Tales of incan gold in an era of guano: Juana manuela gorriti's precious metal melodramas

This essay explores the economic passions that animate Juana Manuela Gorriti's Andean legends "La quena" (1851), "El tesoro de los incas" (1865), and "El chifle del indio" (1878). Placing the tales within the context of Peru's export boom in guano, I argue that Gorriti's colonial romances grapple with the promise and peril of natural resource wealth in the nineteenth century. By analyzing the transformation of Gorriti's tales as the guano boom turns to bust, I trace a growing fear that an economy based on the extraction of a finite natural resource may represent a repetition of Spanish colonialism, which is imagined as a curse in which greed, debt, and resource depletion supplant work-based economic production.