La lucha por la escuela en la literatura indigenista peruana

Abstract

School occupies a relevant place in Latin American literature, not only as a scene of narrated events but also as a drive of a social process that considers it as a privileged area to access the world of letters, culture and knowledge. Such privilege turned it into a space of intense social control and fierce political dispute, a phenomenon that literature did not fail to record throughout its history. In the particular case of Peruvian literature, from Don Rosendo Maqui’s reflections on the struggle of the Rumi community to have a school, in El mundo es ancho y ajeno (Ciro Alegría, 1941), to the frustrated realization of the Chungui community’s desire with the arrival of the false teacher in Este camino existe (Fernando Cueto, 2011), we are facing the conflictive role that school plays in the imaginary of the various social groups that seek or manage to have one. In this text, we seek to examine some of those discourses about school found in Peruvian indigenist literature and other texts, in order to understand how it has been conceived as a place of individual or collective desire and frustration.