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Ciro Alegría (1909-1967) |
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Ciro Alegría was one of the best-known Spanish-American novelists of the 1940s and 1950s. Due to his political activities, he was imprisoned several times and forced to go into exile. In his novels and articles, Ciro Alegría described the lives of the Peruvian Indians. His international breakthrough novel was El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941, Broad and Alien Is the World), an account of the irreversible destruction of traditional Indian community. It has been reprinted many times. Alegría saw that the Indians are not oppressed only by greedy landowners but also by "bad government": "When I reached the age of reason the first thing I noticed was the injustice that reigned over the poor, defenseless dwellers of my beloved town, in spite of the fact that it was called Pueblo Libre. Where did that injustice come from? Simply from bad government, the product of the complicity of the bosses and the eternal despoilers of the country who, for the misfortune of our people, still exist under the name of governors, mayors, judges and tax collectors." (Broad and Alien Is the World by Ciro Alegría, translated from the Spanish by Harriet de Onís, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941, p. 152) Ciro Alegría was born in Sartimbanba, in the Marañón River region, the eldest son of mestizo and Spanish-Irish parents, José Alegría and Herminia Bazán Lynch. His grandfather was said to have made and lost a fortune in mines. Alegría acquired a firsthand knowledge of Indian life and language in his native province of Huamachuco. The deep understanding of the oppressed people became the focus of all his later literary works. At
the age of sevent Alegría was sent to live with his
paternal grandmother Herminia in Trujillo. In the national school of San Juan, Alegría's first grade
teacher was the poet César Vallejo (1892-1938). Later he recalled
how Vallejo's whole being reflected his misery at that time: "His pain
was simultaneously secret and yet visible and it ended up spilling over
onto me. A strange and inexplained pain overwhelmed me. Although he
could at first seem calm there was something profoundly torn in that
man which I didn't understand but which I felt with the whole of my
alert childlike sensitivity." (César Vallejo: A Literary Biography by Stephen M. Hart, Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, 2013, pp. 17-18) After contracting malaria Alegria returned to the northern Peru, where he completed his primary education in the Andean town of Cajababma. Before completing his secondary education at the National College of San Juan, in Trujillo, he spent a year on his paternal grandfather Don Teodoro Alegría. In the late 1920s he worked for a year as a reporter and then on construction and road-building projects. In 1930 he returned to the newspaper El Norte and attended classes at the University of Trujillo, without taking a degree. In
1930 Alegría joined the left-wing Aprista movement, the brainchild of
Victor Raul
Haya de la Torre (1895-1979), a politician, philosopher, and writer.
The APRA party (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana),
founded in 1924,
was dedicated to social and economic reform and to improving the lot of
the
Indian majority. Alegria led a failed Aprista rebellion in Cajamarca
and
for his militant activism, he was tortured and jailed, once in
the notorious penitentiary at Lima (El Sixto); its underground cells
date from colonial times. During the APRA-rebellion in July 1932 he was
freed. Alegría fled through the Andes but he was captured near Calendin
and was brought to Trujillo. He narrowly escaped death in the military
garrison. When got out from El Sixto, Alegría founded with his
colleagues La Tribuna.
Until then he he had written only some poems, short stories, and
articles. In 1934 Alegría
was deported to Chile, where he contracted tuberculosis, and the
suffered an attack of oleurisy. He spent two years in a sanatorium, San
Jose de Maipo. Alegría wrote short stories to a Buenos Aires newspaper and
expanded one of them into a novel, La serpiente de oro
(1935,
The Golden Serpent). It won first prize in a contest sponsored by
Editorial Nascimento in Santiago de Chile. Set among the river
villagers of the Marañón, it
depicted their way of life through multiple characters. The title refers to the river ("the golden serpent"),
as
source of death and renewal. "But life always triumphs. Man is like the
river, deep, having his ups and downs, but always stout-hearted." (The Golden Serpent, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1943, p. 7) Los perros
hambrientos
(1938, Starving Dogs), Alegría's second novel, was
set in northern Peru and
revealed the difficulties of shepherd Indians. When drought hits the
Andes, both dogs of the story and the people are at the mercy of the
circumstances, and starve due to water scarcity. The novel was awarded
the Zig-Zag Publishers prize. Originally it was drafted as a short
story.Alegría
began to write the novel while in the sanatorium, where barking dogs
brought into his mind a tale of the great drought that his maternal
grandmother, Juana Lynch de Bazan, had told. The Cuban
revolutionary leader Che Guevara, who felt a fraternity with the
indigenous people, read Alegría in his youth. Alegría saw
the situation of the Indias similar to that of
proletariat. Basically,
the white landowners were the cause of Peru's economic backwardness. Alegría's major work, Broad and Alien Is the World,
takes nearly an anthropological approach in its depiction of an Indian
tribe struggling to survive in the Peruvian highlands. At the time of
writing the novel, Alegría lived in Santiago with his family. A group
of Chilean doctors supported him financially so that he was able to
finish the work. The novel paints
a romantic portrait of a harmonious relationship between the land and
the Indians,
who are threatened by an avaricious rancher. Rosendo Maqui leads the
peaceful commune, but he is powerless when the rancher uses the
resources of law and state organization to gain control of the communal
land. Rosendo recalls the words of old Chauqui, dead long ago: "The
law! Rights! What do we know about the law? As soon as a rich man
starts talking about rights that means something crooked is afoot, and
if law exists, it is only to do us harm." (Ibid., p. 14)
Rosendo is imprisoned and
he dies after being beaten by the
guards. In the second part of the novel his adopted son Benito Castro
continues the struggle. If Rosendo represented the past, Benito
represents the future, hope. However, his
efforts fail and the Indians are killed after troops are sent against
the commune. "But where shall I go? Where?" asks Benito's wife at the
end
of the novel. Benito is already dead. "Closet, ever closer came the
crack of the Mausers." (Ibid., p. 434)
It has beeen summarized that the main message of the story
is that "the community is the only habitable place for indigenous
Andeans." (Imagining Modernity in the Andes by Priscilla Archibald, Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2011, p. 66) Broad and Alien Is the World reflected the political programme of the Aprista union, which advocated an alliance between intellectuals and workers.
