The Upper Marañón, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and the Nobel Laureate

Abstract

Chapter 3 considers the role of Mario Vargas Llosa’s first trip to the Peruvian Amazon with the Protestant evangelical organization the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) in shaping the author’s literary representations of the region throughout his career. The SIL was involved in restructuring Indigenous social geographies by reorganizing the social and physical arrangement of the communities they worked with. The SIL’s plans to unilaterally assimilate Indigenous communities to the dominant national culture through language instruction, catechism, and economics became Vargas Llosa’s framework for understanding the solutions to the region’s problems as well. Though initially sympathetic to the plight of Indigenous Amazonians contending with unfair labour practices, Vargas Llosa later characterizes their resistance to industry in Amazonia as evidence of their short sightedness. Later in his career, the Nobel Laureate would become a strong advocate of deciding for Amazonian peoples in the political sphere, but a close reading of the texts that resulted most directly from his trip with the SIL reveals how he captured evidence of Indigenous Amazonians’ abilities to think, plan, and configure Amazonian spaces for themselves.