Recovering Chimbote, or the undervalued ecology of José María Arguedas's The Foxes

Abstract

This essay focuses on one aspect of Los zorros hardly discussed in the literary criticism devoted to Arguedas: the ecological crisis that this novel puts forward. Out of this Arguedas’s novel emerges an ecological thinking that, ironically, is not founded in the success of concepts and values recognized as “Andean” in the book, but rather emerges from the predicament in which such ecologies find themselves, overwhelmed by an urban ecological crisis and by the changes taking place among the immigrants. The ecological thinking in Los zorros is less a discourse with specific proposals for change, and more a call for achieving full awareness of the socio-ecological complexity that the novel narrates, and for re-thinking nonhuman/human interaction as more than a mark of identity, nostalgic and utopian, of Andean cultures or of Arguedas’s own thinking.