Taboada Terán, Nestor

(1929– )

   Bolivian novelist, historian, and journalist. Born in La Paz, Taboada Terán belongs to the socalled Chaco generation, those Bolivians who grew up in the shadow of Bolivia’s defeat by Paraguay in the two Chaco Wars (1928–1930, 1932–1935). In the author’s case, the war cast a long shadow: his father died in the second of these conflicts, when the author was only three years old. His writing career began with the publication of the short story “Claroscuro,” which in 1948 won him an award and the attention of critics. He completed studies in graphic arts in Brazil and journalism in Ecuador.

   Intensely patriotic since his earliest years, Taboada Terán has spoken of an anecdote of his youth in a 2008 interview: at age 14, he saw headlines about Bolivia’s foundering economy on the front page of a journal in La Paz. He immediately presented himself at the offices of the newspaper, demanded an explanation, and offered himself as his country’s savior. The editors, good-naturedly, took his picture and published it in the paper, accompanied with a note in which he was described as un pichón de tigre (a tiger’s cub). Years later, Taboada Terán would join the Partido de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Leftist Revolutionary Party), which he abandoned in 1950 to found, with other intellectuals, the Partido Comunista de Bolivia (Bolivian Communist Party). The Partido Comunista threw its support behind the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR, Movement for National Revolution) during the elections of May 1951. Like many other young radicals during the 1960s and 1970s, Taboada Terán traveled to Africa, Chile, China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. A linotypist by trade until the publication of his first novel, in 1964 he was named Director of Culture for the Universidad Técnica de Oruro and later the Universidad Mayor de San Simón de Cochabamba. His first novel, El precio del estaño (1960, The Price of Tin) is based on the December 1942 massacre of miners in the Catavi mining sector, the locale of the 1967 massacre denounced in the testimonial memoir by Domitila Barrios de Chungara. As with his next book, the collection of short stories Indios en rebelión (1968, Indians in Rebellion), Taboada Terán’s early works ground the roots of many of his country’s social and economic ills in the discrimination suffered by indigenous and mestizo (mixed-race) sectors of Bolivian society. His early works and political militancy earned him the censure of the government. In 1972 under the regime of General Hugo Banzer Suárez, his personal library was publicly burned in one of Cochabamba’s plazas, and the author was forced to go into exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

   In his Buenos Aires exile, which would last eight years, Taboada Terán returned to the second war of the Chaco, where his father lost his life, with the publication of El signo escalonado (1975, The Stepped Symbol). The novel examines the origins of the Chaco conflict and its effect on Bolivia’s largely mestizo troops, one of whom argues that it is a “transnational” war that has little to do with the reality facing the Bolivian peasants and miners and their Paraguayan counterparts. In 1977 he published what is perhaps his best-known novel, Manchay Puytu: El amor que quiso olvidar Dios (Manchay Puytu: The Love God Wanted to Forget), the first in a trilogy of novels that examine the pre-Hispanic and colonial histories of his Andean nation. In 1994 the Bolivian composer Alberto Villalpando would premiere an opera based on this work. Other works in the trilogy are Angelina Yupanki: Marquesa de la Conquista (1992, Angelina Yupanki, Marchioness of the Conquest) and Ollantay: La guerra de los dioses (1994, Ollantay: The War of the Gods). Angelina Yupanki, published to coincide with the fifth centennial of the arrival of Columbus to the Americas, posits an Andean counterpart to Malinche, the Nahuatl interpreter for the Spanish invaders, traditionally derided in Mexico as the symbolic mother of the first mestizo and Cortez’s collaborator. Moving away from the social realism of his first novels, the trilogy has been hailed for its mix of oral tradition and history; the matter-of-fact retelling of legends; the presence of magic, all of it leavened by humor, while still retaining the author’s preoccupation with the examination of the roots of social injustice. Stylistically, Taboada Terán is distinguished by the linguistic hybridity of the works, less a matter of incorporating indigenous Aymara words into the content than a recreation of the Aymara language syntax; a trait that approximates him to the indigenista novel of Latin American writers such as the Peruvian José María Arguedas. The author of over 70 works, Taboada Terán remains a widely admired figure in his native country. In 2008, he received the Premio Nacional de Cultura (National Prize for Culture) for his work at home and abroad to publicize the cultural patrimony of his country. He is the recipient of the highest civilian decoration bestowed by the Bolivian Congress, “La Bandera de Oro” (the Golden Flag) and was made a trustee of the Fundación Cultural del Banco Central (Cultural Foundation of the Central Bank), the leading body responsible for all museums and archives in Bolivia. He is also a member of the Academia Boliviana de la Lengua (Bolivian Language Academy).

   Abroad, he was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and received several awards in Argentina. In 2001 the Università degli Studi della Tuscia in Viterbo, Italy, established the Nestór Taboada Terán scholarship for a graduate thesis on Bolivian literature. Details of the scholarship and biographical data about the author are available at http://tinyurl.com/c597gq. One of his short stories, “The Indian Paulino,” was included in the 2000 anthology The Fat Man from La Paz: Contemporary Fiction from Bolivia, and some of his works, such as Ollantay: Guerra de los dioses, have been translated into European languages. Apart from that, his work remains largely unknown among the Englishspeaking reading public. Nestór Taboada Terán lives in Cochabamba, Bolivia.