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  • Unexpected (And Perhaps Unwanted) Revisionisms:La Contramarcha Vanguardista de Gamaliel Churata y Arturo Borda1
  • Elizabeth Monasterios

It is hard to imagine that much is yet to be said in the study of the Latin American avant-garde. This article addresses the unprecedented situation of two countries—Perú and Bolivia—that have begun the process of rethinking their literary canon and correcting historical errors which, throughout the twentieth century, silenced the work of two writers who brought into avant-garde aesthetics both indigenous and marginal subjectivities that, besides being outside the “spirit” of Western art, had the capacity to theoretically dispute its universality. I am referring to the Peruvian Gamaliel Churata (1897–1969) and the Bolivian Arturo Borda (1883–1953).

Gamaliel Churata was the pseudonym that Arturo Peralta Miranda (one of the most intriguing figures of the Andean cultural process in the first half of the twentieth century) adopted in 1924. In the Aymara language Churata means “the chosen one” and Gamaliel (in Hebrew “reward of God”) refers to Gamaliel the Elder, one of the Pharisee [End Page 316] doctors of Jewish law who exhorted the Israelites to “not persecute” the apostles nor to “prevent their preaching” (Acts 5.38–39). Such a combination of Aymara epistemology and biblical context should not be perceived as messianic. It is rather a result of the exceptionality that surrounded this writer’s intellectual formation, rooted in Puno under the tutelage of his heterodox father, Don Demetrio Peralta. In the early twentieth century Don Demetrio had founded the “Sociedad Fraternal de Artesanos” (where indigenous anarchism met) and, in rejecting gamonalista Catholicism, he became an anarcho-evangelist preacher. His children, therefore, grew up radically politicized in favor of indigenous demands and under the influence of the New Testament’s liberating rhetoric. In Bolivia, where Churata lived for over thirty years (first in 1918, when he was only twenty-one years old, and later, in exile, from 1932 to 1964), he assumed the nickname of “barbarian” for having founded, along with Carlos Medinaceli, the literary group Gesta Bárbara (Potosí, 1918), which, as he would put it, was “una contramarcha … allí maduró el genio bárbaro … allí conocimos a España y descubrimos a América” (Churata “Periodismo” 105, 113). In Peru, Churata was a contemporary of the writers known as the “Generación Centenario” (José Carlos Mariátegui, Luis Alberto Sánchez, José Sabogal, Luis Valcárcel, César Vallejo, etc.), yet he never actually joined them. Instead, he led from Puno a cultural countermarch, which he termed as “vanguardismo del Titikaka,” and which Luis Alberto Sánchez once identified as “el hecho más curioso e insólito de la literatura del Perú.” The choice of writing “Titikaka” and not “Titicaca” was in response to a project to disengage Spanish spelling by approaching the barbaric and plebeian writing of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala while, at the same time, preserving an Aymara sonority within the structure of Spanish language.

The other writer who forced a rethinking of the literary canon, in this case from Bolivia, was the charismatic and irreverent Arturo Borda, known among his contemporaries by the nickname of “el Loco” in reference to his desire to incorporate the marginal-popular-urbane into the horizon of nationality and, with that force, demolish the modern history of Bolivia, the Hispanic hegemony, and the elitism of art and literature. Besides being a writer, Borda was also a prolific artist (it is said that he produced around three thousand paintings), journalist, social activist, anarchist, and someone who rejected the role of “intellectual” or “bohemian” as a construction designed to sanitize and tame rebellion when expressed through artistic means. In open defiance to domesticated languages, Borda thought of himself as a lari, an Aymara expression alluding to anonymous and marginal existences, to those [End Page 317] who inhabit the borders between the social and the untamed ways of life. Hence he often identified himself as “Caliban.”

This brief introduction serves to illustrate that we are entering into dialogue with prolific writers who resist conventional aesthetic parameters. They are not simply “novelists,” “chroniclers,” “poets,” “storytellers,” “playwrights” or “essayists,” but in fact explore these and other scriptural modalities while...

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