Novel
Juyungo
Adalberto Ortiz · 1943
Synopsis
Ascensión Lastre, a black teenager from the province of Esmeraldas, ill at ease among his own people, admires an uncle who fought in the civil wars. A bandit, Cátulo Canchingre, teaches him to read and initiates him into smuggling, and the Cayapa Indians give him the nickname Juyungo, the devil. With others, he goes to work on the lands of don Clemente Ayoví, on the island of Pepepán, where the day labourers are constantly cheated, and befriends Nelson Díaz, a mestizo activist who shows him what unites the poor of every colour.
Context
Begun in 1939 in Guayaquil and continued in Milagro, the novel was awarded a prize in 1942 by a national jury and appeared in 1943 in Buenos Aires, from Americalee, with the subtitle the story of a Black man, an island and other Black people. Joaquín Gallegos Lara, the author's mentor, had inspired the idea, and part of the critics have reproached this influence with reducing the racial conflict to class struggle. The book was translated into German in 1957, into French in 1960, then into English by Susan Hill and Jonathan Tittler.
Who it is for
In Spanish, in a prose that mixes narrative, songs and the speech of the coast; a French translation exists. Each chapter opens with an epigraph in poetic prose.
Prizes and reception
First prize in the 1942 national novel competition; “the great novel of the Black and the mulatto” for Hernán Rodríguez Castelo.
Sources for this page 3
The pages consulted to check this page.