Alternative ways of andeanize the city: the memory of the willakuy in the stories about souls told in the urban area/ the urban space

Abstract

In this article, we propose to think about oral narratives as part of migrant discourses. We focus on stories about souls or other beings that come back from death, as narrated by city dwellers. Their stories allow for the reconstruction of personal, family and community memory. These narratives not only rearticulate the tension between the present urban context and the past origin, but also connect to Andean understandings and emotions surrounding death and life. For this reason, this article is organized in three parts. The first is a sociocultural description of the population of San Salvador de Jujuy, explaining how Andean migrants have settled in the city at various times during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, leading to its transformation. The second part of this study examines the willakuy genre and its generic memory (Bajtin, 1993) to showcase the recognition of its vitality and resistance in the oral stories that are currently shared in the city. It is proposed that the oral system also experiences linguistic and cultural displacement, similar to the warning made by Campuzano (2018) for the written system. Finally, the last part, proposes to incorporate the oral narratives about souls into the collection of wandering characters in the Andean world, since they are permanent migrant beings. We recognize that these oral narratives are inscribed as transandean discourses, since they are told by the descendants of migrants and leave a lasting impression on the city by reflecting their intentions of andeanize it (Noriega, 2011).