Crossing Deep Rivers: Jose Maria Arguedas and the Renaming of Peru

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract the introductory paragraph is included here. From the earliest days of the Discovery, the Spaniards had problems with naming in the New World. They had difficulties with the pronunciation and spelling of the Indian names for people and places, and they had to accept the native terminology for objects which had no name in Spanish because they did not exist in Spain. Such early chroniclers of the Conquest as Hernan Cortes, Bernal Diaz del Castillo and Bartolome de las Casas wrote with amazement in Spanish of the things they found in the Americas, interspersing variations of the native words along the way. Many such words even found their way into English eventually, such as tomato, chocolate, ocelot and coyote. Nevertheless, Spanish soon established itself as the dominant language of political, economic and social control in Latin America.