Indianismo, Spanish America

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Indianismo, Spanish America

Indianismo, as used in the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America, refers to a literary movement that predates the more overtly political indigenismo. This primarily nineteenth-century phenomenon represents a first pass at wiping out colonialist tendencies in literature. Some of its strongest adherents were the Argentine Juana Manuela Gorriti (1818–1892), the Cubans Gertrudis Gómez de la Avellaneda (1814–1873) and José Fornaris (1827–1890), the Ecuadorian Juan León Mera (1832–1894), the Puerto Rican Eugenio María de Hostos (1839–1903), the Dominicans Manuel de Jesús Galván (1834–1910) and José Joaquín Pérez (1854–1900), and the Uruguayan Juan Zorrilla de San Martín (1855–1931). Although some of these authors would have seen themselves as defenders of indigenous peoples in their fictional endeavors—Hostos, for example, closely following in his narrative Brevisima relacion de la destruccion de las Indias written by Bartolomé de Las Casas, the sixteenth-century Spanish priest and earliest defender of indigenous peoples—their idealism and romanticism prohibited them from taking a more engaged stance. Their writing can be characterized as a nostalgic evocation of the indigenous past, as in the case of novels by Gómez de Avellaneda and Hostos modeled on historical figures. Oftentimes their works oversimplify indigenous realities by filtering out negative, innate human characteristics, as in Zorrilla's Tabaré, and exemplify the nineteenth-century trend toward creolization, as with León Mera's jíbaro, an indigenous person who turns out to be white. Notwithstanding these authors' good intentions, most of the indigenous characters they created tend to be one-dimensional and lacking real-life complexities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Meléndez, Concha. "La novela indianista en Hispanoamérica (1832–1889)." In vol. 1 of Obras completas, pp. 77-300. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1970.

Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Young, Richard A. "Juan León Mera y el discurso indianista de Cumandá, o un drama entre salvajes." In El indio, nacimiento y evolución de una instancia discursiva, edited by Edmond Cros, pp. 185-204. Montpellier, France: Université Montpellier, Centre d'études et de recherches sociocritiques, 1994.

Thomas Ward

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture