Broad and Alien Is the World

The great indigenista novel of the Andes follows the highland Indian community of Rumi, led by the wise old mayor Rosendo Maqui, as a rapacious landowner seizes their communal land and scatters them into a hostile world of mines, plantations and jungle. Alegría maps the real Peruvian sierra and its beyond: the mountain community and its fields, the landowner's hacienda, and the far mines and rubber forests to which the dispossessed are driven, learning how broad and alien the world is for the landless.

Rosendo Maqui

Rumi (the community)

Part 1

In the mountain village of Rumi, the community lives by its old communal ways under the gentle, wise leadership of the aging mayor Rosendo Maqui, in harmony with the land and each other. Alegría opens on this settled, dignified indigenous world in order to show, step by step, how it is destroyed.

Part 1

inspired by The indigenous community of Rumi is drawn from the real highland comunidades of the northern Peruvian Andes; it is sited in that sierra country, the specific village the novel's own.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗

Don Álvaro

The communal land (the dispute)

Part 1

The ruthless hacendado Don Álvaro Amenábar sets out to seize the community's land through rigged lawsuits, bribed judges and armed force, and the villagers' legal struggle is doomed from the start. Alegría uses the theft of the fields to indict a whole system in which law, church and state serve the landlord against the Indian.

Part 1

inferred The community's communal fields, coveted by the neighbouring landowner Don Álvaro, are sited on the real Andean highland the novel maps; the boundaries and the lawsuit are its own.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