Key in his desire to depict Indigenous expression and perspective more authentically was his creation of a new idiom that blended Spanish and Quechua and premiered in his debut novel Yawar Fiesta.

Notwithstanding a dearth of translations into English, the critic Martin Seymour-Smith has dubbed Arguedas "the greatest novelist of our time," who wrote "some of the most powerful prose that the world has known.

Because of the absence of his father, a lawyer who traveled frequently, and his bad relationship with his step-mother and step-brother, he comforted himself in the care of the family's Indigenous servants, allowing him to immerse himself in the language and customs of the Andes, which came to form an important part of his personality.

Arguedas also worked for the Ministry of Education, where he put into practice his interests in preserving and promoting Peruvian culture, in particular traditional Andean music and dance.

In 1968, Arguedas was awarded the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega literary prize,[3] where he gave his famous[4][5] speech No soy un aculturado (I am not an acculturated man), which has been described by academic sources as a "powerful"[6] embracing of his mixed heritage.

By the time he published his first novel in 1941, Yawar Fiesta ("Blood Fest"), he had begun to explore the theme that would interest him for the rest of his career: the clash between Western "civilization" and the Indigenous "traditional" way of life.

He was thus considered part of the indigenista movement in South American literature, and continued to explore this theme in his next two books Los ríos profundos ("Deep Rivers," 1958) and Todas las Sangres ("All the Bloods," 1964).

At the same time that Arguedas was becoming more pessimistic about race relations in his country, younger Peruvian intellectuals became increasingly militant, often criticizing his work in harsh terms for his poetic, romanticized treatment of Indigenous and rural life.

An instance of the debate that ensued can be seen in the famous Mesa redonda sobre Todas las Sangres (Roundtable on All the Bloods) of 1965, in which Arguedas's penultimate novel was the object of blunt criticism from several social scientists at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.

In Lima, a parade organized by the Catholic University Theater (TUC) started from the Congress of the Republic, down Abancay Avenue, to the Parque Universitario, featuring floats, stilt walkers, and typical characters from Arguedas's literature.