The Ucayali River, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), and the Latin American Boom

• In Event: ¿Nuestra Amazonía?: Mediated Claims to Ownership and Belonging in Amazonian Studies

Abstract

This paper examines the SIL’s role in shaping the Indigenous landscapes that emerge in Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s body of Amazonian fiction (Pantaleón y las visitadoras 1973, El hablador 1987, El sueño del celta 2010), with particular emphasis on La casa verde (1966), which cemented the author’s place in the Latin American literary Boom. Vargas Llosa’s access to Indigenous Amazonia is first made possible by the SIL, a U.S.-based Christian non-profit long considered colonialist in its emphasis on Indigenous acculturation. Nevertheless, Vargas Llosa’s participation in SIL expeditions gave him access to Awajún and Wampis interlocutors, who informed his understanding of Indigenous concepts of geography and territory. I trace the impact of such exchanges on Vargas Llosa’s work and address how the resulting literary geography of Amazonia urges a reformulation of notions of transculturation and literary heterogeneity in Latin American literature. The Boom emerges as a cartographic force that relied on the ability of elite intellectuals to map Other spaces as though they were their own for international readers. As a result, the images of Amazonia crafted by Vargas Llosa are continuously reproduced and consumed while Amazonian texts and literacies remain marginalized in Latin American literary studies. I propose a reading methodology that acknowledges and recovers the Indigenous sources of some of Latin America’s most important literary works, expanding the idea of authorship at the center of the Latin American Boom.

Author

• Amanda M Smith, University of California, Santa Cruz