Carlos Aguirre at the Colloquium for Latin American and Caribbean History

Please join us at the Colloquium on Latin American and Caribbean History as we host Prof. Carlos Aguirre for a talk entitled “Censorship, Politics, and the Making of a Literary Classic: The Biography of Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros”.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s first novel, La ciudad y los perros (Barcelona, 1963), marked the beginning of the author’s outstanding literary career but also, according to many, of the “Latin American boom,” a literary, political, and publishing phenomenon that changed the landscape of Latin American and world literature. A novel about a group of adolescents in a military school in Lima that was widely read as a critique of Peruvian militaristic, machista, and authoritarian culture, it became an almost instant classic but was also involved in a series of literary and political controversies. Exploring the role of literary and friendship networks, the Spanish publishing industry, the negotiations with Franco’s censorship office, the scandals that surrounded its reception, and the political climate of the time, this talk will reconstruct the process by which the manuscript of a novel written by an almost unknown author became a powerful literary, cultural, and political artifact.

Carlos Aguirre is Professor of History at the University of Oregon and the author or editor of several books on slavery and abolition, crime and punishment, intellectuals, and the history of Lima. His most recent publications include The Peculiar Revolution. Rethinking the Peruvian Experiment under Military Rule, co-edited with Paulo Drinot (2017) and Bibliotecas y Cultura Letrada en América Latina. Siglos XIX y XX, co-edited with Ricardo Salvatore (2018). For more information on professor Aguirre’s works, see https://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~caguirre/home.html.

With support from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the History Department Colloquium Committee, the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program, and the Program in Comparative Literature