Ficciones Mineras: Literatura y Capitalismo Utopico en los Andes (1880 – 1930)

Jack Dennis Martinez Arias

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/N2KJ09

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Ficciones Mineras: Literatura y Capitalismo Utopico en los Andes (1880 – 1930)

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Since Spanish colonial rule to the present, mining has been one of the main economic activities in the Andes. Taking this fact into account, my dissertation explores how two major Andean countries’ cultural production reacted to mineral wealth exploitation from 1880 to 1930. By analyzing foundational novels and influential journalistic articles written by the Peruvian Clorinda Matto de Turner and the Bolivians Lindaura Anzoategui and Nathaniel Aguirre during the last decades of the nineteenth century, I have found that these cultural productions have gone hand-in-hand with the official pro-capitalist discourses of their time. While liberalism explicitly made the deceptive promise that mineral exploitation would initiate sustained economic development to achieve a fully industrialized nation, I suggest that novels, newspapers, and journals of this period concealed how the Andean mining industry was fueled by feudal and pre-capitalist economic systems and thus was antithetical to modern and efficient modes of production. Furthermore, I argue that the discourse in favor of mining was countered with another type of cultural production that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. More specifically, literature that demanded legal changes in favor of indigenous mining workers appeared; the Bolivian Jaime Mendoza’s novel En las tierras de Potosí is a case study of this reform literature. Subsequent writings that openly and radically clamored for a dramatic and subversive change in the modes of exploitation of the extractive mining industry appeared as well. From these writings, I study the production of the Peruvians César Vallejo and José Carlos Mariátegui. Through its focus on the above-mentioned writers and cultural productions, my dissertation traces how literature and journalistic articles that promoted a utopian capitalism in the nineteenth century progressively became a lettered production that denounced the “fictions” and fallacies of the liberal discourses and promoted a new socialist utopia in the Andes Since Spanish colonial rule to the present, mining has been one of the main economic activities in the Andes. Taking this fact into account, my dissertation explores how two major Andean countries’ cultural production reacted to mineral wealth exploitation from 1880 to 1930. By analyzing foundational novels and influential journalistic articles written by the Peruvian Clorinda Matto de Turner and the Bolivians Lindaura Anzoategui and Nathaniel Aguirre during the last decades of the nineteenth century, I have found that these cultural productions have gone hand-in-hand with the official pro-capitalist discourses of their time. While liberalism explicitly made the deceptive promise that mineral exploitation would initiate sustained economic development to achieve a fully industrialized nation, I suggest that novels, newspapers, and journals of this period concealed how the Andean mining industry was fueled by feudal and pre-capitalist economic systems and thus was antithetical to modern and efficient modes of production. Furthermore, I argue that the discourse in favor of mining was countered with another type of cultural production that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. More specifically, literature that demanded legal changes in favor of indigenous mining workers appeared; the Bolivian Jaime Mendoza’s novel En las tierras de Potosí is a case study of this reform literature. Subsequent writings that openly and radically clamored for a dramatic and subversive change in the modes of exploitation of the extractive mining industry appeared as well. From these writings, I study the production of the Peruvians César Vallejo and José Carlos Mariátegui. Through its focus on the above-mentioned writers and cultural productions, my dissertation traces how literature and journalistic articles that promoted a utopian capitalism in the nineteenth century progressively became a lettered production that denounced the “fictions” and fallacies of the liberal discourses and promoted a new socialist utopia in the Andes

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