MEMORY SETTINGS IN THE INDIGENOUS NOVEL LA SERPIENTE DE ORO

Abstract

The present work has the purpose of planting the configurations of memory in the novel La Serpiente de Oro, by the Peruvian author Ciro Alegría, considering the Latin American indigenist movement, its context and importance, especially in Peru, seeking to highlight primarily the changes in the political scenario and social development of Latinoamérica, and the more active participation of indigenous peoples in Latin American society during the 19th century. In this way, with the aim of understanding the field of the literary production of the indigenist movement, Indigenism, the investigation is based on conjectures of anthropologists and historians such as Menezes (2015), who in the light of Baud (2003) support the conjecture of that Indigenism was a political and literary movement. In addition, this investigation analyzes the memorialistic questions in the previously mentioned narrative, considering, for example, the assumptions of Maurice Halbwachs in “A Memoria Coletiva” (2006). The literary critic manifests the idea that memory, when at a certain moment it is lost in new societies, the only way to keep them safe is through a narrative. In this sense, the indigenist soap operas, as well as the (authentic) indigenist movement, had the function of keeping indigenous memories safe, because it considers the reality of the indigenous person, as a man of the land.