A Strange & Marvelous Land: Peruvian Crossroads in My Fiction

Abstract

I was born in a city in Andean Peru, Jauja, that in more than one sense constitutes quite a singularity, one that has marked my novels of all. It was founded by the Spanish in 1533, in an Incan urban center where there were large depositories of provisions, clothing, and weapons, whose fame would make Bartolome de las Casas say that was greater than Rome/7 in a valley that Garcilaso de la Vega described as a most beautiful province. Its original name, Xauxa, gave rise to the toponym Jauja, which quickly was associated with that of medieval legends. That is to say, the reality of the Indo-Spanish city's wealth and good climate melded with the image of abundance, longevity, and pleasant leisure tierra de Jauja in Spanish, terre de Cocaigne to the French, Cockaigne to the English, or Cuccagna to the Italians a legend that spread in Spain and in of Europe. In Castilian romances, it would be said that in Jauja all is pastime, / health, contentment and regalia, / happiness, rejoicing, / pleasures, delights and applause. / There they usually live / at least seven hundred years, / without ever growing old. In Jauja, during the colonial period and after independence, there was not, for various reasons, the more or less feudal regime that was prevalent in the Andean world. In fact, it was and remains an area of landowners, without great tensions. At the same time, because of its geographical position, Jauja always maintained a close relationship with the central coast and the mountainous regions. Furthermore, during the mid-nineteenth century, the power of its climate to cure pulmonary tuberculosis was discovered, and, as a result, the infirm from diverse locales began to appear with their companions, even from Europe, many of a certain cultural status. Thus was formed what one traveler called a small cultivated