Perched on the limb of the new millennium, many of us in North America or Western Europe struggle to imagine what it must have been like to live in Santiago de Chuco a century ago. Even a journey today to that highland town is likely to be misleading; for eyes accustomed to the comfort, commodities, and technologies of developed cities and countries, a journey to Santiago will feel like a trip back in time. But the truth is that this little mountain town has already modernized extensively. According to the 1940 census, in Santiago de Chuco many houses were still lacking utilities that had started to become mainstays in other less remote homes—utilities as basic as electricity and potable water. If we take into account that as late as 1940, out of 957 households, as few as 147 had running water, 130 had drainage, and a mere 2 had electricity, then we must imagine a Santiago in 1892 when Vallejo was born there quite a bit less modern.4
We must also be careful not to assume that La Libertad at large had dodged the European influence that so radically changed so much of South America. Out of the approximately forty-eight thousand people in the department, as many as forty-six thousand were mestizos, and about forty thousand over the age of five were proficient only in the Castilian language, while a mere seventy or so individuals knew Castilian and Quechua; no one in the census is said to have known only Quechua or any other indigenous language. Therefore, the Santiago where César Vallejo was born and raised, as Luis Monguío suggests, contained “biological, linguistic, and Indo-Hispanic cultural fusion that extends to the majority … [He] was born in neither the Andalusian nor the indigenous Peru, but in the mestizo, cholo Peru.”5
So here we have Vallejo’s early stomping ground, a rural town of the Andes where the process of modernization seemed to lurk on the horizon but not fully arrive. Although there’s a lack of sufficient information to determine his early childhood education with detail and certainty, we do know that he was largely inspired by his grandfathers and, at an early age, is said to have wanted to follow in their footsteps and become a priest. We also know that he attended secondary school in Huamachuco, as Santiago didn’t have one, but apparently only in 1905 and 1906 and thereafter sporadically, probably coming in only to take exams, since his family couldn’t afford to send him full-time.
Nevertheless, when 1910 rolled around, the horizons of a now eighteen-year-old César began to widen as he moved from his highland hometown to the coastal city of Trujillo on April 2. There he enrolled in the Department of Humanities at La Universidad de La Libertad but didn’t even finish his first year on account of economic hardship, which led him to work for a stint in the Quiruvilca mines instead—an experience that eventually received literary expression in his novel Tungsten and his play Brothers Colacho. Desperately trying to carry out his studies, on April 11, 1911, he enrolled in the Department of Science at the same university but again dropped out for financial reasons, and this time found work from May to December tutoring the children of a wealthy land owner, Domingo Sotil.
César continued to live as a sort of rogue intellectual for the next few years, looking for a vocation. In 1912, for example, he took a job on a sugar plantation called Roma, nor far from Trujillo in the Chicama valley, which was “owned by the Larco Herreras, one of the two big families (the other being the Gildemeisters) who had come to monopolize the sugar industry in Peru after the war of the Pacific.” It’s not hard to imagine how strongly impacted the future champion of social justice would’ve been when he saw “hundreds of peons arriving at the sugar estate at the crack of dawn and working until nightfall in the fields, with only a fistful of rice to live on.”6 Vallejo was horrified by the way those workers’ lives “were dominated by alcohol sold to them on credit,” creating debts that rapidly accrued to the point that they’d surely outlive their debtors, and it was this “hideous process [that] devastated him and lit a fuse that burned until 1928, the year he suffered the implosion that resulted in his inability to conform with social conditions for the rest of his life.”7 We should also point out that Vallejo’s direct contact with these workers, who would’ve been native speakers of Quechua, can help explain where some of his surprisingly large Quechua vocabulary may have come from.
In 1913–14, Vallejo managed to reenroll in the Department of Humanities with the money he was earning from a job he’d landed teaching botany and anatomy at Centro Escolar de Varones in Trujillo. This proved to be a formative period in his life, since this return to the university also placed him in a literary environment that fostered his creative endeavors and shaped his artistic theories. The following year, he was adopted by Grupo Norte in the Trujillo counterculture, his “bohemia” as he referred to it fondly over the years. The group consisted of Eulogio Garrido, whose house was the central meeting place; Antenor Orrego Espinoza; Alcides Spelucín; Juan Espejo; Óscar Imaña; Macedonio de la Torre; Eloy Espinosa; Federico Esquerre; Leoncio Muñoz; Alfonso Sánchez Arteaga; Francisco Sandoval; Juan Sotero; and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. During this time Vallejo started taking courses in law and switched jobs, giving preference to a position at Colegio Nacional de San Juan, where, as it turns out, he ended up teaching a young man by the name of Ciro Alegría.8 Complicating this adventure into Trujillo’s literary underworld was the terrible loss of César’s brother Miguel, who died in Santiago.9
Later that year Vallejo earned his licenciatura in philosophy and letters at La Universidad de La Libertad with his thesis “Romanticism in Castilian Poetry,” a sweeping survey that demonstrates remarkable critical skill and foresight. In the thesis Vallejo saw José Manuel Quintana as “the father of revolutionary poets,” praised José María de Heredia for his innovative “Galician vocabulary and natural pomp,” and disputed the claim that in the work of José Zorrilla romantic poetry reached its apogee, because it was in José de Espronceda’s El diablo mundo that “the robust poetic temperament … exploded in a blast of asphyxia, thirsty for light and space.” With the thesis out of the way, over the next couple of years Vallejo started publishing poems from The Black Heralds in magazines and had an affair with María Rosa Sandoval, who inspired several of his early love poems. This was when he started reading magazines like Cervantes, Colónida, La Esfera, and España, which were crucial resources that fostered his production of experimental poetry.
From July to December 1917 Vallejo had a love affair with Zoila Rosa Cuadra, whom he nicknamed “Mirtho”—a name that resurfaced as the title of a short story in Scales published five years later. In the midst of this relationship, on September 22, 1917, to be precise, the Lima magazine Variedades took interest in one of his poems. Like many young writers who emerge from the peripheries, Vallejo had initially been ignored, and when the professional critics of Lima deemed it unfashionable to disregard his youthful voice, they acknowledged his presence by using him as a punching bag. “The Poet to His Lover,” which he’d submitted to Variedades and simply initialed, was published, accompanied by a rather unflattering cartoon and the following note from Clemente Palma:
Mr. C. A. V. Trujillo. You too belong to the lot that comes whistling the ditty which we attribute to everyone who keeps trying to tune their lyrical wind bags, i.e., the youth that has been dealt a hand to write kitsch poetic rubbish. And said ditty should let you rest assured that we shall publish your monstrosity. You have sent us a sonnet titled “The Poet to His Lover” which, in all honesty, would be more appropriate for the accordion or the ocarina than for poetry. Your verses are noxious twaddle and, until you remove your piece of junk from the wastepaper basket, we shall see nothing else than the dishonor you have done to the people of Trujillo, and if one day your neighbors discover your name, they will find a rope and bind you to the tracks like a tie on the Malabrigo railroad.10
By 1918 Vallejo’s situation started to change dramatically. After moving to Lima, he began graduate studies in January in the Humanities Department of La Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. The following month he met the visionary poet and founder of Colónida, Abraham Valdelomar, whom he came to see as one of the few guides for the literary youth of Peru. Since Vallejo was preparing for the upcoming publication of The Black Heralds, Valdelomar offered to