La nostalgia del pasado en la novela indigenista. Un estudio de los personajes femeninos de Raza de bronce, Huasipungo y El mundo es ancho y ajeno.

This article focuses on the roles played by the female characters in three of the most influential indigenista novels, Raza de bronce (1918) by the Bolivian author Alcides Arguedas, Huasipungo (1934) by Jorge Icaza, from Ecuador, and El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941) by the Peruvian writer Ciro Alegría. The roles of the female characters are studied from the perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “destruction of the idyll”. The study identifies a recurring type of female character in the novels, the female victim, which is always of indigenous origin and which is consistently presented as the type of character that this study has termed “idyllic”, the most prominent traits of which are simplicity, naturalness, and the possession of a strong bond to family and to the area where they live. The article argues that the idyllic female character plays a symbolic part in the novels as the guardian of the survival of the indigenous family and traditional society, and when this figure becomes subject to different kinds of abuse, it is not only the individual character that comes under attack but also everything that she represents