De mestizos y guerras. In(ter)venciones políticas y sociales en Jorge o El hijo del pueblo (1892) de María Nieves y Bustamante

The following article studies Jorge or The Son of the People (1892) by María Nieves y Bustamante. Our objective is to demonstrate that in this novel the main events of the Peruvian civil war of 1856-1858 are recreated, but also that the author of this text intends to give a different meaning to these events, in order to justify the behavior that the ruling class of Arequipa had in such a conflict. Likewise, it is desired to prove that in the novel by Nieves and Bustamante it is suggested to make changes in the social structure, but these are barely superficial. The hypothesis that is supported is that its author wrote this novel to intervene in the public sphere, a symbolic space in which she was not allowed to act because she was a woman. The strategy of Nieves and Bustamante was to represent the war, which earned him an opinion on a series of political and social aspects of his time, such as, for example, the treatment that elites gave to subalternized groups, the place assigned to women in public affairs, the type of social group that should lead society.