Translations of the cholo: the emergence of andean projects of society out of the conversion of the Manchay Puytu tradition from the oral to the written form

Abstract

Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many Latin-American writers ventured themselves in the creation of written versions of the traditional Andean oral tale Manchay Puytu. In this article, I propose myself to analyse how some of these versions reflected projects of society conceived by their authors, and that, particularly in relation to a postcolonial Latin-American context in which they were inserted. To do so, I take as central to my reflections the image of the cholo, the Andean mestizo, protagonist hero of Manchay’s narratives who, due to his ambiguous position, would receive a large part of the burden of the expectations of intellectual circles of different periods in the region, both positive and negative. In order to develop my analysis, I make use of an extensive bibliographical research, as well as certain theoretical tools that I borrow from the social sciences and that allow me to think the postcolonial context in which such “translations of the cholo” find themselves in. Finally, I conclude with reflections on the representation of the cholo in Taboada Terán’s Manchay, presented as a psychologically unsustainable being with no place for himself vis-à-vis the coloniality of power of the society he still finds himself in. In the end, I also point out the importance of the Manchay tale above all as a strategy of remembrance of an oppressive colonial past, what is highlighted in most versions of the tale by the image of the quena, an Andean flute of high symbolical power within Quechua cosmology.