Mendoza, Jaime (1874–1939)

Born July 25, 1874, in Sucre, Jaime Mendoza was, together with Alcides Arguedas and Armando Chirveches, one of the most important Bolivian realist writers. After obtaining a medical degree in Sucre, Mendoza's career took him to the mining centers of Uncía and Llallagua. Living and working in the depressed centers deeply influenced his novel En las tierras de Potosí (1911). The War of the Acre found Mendoza in the Bolivian tropics: the conditions of extreme poverty there are reflected in his novel Páginas bárbaras (1914). Mendoza later traveled to Europe and lived in France and Spain. While in Europe, he contacted Arguedas, the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, and other important Latin American writers. Arguedas, who wrote the prologue to En las tierras de Potosí, called Mendoza "the Bolivian Gorki" for the social realism that characterized his novels. Also an essayist, Mendoza wrote Tesis andinista (1933) and El macizo andino (1935), both comparative studies of Bolivia to the Pacific Ocean and the Argentine Río de la Plata basin. In response to the Spanish essayist Carlos Badía Malagrida, who believed that Bolivia was incapable of developing a stable political society, Mendoza used this geography to counteract Badía's negative opinions, and to assert Bolivia's right to exist as an independent nation. He died January 26, 1939, in Sucre.

See alsoArguedas, Alcides; Literature: Spanish America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnade, Charles W. "The Historiography of Colonial and Modern Bolivia." The Hispanic American Historical Review 42, no. 3 (1962): 333-384.

Zulawski, Ann. "Hygiene and 'The Indian Problem': Ethnicity and Medicine in Bolivia, 1910–1920." Latin American Research Review 35, no. 2 (2000): 107-129. Examines the proposals of Jaime Mendoza and Nestor Morales for improving the health of the native population in the context of the larger national debate about ethnicity and citizenship.

                                    Javier SanjinÉs C.