Originally the story was based on a deleted episode from the novel Los
perros hambrientos.
Alegría's manuscript won a contest sponsored by
the Pan-American Union and was published in the United States by Farrar
& Rinehart, and and was also translated into many languages. The
novel's many subplots stirred both criticism and praise. From 1941 to 1948 Alegría lived in New York, where he translated screenplays for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, contributed to various publications, and lectured at Columbia University. Later he taught at the University of Puerto Rico and edited the magazine Presente. By 1948, internal tensions within the party had become so serious, that Alegría resigned in protest. In 1953 Alegría moved to Cuba, where worked on the unfinished novel
Lázaro and gave his account of the Cuban revolution in La revolución
cubana: un testimonio personal. These
works were not
published until 1973. After a long period of exile, he
eventually returned in January 1960 to Peru, where he was received with
great honor and
appointed member of the Academia Peruna de la Lengua. Alegría
looked all his years away from his homeland as a prolonged journey
rather than exile: "I say journey because this absence to which they
gave the name exile was never anything else." (quoted in Joy in Exile: Ciro Alegría's Narrative Art by Eileen Early, Washington: University Press of America, 1980, p. 13) In 1961 Alegría joined Fernando Belaúnde Terry's Acción
Popular party and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1963, when Terry was elected president for the first time. Duelo
de caballeros
(1963, Duel of gentlemen) collected his short
stories published in English or in small magazines during his exike. In 1966 he was
elected president of the Peruvian Association of Writers and Artists (ANEA).
President Terry, at the request of the association, decorated Pablo
Neruda with the Orden del Sol del Perú for his poem, Alturas de Macchu
Picchu (1947, The Heights of Macchu Picchu). Ciro Alegría died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage the age of fifty-seven, in Trujillo, on February 17, 1967. His fourth son was born after his death. Alegría was married three times. While in Santiago, he married Rosalía Amézquita, a Peruvian pianist. They had two sons. After divorvce he married in 1948 Ligia Marchand in Puerto Rico. His third wife from 1957 was the Cuban poet Dora Varona, who collected and published many of the author's essays and tales that he wrote for newspapers. Varona died in Lima in 2018. Alegría was among the pioneer writers who made transition from European traditions toward new confidence, first seen in the work of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the Brazilian mulatto who wrote Epitaph of a Small Winner (1880) and Don Casmurro. By the 1930s a regional literary movement wholly of its time and place began to flourish. From Venezuela emerged Rómulo Gallegos (1909-1967), who portrayed the hard life of hinterland in Doña Bárbara (1929) and Canaima (1935), from Brazil Graciliano Ramos (Barren Lives, 1938), and later João Guiarães Rosa (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1956). – Enrique López Albújar's (1872-1966) Andean Tales (1920) appear to have influenced Alegría's Broad and Alien is the World. For further reading: 'Ciro Alegría,' in The Golden Land: An Antholgy of Latin American Folklore in Literature, selected, edited and translated by Harriet de Onís (1948); The Modern Short Story in Peru by Earl M. Aldrich Jr. (1966); An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature by Jean Franco (1969); A New History of Spanish American Fiction, Vol. 2: Social Concern, Universalims, and the New World by Kessel Schwartz (1972); Joy in Exile: Ciro Alegría's Narrative Art by Eileen Early (1980); 'Ciro Alegría,' in Spanish American Authors: The Twentieth Century, edited by Angel Flores (1992); La sombra del condor: biografia ilustrada de Ciro Alegria by Dora Varona (1993); La "trilogía novelística clásica" de Ciro Alegría by Antonio Cornejo Polar (2004); 'Alegria, Ciro' by Michael D. Sollars, in The Facts on File Companion to the World Novel: 1900 to the Present, edited by Michael D. Sollars (2008); Ciro Alegría y su sombra: biografía ilustrada by Dora Varona (2008); Ciro Alegría y la amazonia peruana by Manuel Marticorena Quintanilla (2009); Alegría y El mundo es ancho y ajeno by Tomás G. Escajadillo (2018); Ciro Alegría: páginas escogidas by Dora Varona (2018) Selected bibliography:
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