Secret of the Andes

This children's novel won the Newbery Medal in 1953 "for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children". The author, Ann Nolan Clark (born 5 December 1896), spent many years teaching literacy in the indigenous Tesuque Pueblo communities of her home state of New Mexico. She wrote 15 books about her experiences with these Native Americans. In 1945 the Institute for Inter-American Affairs sent her to Latin America and she lived and worked there for five years. She wrote several books about this period of life, including this coming-of-age novel set in highland Peru.

The significance of the choice of a boy, Cusi, as the central character in the story is reflective of the author's nurturing and loss of her only child, Thomas Patrick Clark Jr., who, as an Army Air Corps pilot, was shot down over the West Pacific in January 1944. Her husband, too, had died at a young age, leaving her to bring up her son alone. Cusi has been brought up by an old man, Chuto, in a hidden valley in the Andes and has no knowledge of his father or mother. Cusi had taken the place of another boy who had chosen not to return from his first visit to a town.

The novel sensitively deals with the destruction of a traditional society and the preservation of its culture by those left behind determined to pass on the historical values and way of life to future generations. This made me think of the nations that experienced genocide during the First World War, such as the Armenians, the Assyrians and the Greeks, and the way in which the survivors have been determined to preserve generation after generation of cultural memory and tradition. At the end of the novel, Chuto tells Cusi about the destruction of the Inca culture. We're told that “the words were precise... were deadly and cold” and that Cusi, listening, shivered:

“They, the Conquerors, came.
They came swarming into the land
with hate and with weapons.
They came.
They captured the mighty Inca,
holding him with chains.
They captured him.
Down the trails of the Andes
the Indians sent ten thousand llamas,
carrying bags of gold dust
to ransom their King
but they, the Conquerors, killed him.”