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Christian Martínez Arias
This article analyzes the configuration of masculinity in José María Arguedas’s Yawar fiesta (1941), understood as a set of practices that structures power relations and sociability in the fictional town of Puquio. Drawing on a close reading of key scenes, it examines the tensions among coercive state masculinity, misti masculinities, and an Indigenous masculinity that is collective, productive, and ritual, even willing to embrace sacrificial violence. Engaging the lexicon of manhood (“hombre,” “k’ari,” “macho,” “maula,” “maricón”) and Connell and Messerschmidt’s (2005) notion of hegemonic masculinities, the analysis shows how the novel concentrates impotence in the figure of the subprefect and calls into question the authority of state manhood. By contrast, certain Indigenous masculine practices move toward a form of manhood that the text ultimately presents as socially legitimated in Puquio. In this way, Yawar fiesta configures a masculinity that functions not only as a device of subordination but also as an essential terrain for the agentive possibilities of the Indigenous subject within Arguedas’s indigenist project.
