Associate Professor of Spanish Karen Spira has published the book chapter “Los maestros no humanos de Los ríos profundos” (“Nonhuman Teachers in Deep Rivers”) in the volume Arguedas Global: Indigenismo en el nuevo milenio (Arguedas Global: Indigenismo in the New Millennium).
Arguedas Global features 21 essays by scholars who study José María Arguedas (1911-1969), a Quechua- and Spanish-speaking intellectual who challenged colonial attitudes toward Peru’s Indigenous communities through novels, essays, and poetry infused with Indigenous cultural practices and teachings. Arguedas Global was published in July 2021 by the Universidad César Vallejo Press to coincide with Peru’s Bicentennial celebrations.
Karen’s book chapter brings together her interests in pedagogy, novel theory, and Indigenous Studies. Drawing on Arguedas’s own writings on education, the chapter offers a new interpretation of Arguedas’s most canonized novel, Deep Rivers (1958), as the embodiment of the author’s educational philosophy, which centers Indigenous beliefs. The novel narrates 14-year-old protagonist Ernesto’s experiences at a boarding school in the Peruvian Andes.
In her article, Karen argues that nonhuman beings such as the River Pachachaca and the zumbayllu (a spinning top made of natural materials) become Ernesto’s true teachers: They are the beings who guide, console, and instruct Ernesto when the novel’s official authority figures do not meet the ethical demands of this role. Informed by the writings of Quechua-speaking Indigenous educator Justo Oxa and anthropologist Catherine Allen, Karen's article demonstrates how these nonhuman beings, or tirakuna, teach Ernesto to resist the colonial systems that constitute his school’s hidden curriculum, and guide him through an alternative curriculum focused on the Indigenous value of pursuing harmony with all beings, human and nonhuman.