Ontological Migrations in José María Arguedas’s Tupac Amaru Kamaq Taytanchisman: The Triumph of Runa Migrants Against the Colonial Violence in Lima

In his poem Tupac Amaru Kamaq Taytanchisman (1962), José María Arguedas depicts runa migrants as resisting spatial segregation and racial and social injustices in Lima through the practice of ontological migration. Arguedas shows that, by transferring their ontological beliefs to their new urban geography, runa migrants confronted the colonial violence of Lima with the support of non-human beings that had inhabited their home-lands, such as the Amaru or Serpent God. In this way, Arguedas engages Quechua ontologies as a political gesture in his poetry.