José María Arguedas: Huérfano de huérfanos

In Warma Kuyay, the story that describes the painful love initiation of the young Ernesto (the author's alter ego) due to the impossible feeling for Justina, a young indigenous from Viseca, José María Arguedas condenses, and heightens as well, all the characteristics of a complex personality, mestiza. The frustration deriving from this condition exacerbates the crisis of an existence made up of culturally incompatible binomials (sierra-costa, white-indigenous, exploiters-exploited, woman-man, good-evil, orality-writing): that of a man white by birth and indigenous by choice. While scrutinizing the main expressive choices made in the tale, this paper aim at demonstrating the role played by love and its linguistic representation, in catalysing the cultural hybridism of Arguedas, which, therefore, eludes any literary definition or collocation.