Response to Pop Culture as Folk Culture

First, Arguedas’ The Pongo’s Dream was significantly easier for me to understand than Asturias’ collection of fables. For that reason I will start by considering Arguedas’ story. It was a very interesting tale, short but terrifying. The treatment that the pongo received was troubling and degrading, and I can of ended up just assuming that pongo was not particularly well educated since he did not attempt to converse with the lord about his treatment. Arguedas seems to be portraying a pitiful man who has nothing and is completely controlled by his master. Despite this, the pongo tells a story to the lord that says that he is not as unfortunate as the lord paints him out to be. In the end, the pongo is either equal to the lord or slightly better.

It seems to me that the pongo represents the average indigenous person, and the lord the average person of Spanish descent. Assuming this to be the case then it follows that the pongo represents that although seemingly obedient and silent, the indigenous people know their own importance. That in spite of continued inhumane treatment the pongo was able to prove his uniqueness is indicative of a group of people that are capable of proving stereotypes inaccurate. At the end of the story, the pongo is not a pitiful man but an equal and steely person.

If The Pongo’s Dream is about the triumph of the indigenous people over the ruling class then Asturias’ collection of fables might be about the mixture of indigenous culture with the culture that the Spanish brought. It did not seem that there was a complete upheaval of the indigenous people’s beliefs. The nun in the Legend of the Silent Bell was both Spanish and Indian, and so shows the joining of these two separate places.


To return to The Pongo’s Dream, the end was also interesting in the kind of harsh ending of the pongo’s dream. The lord is basically set to lick excrement off the pongo for the rest of eternity while the pongo is left to lick gold off the lord. It is unclear to me what the excrement and the gold represent, but it does seem evident that the lord and pongo are not that different because they end up with similar fates.

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