His literary work, which had a profound influence on the Bolivian social thought in the first half of the twentieth century, addresses issues related to national identity, miscegenation, and indigenous affairs.

[1] As a diplomat, he was second secretary of the Legation of Bolivia in Paris (1910), where he would meet Rubén Darío and Francisco Garcia Calderon and would have as boss the ex-president Ismael Montes.

Some of the issues for which he contributed a significant amount of thought—conflicts between cultures, the complexities of mestizaje, and the sometimes violent relationship between the indigenous and creole/mestizo worlds—were later taken up by other currents of thought, including indigenismo, albeit from a different perspective.

However, it created controversy in Bolivia, and Franz Tamayo responded critically to his ideas in a series of editorials that would later be compiled as his book Pedagogía de la educación nacional.

The first volume of his Historia general de Bolivia was published two years later under the auspices of industrialist and millionaire Simon I. Patino.

Arguedas received the Rome Prize in France for his autobiographical book La danza de las sombras in 1935.

In 1945, after spending a period of time in Buenos Aires, he returned to Bolivia and died of leukemia in Chulumani, a district of La Paz, on May 6, 1946, at the age of 66.