . . . . No es un
reproche . . . a los excelsos poetas hispanoamericanos que son lustre de
la hispana literatura, pero de esos camafeos brilladores está empredrado
nuestro andrajo . . . Si hacemos literatura social, la hacemos moscovita; y
por ahí es que entendemos la tragedia del indio. Y tanto que esta literatura
por lo general la hacen revolucionarios . . . decentes.
Al Diablo con la porra. No hay literatura americana porque no hay
americanos. (El pez 170–72).

The possibility of a national literature, therefore, was not up to the

virtuosity of great writers, or through the initiative of Ateneos or

11
Ajayu, in Aymara language, can be translated as the “spirit” or “soul” of living things.
This is why literature, according to an Aymara semantics, can have ajayu in the same
way that a human being, an animal, a river or a mountain can have one.
 M  L N 327

academies, or embracing cosmopolitan modernities, but rather the

result of a collective capacity to engender literature “from itself.” The
Peruvian reality informed him that so-called “Peruvian literature” had
been engendered “fuera de sí misma.” This was literature conceived,
systematized, and canonized by Peruvian minorities, and by means of
a language and aesthetic sensibility that did not root itself in those of
the majorities. The enormous importance Churata gives to Aymara
and Quechua languages ​​originates from these concerns and not from
an irrational rejection of the Spanish language or a lack of knowledge
of the multiethnic composition of the Andean region. What Churata
is proposing is that in the field of artistic creation “nadie engendra
fuera de sí mismo” (El pez 216), and proves his point with a reference
to El Greco, noting that only “aferrado al ñuño de Castilla” (207–8)
could he have given birth to El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz. Is there
anything more Spanish that that? . . . Not even Loyola or Philip II
(El pez de oro 38).

Detail of El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz (1586—1588)

Oleo, 15’ 9” x 11’ 10” (4.8 m x 3.6 m)
Santo Tomé, Toledo, Spain. (Fig. 6)

These gaunt, stoic and individualized faces we admire in El Entierro

del Conde de Orgaz are Spain because they fully interpret the sixteenth-
century Spanish “ego,” as it was shaped by Seneca’s Stoicism and the
328 Elizabeth Monasterios

individualistic consciousness of the Renaissance. If greatness lies in El

Greco for having masterfully captured the “ego” of the nation, he then
was its child, and Churata’s understanding of the aesthetic process is
then valid: when beauty (our writer prefers the word “hermosura”) is
most intensely expressed, it is when it comes tied to its “ego,” mean-
ing “ego” not as an essentialist reduction of one’s life, but rather as a
possibility of intersubjective constitution. The criticism Churata sets
out of the artists and writers of his time is that with few exceptions
(Guaman Poma in the seventeenth century; Jorge Icaza, José María
Arguedas, Cardoza Aragon in the twentieth), they pretend to produce
beauty, art, and literature, clinging to foreign “egos.” Against these
“histéricos fuera de sí” he articulates that cultural countermarch
called “vanguardismo del Titikaka.” A discussion of this avant-garde
intervention falls beyond the scope of this essay, so I will limit it to a
general consideration of its aesthetic project.12
We are facing an avant-gardism that, distancing itself from the his-
torical “isms,” sought to express an Andean “ego,” assuming that this
“ego” was quite different from its Spanish counterpart, although not
necessarily understanding that difference as a hierarchical “better.”
The means with which the Puno ayllus managed their confrontations
with gamonalismo, and the experience of being next to indigenous
intellectuals, suggested that neither gaunt, nor stoic, nor individual-
ized, the Andean “ego” tended to be collective and definitely not
anthropocentric, due to its sense of interrelatedness with all types of
living beings. To capture that “ego,” the Andean artist was first called
upon to be in touch with it.
Churata knew that thinking in these terms antagonized classical
aesthetics, which in its Platonic version conceives of beauty as an
Idea provided with universal value, which the artist feels compelled to
imitate. Joining the classics engine, Peruvian literature mimicked clas-
sicism, romanticism, modernism, and when expressing itself through
indigenism, it subalternized, idealized, or politicized Andean cultures
within parameters and interests other than their own. Churata’s lesson
challenges classical aesthetics in its constitutive moment, which is its
Platonic formulation. Here is an example of Churata disauthorizing
Socrates’ disciple, whom he addresses with the Latin word Plato:

12
To read about the Titikaka avant-garde, see my article “La vanguardia plebeya del
Titikaka,” included in the literary magazine La Mariposa Mundial 19/20.
 M  L N 329

El único mandamiento de la belleza viva: ¡engendrar!

