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Father of magical realism, precursor of the Latin American boom, colossus of letters and innovator of language, the Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias made the indigenous world and the Mayan culture visible, and was a pioneer in bringing the portrait of a dictator to the continent's literature.
He is one of the only six Nobel Prizes in Literature that Latin America has given.
But, unlike the Mexican Octavio Paz, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez or the Chileans Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, the Guatemalan is almost unknown to many readers on the continent.
Monumental works such as "Men of Corn", "Legends of Guatemala" or "Mr. President" took him to Stockholm in 1967 and to the summit of literature.
But another book, published proverbially that same year, condemned him to oblivion.
The bitter dispute he had with García Márquez over his criticism of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", in addition to the political and generational quarrels and controversies that he experienced in his adulthood overshadowed his work shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize and just before his death in 1974 in Madrid.
He was also dragged by the dynamics of the Cold War: being a left-wing man forced into exile by dictatorships for years, he ended up, however, being rejected by part of the Latin American left.
Asturias was buried in Paris in the Père Lachaise cemetery for more than 50 years. His family decided not to have him buried in Guatemala or Spain because both countries lived under dictatorships.
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This Thursday his remains returned to their homeland and were received with state honors. "Guatemala proudly receives one of its most illustrious sons," wrote President Bernardo Arévalo in X.
With the arrival of his remains in the country, the authorities began a series of commemorative events and celebrations that will last four days to honor the writer.
The "Guatemalidad"
Miguel Ángel Asturias was born in 1899 into a moderately wealthy family.
As a child, his family had to migrate from the capital to the countryside, because his father, who was a lawyer and judge, was left without a job after refusing to imprison some students critical of Manuel Estrada Cabrera's regime.
There he came into contact with the indigenous world for the first time and it was through his nanny, a young indigenous woman who told him stories, legends and Mayan myths, that his interest in that fascinating and dreamlike world that he would later capture in his books was awakened.
He graduated in Law and was one of the founders of the Popular University. In 1923 he traveled to Paris, where he would live for 10 years.
As an ethnology student at the Sorbonne, he continued to expand his knowledge of the Mayan religion, and surrounded himself with writers and intellectuals such as the surrealist André Breton.
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His work, strongly marked by social and political criticism, created magical narrative universes in which the dreamlike and indigenous mythology were mixed with the everyday in a cocktail that already anticipated what years later would be baptized as "magical realism."
The land and the time in which he lived are very present in its pages. "There is a very strong Guatemalan quality in the work of Asturias, as well as a very Asturian way of saying and naming things," Guatemalan writer and editor Carmen Lucía Alvarado explains to BBC Mundo.
One of the best examples of this is "Men of Corn", which narrates the resistance of indigenous peoples against modernity, and whose protagonist is its most famous literary character, Gaspar Ilom.
Years later, his son Rodrigo, founder of the Guatemalan guerrilla Organization of the People in Arms, would borrow Gaspar Ilom as a nom de guerre.
Asturias's international success paved the way for other authors who would come after him. His Nobel put the spotlight on writers from Latin America, who had drawn from the sources of Asturias, and who would later become what we know as the boom generation.
"Miguel Ángel Asturias was one of the great innovators of the language, who assumed, without any complexes, the encounter between two baroques: the indigenous Mayan baroque and the Spanish baroque of the 16th and 17th centuries," says the Guatemalan writer Arnoldo Gálvez.
That poetic explosion of baroque language, sonorous, complex and with a strong Mayan flavor "can be read uphill," Gálvez acknowledges.
And that is another reason for this "forgetfulness" of the Guatemalan Nobel Prize.
In a time like ours in which preference is given to the telling of a story and the communication of an argument, Asturias' style, which in Gálvez's words prioritizes "stretching the limits of language", has been left aside from contemporary editorial interests.
The dispute with García Márquez
But let's go back to the beginning and to the book that sealed his fate.
Asturias received the Nobel Prize in 1967, the same year in which "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was published.
The novel was a success upon its publication, and propelled García Márquez to international fame.
However, in an interview with the Spanish magazine Triunfo in 1971, Asturias assured that the Colombian's novel was a "gross copy" of "The Search for the Absolute" by Honoré de Balzac.
