The Road of Ahayu Watan: Psychic Realism and a Reading of Gamaliel Churata’s El Pez de Oro (1957)

During the first half of the 20th century, Gamaliel Churata built a theoretical project with the aim of conceptualising a new identity for the American continent, avoiding the shortcomings of indigenism and allowing the people of the Americas to overcome the problems of modernity. This vision was based on the appraisal of the roots of the continent and the interaction of diverse world-visions, especially the Western one, which does not reject americanity. A necessary step was to abandon logocentrism and to assimilate the Andean world-vision that would allow the encounter of irreconcilable Western elements. Churata, however, had to elaborate other categories in order for this encounter to work. One of these is that of psychic realism, which finds in El pez de oro its literary embodiment.