¿Entiendes, Plato? Para el americano de América: ¡engendrar! ¡engendrar!
Engendrar hasta la profundidad del Tawantinsuyu. (El pez de oro 41)13

It is noteworthy that in referring to the discipline that deals with

beauty, Churata selects a verb of action (“engendrar,” to conceive)
that allows him to link the field of the intellect with that of the propa-
gation of life. Churata claims that it is in the act of germination, in
the regrowth of life, where beauty fully expresses itself, and that no
moment in life is more germinal that the one performed by the cry
of a newborn. That “first bubbling” links the newborn to the womb
that brought him/her to life (El pez 205). This explains why, from
an Andean perspective, human beings are not subjected to Heideg-
gerian fatalities. More than “thrown into a world” (Heidegger 203)
that will make of them desolate beings, the Andean jaqi [persona] is,
from birth, related to a world that receives and raises him, organically
integrating him into the economy and sociability of the ayllu. Beauty,
according to Churata, cannot be more touching than when its creator
forges it in contact with the womb that gave him life and, by so doing,
provides him with an alliance with the world. This argument leads
Churata to claim that with few notable exceptions (i.e. José María
Arguedas and the Titikaka avant-garde) Peruvian literature was unable
to “create” due to its submission to intellectual minorities “aferradas
a ñuños y parentescos extranjeros.” Accepting the work produced by
these minorities as “national literature,” therefore, was a mistake.
This explains why El pez de oro becomes separated from that tradition,
uncovering its imitative nature at a continental scale:
afirmamos la vigencia de una Literatura Americana no por sus raíces
americanas sino por el cosmopolitismo oceánico que rompe todo pudor
y candidez a la expresión estética. Eso nuestro americanismo . . . . Que
sea, si así lo impone el determinismo colonial. Pero ese americanismo no
es americano.
. . . [S]i América ha perdido toda esperanza de expresarse en un idioma
con patria, más que ocioso, es cretino, hablar de Literatura Americana.
Debe hablarse de Literatura Española de América, y con más propiedad
de Literatura Española a secas; que si en España se habla de Literatura

13
In El pez de oro the reader finds several inquiries directed at Plato, each of them chal-
lenging different aspects of his thought. Most of these inquiries adopt a logical structure
similar to the one I have just quoted, and they always end by asking “¿Entiendes, Plato?”
A few, however, dig deeper into disagreement, as evaluating the effect they could be
causing (“¿Qué? ¿Te hirieron; lloras, Plato?”) or demanding answers: “¡Contesta Plato!”
330 Elizabeth Monasterios

Española de Vascos, Catalanes, Aragoneses, es porque hay vascos, catalanes,

aragoneses, que piensan y sienten, y producen, en lenguas aborígenes, y
en temple agonal, que diría el hispano centrífugo que fue don Miguel de
Unamuno. (El pez de oro 167, 183)

