This thesis explores the possible creation of a new categorization of American Literature as presented in the Andean novel El pez de oro: Retablos del Laykhakuy (1957) by Gamaliel Churata. In El pez de oro, Gamaliel Churata presents a strategy for the recuperation of native Andean cultural agency that enables the Andean subject to reclaim traces of their ancestral past under more verisimilar and verifiable terms. Churata argues that through a recuperation of native language and its infusion into the body of the major colonial language, Spanish, the Andean subject is equipped with a new culture producing tool that enables the recuperation of language, agency, history, and, ultimately, representation and inclusion within cultural and political institutional frameworks. By introducing his own function of bilingualism, vernacular language, and mythological infusions into the body of colonial letters, Gamaliel Churata is able to destabilize and disrupt colonial historical and textual authority to the point where the invented concept of America and the colonial product of American identity can be re-examined. Through this examination emerges a new option for the categorization of American identity as an aesthetic construct. Within this new categorization of aesthetic American identity, the Andean subject can begin his own process of self-identification through his native language toward the production of a future Andean American subject.

This thesis uncovers a deep and recurring link between two indigenista texts of the 20th Century: Balâun Canâan, by Rosario Castellanos, and "El problema del indio," by Jose Carlos Mariâategui. Mariategui's text, an essay, takes a deductive approach to prove that the "Indian's problem" in Peru is related to the concentration of land in the hands of his oppressors. Using Marxist theory, Mariâategui shows that only through more equitable distribution of land can the indigenous Peruvian's fortunes be improved. Castellanos chooses the years of the Cardenas presidency (1934-1940) for her novel, a work that deals with the legacy of the Mexican Revolution. Set in Chiapas, Mexico, autobiographical and fictitious elements and characters dramatize a conflict over indigenous rights to land and education on a criollo family's enormous estate. Supported by intellectual criticism from a number of fields, this thesis connects episodes from Castellanos's novel with the core premises of Mariâategui's essay. / by Blaire Modic. / Abstract in English. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.