Across the literary traditions of Spanish America, Indigenous peoples appear as resource materials for non-Indigenous authors and as emblems for national identity, rather than as literary creators themselves. Acclaimed examples from the mid-twentieth-century canon of what Angel Rama termed “transculturated narrative” are no exception: despite overt attempts to create works expressing solidarity with Indigenous peoples, these do not elude the colonial legacies, which have obliged Indigenous peoples to cede control of their words and the contexts that make these words meaningful. However, by working at the intersection of Latin American and Indigenous literary studies, this essay pursues those other contexts beyond the nation frame and returns to Miguel Angel Asturias’ Hombres de maíz and José María Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos. It charts Latin American literature and criticism across two historical transitions: the transition produced by indigenismo toward the horizon of a national identity discourse more centered on “the Indian”; and the transition produced by Indigenous movements away from that emblematic “Indian” and toward the horizon of Indigenous self-determination. To what extent can these Spanish-American novels, product of the first transition, be harnessed to that second transition to offer a window onto native ways of conceiving Latin American space and time?

Across the literary traditions of Spanish America, Indigenous peoples appear as resource materials for non-Indigenous authors and as emblems for national identity, rather than as literary creators themselves. Acclaimed examples from the mid-twentieth-century canon of what Angel Rama termed “transculturated narrative” are no exception: despite overt attempts to create works expressing solidarity with Indigenous peoples, these do not elude the colonial legacies, which have obliged Indigenous peoples to cede control of their words and the contexts that make these words meaningful. However, by working at the intersection of Latin American and Indigenous literary studies, this essay pursues those other contexts beyond the nation frame and returns to Miguel Angel Asturias’ Hombres de maíz and José María Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos. It charts Latin American literature and criticism across two historical transitions: the transition produced by indigenismo toward the horizon of a national identity discourse more centered on “the Indian”; and the transition produced by Indigenous movements away from that emblematic “Indian” and toward the horizon of Indigenous self-determination. To what extent can these Spanish-American novels, product of the first transition, be harnessed to that second transition to offer a window onto native ways of conceiving Latin American space and time?

Instead of seeing Boom authors as the beneficiaries of international economic developments and marketing campaigns or as passive victims of US political propaganda during the Cold War, it would be wiser to acknowledge their ideological and literary agency. Magical realism, as well as other Boom aesthetic choices, including modernist experimentalism, responded to two separate developments. First, independently from a potential influence of CIA-backed political propaganda in Latin America, they were an inevitable outcome of the direct literary influence of US and European masters. Second, magical realism and other modernist formal experimentation used by the Boom authors, rather than being a nod to anti-communist US propaganda during the Cold War era, were a direct and personal reaction precisely against the strict internationalist political dictums coming first from the Soviet Union and then from Cuba. They responded to a self-affirmation of the authors' autonomy and individual/national approach against Soviet and Cuban revolutionary impositions.