[Download] "Oscar Cerruto's Aluvion de Fuego: An Incomplete Narrative of the Fragmented Bolivian Nation (Company Overview)" by Chasqui " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Oscar Cerruto's Aluvion de Fuego: An Incomplete Narrative of the Fragmented Bolivian Nation (Company Overview)
- Author : Chasqui
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 124 KB
Description
Oscar Cerruto's 1935 novel Aluvion de fuego illuminates a critical predicament of early twentieth-century Bolivian thought: how to reconcile a Eurocentric rubric of nationhood with indigenous national aspirations. Many of the period's Bolivian intellectuals, ranging from Franz Tamayo to Antonio Diaz Villamil, held that the solution to this intractable problem lay in the absorption of Bolivia's indigenous groups within the rubric of the modern nation-state--an absorption to be accomplished through a state-directed pedagogical program and to be reinforced by a concomitant abandonment of the indigenous people's distinctive ethnic and political aspirations. Cerruto aspires, however, to strike a balance between the two worldviews in his novel. (1) Better known for his poetry, he wrote his only novel at the height of the Chaco War (1932-36), while serving as a Bolivian diplomat in Santiago, Chile. Despite being a state functionary, Cerruto was a known socialist firebrand with a prior history of political as well as intellectual skirmishes with the oligarchy during the late 1920s. He had been an active member of Partido Laborista, a small semi-Marxist outfit, and also a regular contributor to a leftist newspaper, La bandera roja, which concertedly attacked the government's political, social, and economic policies. These activities, however, were brought to a halt in 1928 when the then government banned La bandera roja, suspended the Partido Laborista, and forced most of its members into exile on allegations of conspiring against the state. One of the party members tried as part of this exercise, Cerruto bid farewell to his days of political activism after serving a one-year prison sentence and joined the diplomatic services--his first posting being to Santiago, Chile (Klein 97, Garcia Pabon "Cronologia" 131-32). The Chato War that broke out between Bolivia and Paraguay in 1932 found him returning to his earlier opposition to state policies. According to Luis Alberto Sanchez in Proceso y contendido de la novela hispano-americana, his refusal to enlist in the War would lead to a prolonged exile--first in Chile, where he would spend the next five years and then subsequently in Argentina (407).