José María Arguedas Altamirano was a Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist. Arguedas was an author of Spanish descent, fluent in the Native Quechua language, gained by living in two Quechua households from the age of 7 to 11 – first in the Indigenous servant quarters of his step-mother's home, then, escaping her "perverse and cruel" son, with an Indigenous family approved by his father – who wrote novels, short stories, and poems in both Spanish and Quechua.
