Arguedasmachine: Modernity and Affect in the Andes

Abstract

Peruvian writer José María Arguedas’s final book, an unfinished and posthumously published novel entitled El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, is set in the coastal boomtown of Chimbote during the late 1960s. Rapid industrialization has led to the town being dominated by fish-processing factories belching out smoke, and surrounded by slums in which thousands of recent immigrants from the Andes eke out a living at the margins of this intense capitalist exploitation. The novel’s main concern is with these margins, with the slums or barriadas in which all of Peru’s cultures and languages are thrown together in chaos and misery, if also in vital intercommunication and restless striving. But at the center of the novel is a strange scene of epiphany that takes place at the heart of the industrial enterprise.