Bare Life, Indigenous Viscerality and Cholo Barbarity in Jesús Lara’s Yanakuna
2014; eScholarship Publishing, University of California; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5070/t432022921
ISSN2154-1353
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American Literature Studies
Resumobegins with Sabasta, an indigenous woman, left destitute by her husband's death. 1 Unable to repay her debt to the cholo moneylender, Don Encarno, and his wife Elota, she is forced to sell them her young daughter, Wayra. 2 After years of grueling labor in the house of Don Encarno, Wayra escapes to Cochabamba to search for work.There, she meets her future husband, Simu, a runaway farmhand from the mountainous part of the Cochabamba valley.After setting up house in the city, Wayra and Simu eventually decide to return to Simu's village, where his family works in La Concordia, the hacienda of Isidoro Botado.Yanakuna then traces the indigenous rebellion of the colonos of La Concordia and concludes with Wayra sentenced to death for instigating Botado's murder.Thus, the novel's last few pages echo its opening scenes: the text opens with the destitution of Wayra's mother and concludes with the destitution of Wayra's children.In between, Lara's anti-mestizaje narrative runs the gamut of the local, as well as the national, social structures of pre-Revolutionary Bolivia.Literary critics such as Leonardo García Pabón have argued that in Yanakuna Bolivia's leading indigenista writer documents the "proceso de mestización" of an indigenous woman (263).In a similar vein, Josefa Salmón writes that the novel's defense of the Indian is embedded in a "discurso de progreso . . .con el fin de aculturarlo [al indio]" (112).In contrast, my essay demonstrates that Yanakuna presents mestizaje as a circular discourse, rather than as a teleological process of acculturation.Wayra learns the skills of a good housekeeper under the tutelage of her chola mistress Doña Elota, spurred by her lashes.A lascivious priest, the son of her brutal cholo masters, teaches her the gospel and Spanish, but culminates these lessons by brutally violating her young body.The indigenous girl's entrance into the system of mestizaje thus entails her brutal dehumanization as a commodity of sex and labor for the cholos.But, far
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