In contrast to those Basques, Catalans and Aragonese who think, feel

and produce Spanish literature from themselves, Churata denounces
that in Southern Peru, Aymaras and Quechuas had not only been
expelled from the Republic of Literature, but their contributions
to Peruvian cultural dynamics had been sabotaged: “Nadie vio en el
mugriento español de Huaman Poma [sic], o Tupak Khatari, la dialéc-
tica de una estética; ningún crítico tabuló la chaskhadera; se la dejó
para los espectáculos del Thantakhatu; jamás se pensó en extraerla
de las zonas plebeyas a que el alma americana fue confinada” (El
pez de oro 184). The primary purpose in this passage is to articulate
a reflection on language that seeks to propose the challenging idea
that “[e]l español tendrá que hibridarse rindiendo parias a Huaman
Poma para que pueda hablarse de literatura peruana nacional” (El
pez de oro 185). As controversial and provocative as they seem, these
ideas become particularly relevant today, when the work of indig-
enous intellectuals that begin to circulate in international politics and
academia are often disqualified because the authors “do not speak
Spanish well” or because “their texts are poorly written,” published
in “minor editorial houses” or because they are “essentialist, millena-
rist, messianic,” and therefore too clumsy to successfully match the
current climate of world culture. The figure of Tupac Katari (Julián
Apaza Nina) in Churata’s discourse offers a wonderful opportunity
to reflect on these forms of violence. Why does Churata place Tupac
Katari together with Guaman? It would have been far more logical
to reference Tupac Amaru or any of the tupamarista leaders of 1781.
To understand the rationale behind this thinking, it may be useful to
clarify the historical figure of Tupac Katari.
We are talking about the Aymara warrior who, after the death of
Tupac Amaru in May 1781, led the most radical faction of the Great
Rebellion from La Paz, which by his intervention gained a pan-
Andean dimension that traveled from Cusco and Puno to Chayanta,
in Northern Potosí, and to La Paz. Historians have already pointed
out that unlike José Gabriel Condorcanqui, Julián Apaza was a poor,
illiterate Indian, with no ties to Indian nobility, and in possession of a
political agenda significantly different to that of Tupac Amaru. In his
Cuando sólo reinasen los indios. La política aymara en la era de la insurgencia
 M  L N 331

(2006), Sinclair Thomson emphasizes that by conceiving of a reason-

able insertion into colonial society via alliances with criollo sectors,
Tupac Amaru was acting from a logic that the political criollo elites
were able to absorb. Katari, on the contrary, fell beyond understand-
ing due to his millenarian militarism and Aymara ethnocentrism, not
to mention his intention to demolish colonial society with an army
of 40,000 Indians. Clearly, he represented “un desborde indígena”
that both Peninsulares and criollos felt the urge to dismantle. That
radicalism, still in force in some of the most rebellious ayllus of the
Bolivian altiplano, explains why Tupac
​​ Katari “nunca haya podido
encajar cabalmente en el panteón nacionalista boliviano, ni siquiera
como precursor de la independencia” (Thomson 223).
Mid-twentieth century Bolivian historiography had enormous dif-
ficulty in absorbing the historical figure of Katari. Carlos Montenegro,
the most important ideologue of the Nacionalismo Revolucionario,
for example, chose to ignore his intervention, while other historians
depicted him as the architect of a “guerra de razas” and therefore an
enemy of the Bolivian nation (Finot, Imaña Castro). These misread-
ings prevented, as Thomson suggests, the figure of Tupac Katari from
being integrated into a nationalist political discourse because something
alerted others of his incompatibility. This brief contextualization sug-
gests that when Churata brings forth the figures of Tupac Katari and
Guaman Poma, he is thinking outside of national interests that would
make of Guaman a Peruvian and of Katari a Bolivian. What matters
here is to draw attention to the critical consciousness and decolonizing
will that cross Katari’s and Guaman’s writings, linguistically expressed
in “el mugriento español” which they both articulated. I have two
examples to illustrate my point. The first is taken from the chapter
on “Ciudades y villas” in the Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno. In those
pages dedicated to the Imperial City of Potosí, we find a text that,
exceeding expectations of urban description, offers an elaborated
critical reflection on the colonial condition, written in a language
that neither the seventeenth century nor the historiography of the
twentieth could recognize as Castilian:
332 Elizabeth Monasterios

La Villa Rica Enpereal de Potocchi. Por la dicha mina es Castilla, Roma es Roma, el
papa es papa y el rrey es monarca del mundo. Y la santa madre yglecia es defendida
y nuestra santa fe guardada por los quatro rreys de las Yndias y por el enperador
Ynga. Agora lo podera el papa de Roma y nuestro señor rrey don Phelipe el terzero
[1057]. (Fig. 7)