"Without a doubt it was nonsense that was not very well thought out, and the friends of García Márquez and that generation that was gaining so much prestige at that time turned to criticize Asturias," says Arnoldo Gálvez.
In the 70s, a decade in which Latin American writers were confronted by generational differences, political visions and control of the publishing markets, which were fundamental for the boom to take off, Asturias became an attractive target.
"Refuting it, disqualifying it, certain authors affirmed their own public image," says Guatemalan historian Julio César Pinto Soria.
For them it was "like touching God with dirty hands," the researcher wrote in an article published in El Periódico in 2013.
The cruelty of the young boomers towards the veteran was fierce: they called him an "old idiot", "gagá", "resentful" and "ignorant".
Asturias' criticism of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was the straw that broke a glass that had begun to fill years ago.
In 1968, García Márquez said in an interview that "before Asturias, the prize was deserved by Neruda and Borges, in that order," referring to the Nobel Prize.
"Borges's political position is more honest than that of Asturias, who has sold out to achieve it," he said.
This new generation of writers, however, had read his works and had been nourished by them.
"He influenced all those young people, there are letters that demonstrate the respect and intention they had to approach Asturias, they sent him their books and he did things to move them. But they were growing like an immense wave at the media level, Asturias was from the 'establishment' and they ate it up, they decided to 'kill the father', kill Asturias," says Carmen Lucía Alvarado.
Nothing is older in the history of literature than public fights between writers. But the one in Asturias with the young people of the boom came when the Nobel Prize winner was already a septuagenarian author, who would die a few years later.
"He did not have time to protect his work against oblivion. Nor did he have a country to support him, neither then nor later," says Pinto Soria.
Diplomatic controversies
Asturias's relationship with the different Guatemalan governments and dictatorships marked his work. Hence, for example, "Mr. President."
But also his life. He was a left-wing man who suffered exile in several periods of his life precisely because of his confrontation with the dictatorships of his country.
When he received the Nobel Prize in 1967, Asturias had been named ambassador in Paris a year earlier by the government of Julio César Méndez Montenegro, which, "although it had a more or less democratic veneer, was a government ultimately controlled by the military," explains Arnoldo Álvarez.
For this reason, adds Álvarez, a series of ethical questions begin to fall on the writer.
Asturias already had extensive experience as a diplomat.
After the 1944 revolution in Guatemala, which overthrew the Jorge Ubico regime, he held various diplomatic positions in Mexico, Argentina and El Salvador.
It was named by the democratic government of Juan José Arévalo (father of current President Bernardo Arévalo), which flourished in what is known as "the 10 years of spring."
But the coup d'état carried out in 1954 by Carlos Castillo Armas with the support of the CIA condemned him to exile, where he was also stripped of his nationality.
Asturias was designated as communist and its books were banned in Guatemala, says Pinto Soria.
He suffered that exile like a tear. He stated that "he was inside Guatemala, that they could never get him out," and that "in order to be, to write, I always needed to hear that voice again," writes the historian.
So when Méndez Montenegro offered him in 1966 to rehabilitate his figure and be ambassador in Paris, Asturias did not hesitate.
That year he had received the Lenin Peace Prize, awarded by the Soviet Union to individuals who had contributed to peace between peoples, and the following year he received the Nobel Prize.
But his acceptance of the diplomatic position was accompanied by devastating criticism from some sectors of the Latin American left, which was later amplified by the dispute with the boom generation.
So, after achieving world fame, his figure was little by little being relegated and his work would end up falling into oblivion.
Image source, AFP via Getty
For Carmen Lucía Alvarado, we must look for political and historical reasons to explain this forgetfulness, "but not only of the figure of Asturias, but of Guatemala as a country."
Guatemala "was not forgiven for the counterrevolution," which remained as a defect in the eyes of its neighbors, argues Alvarado.
"I also think about the class condition of the countries, in which Guatemala is at the bottom," says the writer and founder of Catafixia Editorial.
And this is also perceived in literature and the publishing world, he states: "There is a hegemony of Latin Americanity, of what Latin America should be in literature, which is Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, if you are a poet you are Chile... but in Central America we have to deal with the fact of being invisible."
*This note was originally published in 2025, when it was announced that the remains of Miguel Ángel Asturias would return to Guatemala. It has been updated and republished.
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