Alcides Arguedas

Alcides Arguedas (born July 15, 1879, La Paz, Bolivia—died May 8, 1946, Chulumani) was a Bolivian novelist, journalist, sociologist, historian, and diplomat whose sociological and historical studies and realistic novels were among the first to focus attention on the social and economic problems of the South American Indian.

Arguedas studied sociology in Paris and pursued an active career in government. He represented Bolivia in London, Paris, Colombia, and Venezuela and was a leader of Bolivia’s Liberal Party, serving as a national deputy and a senator and becoming minister of agriculture in 1940. Throughout his public career he explored in his own works the plight of the Indians, sympathetically portraying their manners and customs and documenting the social and economic forces that had brought about their exploitation and decline.

Though noted for such sociological studies as Pueblo enfermo (1909; “Ailing Town”) and for his Historia general de Bolivia (1922; “General History of Bolivia”), Arguedas is best remembered for his novels about the Indians, especially Raza de bronce (1919; “Race of Bronze”), an epic portrayal of the travels of a group of Bolivian Indians, ending with their extermination by Europeans. His exploration of the Indian problem foreshadowed the Indianista novel of the 1930s and ’40s in Latin America.