This description of the Villa Imperial clearly states that without the
existence of Potosí mining, seventeenth-century modernity would
have simply been unthinkable. In other words, Guaman is telling
his readers that the Iberian colonization needed the indigenous
subalternization to ensure its operations. No doubt he was inaugu-
rating the most lucid historiography of the time, but his “mugriento
 M  L N 333

español” and the European ethnocentrism of modern historiography

prevented scholars from recognizing La Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno
as a constitutive moment in American critical thinking. My second
example is taken from one of the letters Tupac Katari sent to Cor-
regidor Sebastián Segurola on the eve of the Siege of La Paz, when
his army of 40,000 Indians made Peninsulares tremble with fear as
they correctly understood that Katari’s political project was detached
from Tupamarista aristocracy (which proposed a revolution “to break
with colonialism and modernize the country”) and rather sought
to “transform” the foundations of the world, understanding that a
transformation (Pachacuti) of colonial patterns was possible (Flores
Galindo 143). Katari’s letter reads:
Y así Cristianos VV quieren á malas mañana lo verán con el favor de Dios,
ya les tengo por donde pegar avance, y así no hay mas remedio que tenga,
si VV se porfían más; no hay ni para tres horas con el favor de Dios para
mis soldados, le dice acaban sin duda, y así no hay más remedio que tengan
los que tuvieren las armas, no será caso para mí con el favor de Dios, y
sepan han de volver por tierra y polvo, y a ver cual nos ayudará de Dios y
cual seremos hombres de carajos, y así este es de lo alto. . . . y que tenga
muy presente esta mi advertencia para que en adelante si despreciando
esto executase a lo contrario, se volvera todo en ceniza . . . oy 7 de abril
de 1781. Que Yó S. Virrey Puma—Catari. (“Diario de los sucesos del cerco
de la ciudad de La Paz . . . ” 194–95).14

The historiography of the time perceived this letter as a “barbaric”

and “incoherent” product of a disturbed mind, without even consider-
ing the possibility that it could contain the means to understanding
Katari’s reasoning. That initiative is taken by Churata when in the
first pages of El pez de oro he becomes the first intellectual partner
of Guaman Poma and Tupac Katari and, as such, the first Andean
writer who perceived aesthetic value in their “mugriento español”
(El pez de oro 184). Churata goes as far as to propose Guaman and
Katari’s “ortografía bárbara y plebeya” (El pez 165) as a constitutive
moment of the Titikaka avant-garde, whose most radical members
lived el complejo indigenista (that set of emotions and ideas suppressed
around the Indian) with the obsession of no interpretar al indio, sino
expresarlo (Motivaciones del escritor 65–66; my emphasis). Jorge Basadre,
Luis Alberto Sánchez, Antero Peralta, Luis Valcárcel, Uriel Garcia, the
same Mariátegui, and many others, lived the same complejo, but with

14
Katari probably dictated his letters to one of his secretaries, since it is known that
he could not write nor properly speak Spanish.
334 Elizabeth Monasterios

the obsession to interpret, represent, and modernize the Indian, not

to merge interests with him. Although Churata perfectly understood
that difference, he did not realize that his dealing with Indian issues
was no longer “indigenist.” He did, however, acknowledge that in Puno
había surgido un movimiento vanguardista de raíz india . . . y la generación
más brillante de la historia indigenista . . . . Todos estos hombres tenían una
sola obsesión: no interpretar al indio, sino expresarlo. Eso quiere decir que
nosotros hicimos una literatura porque vivíamos el complejo indigenista de
nuestro pueblo . . . . Allí, en Orcopata, vivíamos, pensábamos y escribíamos
con los indios y en indio. De allí el indigenismo que nosotros propugnamos
no ha sido comprendido. (Churata 1966, 65–66. My emphasis).

