Progress?

Both The Lettered Mountain and Unending Struggle draw attention to the role of literacy in social control. Salomon and Nino-Murcia emphasize the fact that, although writing may have initially been a means by which the Spanish exerted colonial control, it slowly became a tool of freedom for Creole revolutionaries, and finally for indigenous peoples to assert their authority over their own communities. Despite outsiders’ tendencies to view Latin and South America’s indigenous people as illiterate and backward (perhaps in part due to the paucity of books themselves), the percentage of those who have at least basic reading and writing skills is somewhere in the eighties. For Salomon and Nino Murcia, literacy is an empowering tool for the people of Tupikocha.

On the surface, the view of literacy in Unending Struggle is similar to that in The Lettered Mountain. The somber narrator states, “For over three quarters of the world’s population, there is simply the passing of years from birth to death.” United States intervention, he asserts, will help change that, enriching the lives of the people of Ecuador by bringing them into the twentieth century.

In reality, however, the United States’ educational initiatives were nothing more than poorly disguised ideological imperialism. At every turn, the diplomats portrayed were trying to sniff out Communist sympathizers. Is anyone in your union a Communist? Who put up these posters? Of course the dictatorial junta will eventually set up a constitutional government, and even if they don’t, at least they’re not Commies, amiright? At one point the narrator explicitly states that the Ecuadorian people’s lifestyle provides a breeding ground for revolutionary rabblerousing. Literacy empowers indigenous people in The Lettered Mountain but serves as a tool for their subjugation in Unending Struggle.

1) How did the indigenous Peruvians described in The Lettered Mountain use the written word to assert and maintain their own cultural independence?

2) How did the United States use literacy to assert its in cultural values in Unending Struggle?