The unprecedented experience of writing and thinking “con los indios

y en indio” was possible because the leadership of ayllu-Orkopata
included indigenous intellectuals with whom Churata maintained a
far more fluid and enriching dialogue than the one shared with his
mestizo counterparts. Literary criticism has not yet noticed this singu-
larity because it has been guided by a far too literal reading of written
records left by the orkopatas. Indeed, at first glance the Boletín Titikaka
appears to prioritize mestizo interventions over indigenous ones. This
assumption, however, begins to weaken when we notice that most of
the books, magazines and newspaper reviews went published without
authorship, suggesting the practice of a collective work that did not
need “firma de autor” to validate its claims. A fortuitous observation
by Emilio Vásquez on the dynamics of the ayllu-orkopata supports this
hypothesis: “[en Orkopata] se estudiaba de todo . . . frente al lago,
los días domingos, se llevaban a cabo las confrontaciones de ideas y
lecturas nuevas. . . . Churata acotaba, corregía, aclaraba ideas, aportaba
mayores conocimientos” (Vásquez 445).
The array of extra-editorial activities that the orkopatas so consis-
tently promoted (festivals of indigenous theater, music and Andean
dances, indigenous schools with bilingual literacy projects, seminars
in agrarian culture, etc.) and the fact that the last issue of Boletín
Titikaka closed with three poetic compositions written in Quechua
and Aymara by Eustaquio Arewanka, Inocencio Mamani and the leg-
endary “maestro de Utawilaya” Manuel Allqa Camacho,15 speak of the
impact that Indian intellectuals had on the Titikaka avant-garde. It is
no coincidence that in her speech to the Congress, Estrella Peralta

15
One of the most charismatic and politicized Aymara intellectuals, member of the
Comité Central Pro-Derecho Indígena Tahuantinsuyu and personal friend of Churata.
 M  L N 335

did not forget to mention them, noting that in the case of “Camacho
Allqa,” we are talking about “a friend” of her father.
This constellation of indigenous intelligentsia, whose most remote
figures were Guaman and Katari, allowed Churata to claim that in Peru
it had been by means of indigenous intervention and Andean literature
that a decolonizing form of thinking took shape. That is why he so
deeply regretted Vallejo’s statement that “nada en el vanguardismo que
se producía en América era digno de originalidad porque todo ya había
sido dicho y hecho en Europa” (my emphasis) or Mariátegui’s account
of Peruvian literature, which not even in passing would mention the
puneño avant-garde (Siete ensayos). Churata’s remarks concerning the
existence of plebeian forms of critical thinking invited a reassessing
of the Peruvian literary process questioning the “nationality” of a
literary canon restricted to criollo-mestizo aesthetic interests. Equally
important was to emphasize that both in Guaman as in Katari, those
plebeyismos were postured from a language that was no longer Spanish
or vernacular, nor accommodated to any form of mestizo harmonies.
It was rather a linguistic monstrosity that suggested that literature was
not a belletristic phenomenon when what matters is to bring forth
“una radical americana en el pensamiento de América” (El pez 167).
Churata was indignant that by mid-twentieth century “todo lo que el
indio veía con las elaboraciones de la imaginación le estaba negado”
(168). The political and artistic struggles of the Puno ayllus and the
Bolivian Altiplano to acquire land, culture and education, however,
led him to believe that “ese mutismo habrá de romperse un día, a
juzgar de la magnitud de este mundo y de su proceso expansivo, [y]
se romperá por el lado aristárquico de las ruinas americanas: por el
indio, que es lo único con régimen en sí mismo, con raíz y cosmos”
(El pez de oro 184–185). Churata did not live long enough to witness
the massive resurgence of indigenous cultures and politics in Bolivia,
which resulted in the erosion of the Republican, Colonial and Liberal
State and the emergence of a complex, still not fully realized Plurina-
tional State, but nevertheless sufficiently empowered to have already
reoriented the course of culture and politics. Today, the remarkable
appeal that Churata has among young Andean writers reflects an
admiration for the ability he had to anticipate events that were, then,
simply beyond belief. Here is Churata theorizing the inconceivable
takeover of the State through the action of the national majorities:
Oigo a las minorías afirmar que ellas incorporarán a las mayorías a la
nacionalidad . . . . Argucia de tramposos: que tanto equivaldría a que la
336 Elizabeth Monasterios

fontana, que se contiene en un cuenco de la mano, pretenda que ella

incorporará la inmensidad de los océanos.
Si las minorías se apropian de los instrumentos del Estado, preveníos:
sobrevendrá un cataclismo. No esperéis que os lleve de la mano el taimado
politiquero: ¡id vosotros; tomad el Gobierno; disponed de él! . . . Si les
dejáis despotricar os arrancarán los intestinos. Carecen de las materias de
la vida; no tienen los sentidos genésicos de la acción; cualquier enano de
los vuestros es un gigante a su lado, porque vosotros tenéis naturaleza y
ellos materias rarificadas. Si hubiésemos de aceptar su predominio, sería—y
es—sobre la base de que la nacionalidad por ese medio será proscrita del
Estado; se ejercitará el gobierno con usurpación de autoridad consagrando
la negación de la Patria. (El pez de oro 915)

Equally provoking and futurist in his own way, Borda’s narrative scares
the reader. The shock, in this case, comes from a discharge of fury.
Borda disapproves of the historical experience of Bolivian modernity
and fiercely detaches himself from this tradition. When writing El
loco, he fictionalizes himself in the figure of a nameless character (we
only know him as “el loco”) who thinks of himself as a mass and as a
symptom of a social experience of collective indignity. This mad man,
besides rejecting “modern” and “national” Bolivian history, imagined
its demolition, so that upon its ruins different forms of sociability
could be built. To this end, he reconstructs himself as a “demoledor.”
From that belligerence, and without traces of indigenism or utopian
discourse, he performs a decolonizing avant-gardism that he himself
was unable to conceptualize. The closest he came to understand his
own work was when he wrote, in volume III of El loco, a truly moving
statement: “en algo, no sé en qué, seré el primero y el único; pero la
angustia me mata, porque no logro saber dónde está mi fuerza, no
puedo calcular en la actividad de qué facultades está mi triunfo. Esto
me enloquece” (El loco, tomo I, 37).
Borda was not mistaken. He was, indeed, “el primero y el único”
who conceived in his time the entrance of urban, popular marginali-
ties into literature and put to work a powerful decolonizing form of
writing. But unlike Churata, who always knew that his strength came
from indigenous struggles for political and cultural self-determination,
Borda lived tormented by not knowing exactly where to pinpoint the
source of his strength. Perhaps in his capacity to conceive cultural
decolonization in Bolivia? Or perhaps in his ability to exceed the
conventionalities of artistic creation? Or in his uncontainable urge
to demolish it all? Or maybe in a conflicting combination of all of
the above? Whatever the answer may be, we can go as far as to think
that Borda gave expression to what might be called the last ism of
 M  L N 337

the avant-garde: demolitionism. What makes this ism so intriguing

and charged with theoretical validity, even today, is that besides the
demolition of a colonized culture and society, it also seeks to demol-
ish the perverse “mansedumbre de los subalternos” (El loco I.79).
Borda confronts that subalternity with troubling questions: “Lo que
en esto [en una situación colonizada] hay de insoportable es la vil
mansedumbre de los subalternos que se hacen sobajear como a per-
ros muertos de hambre. ¿Cuándo reventará la dignidad humana?
¿Cuándo se sublevará la humillación?” (El loco I.79)

I have initiated these pages questioning the rescue that Peru and
Bolivia are undertaking of the works of Borda and Churata, and
I have discussed the challenges of uncritically reintegrating into a
“national literature” those works and authors that were fundamen-
tally banned. By way of conclusion I would like to stress that only
by fully incorporating Borda and Churata’s thought into current
critical theory would we effectively honor the challenges that these
writers posed to the Peruvian and Bolivian literary process. Borda
and Churata have eloquently shown us that every time the majority
(the masses, Borda would say) confront the State or intervene in the
culture of the Andean region, irreversible changes occur, regardless
of the success or failure that those actions may have. The Tupac
Katari rebellion, which ended with his dismemberment and that of
his life companion, Bartolina Sisa, generated situations that ultimately
challenged the stability of the colonial order in Charcas. Likewise, El
loco and El pez de oro caused irreversible changes in the Bolivian and
Peruvian literatures, bringing them close to what may be perceived
as “national literatures.” In Bolivia, this process has been significantly
enriched because it has been accompanied by a political will with a
capacity to transform a “national State,” shaped by criollo minorities,
into a “Plurinational State,” whose commitment with the majorities is
still to be seen, but that has already taken fundamental steps towards
a radical democratization of culture.
University of Pittsburgh

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