ABSTRACT
A careful reading of the cronicas shows many of these contradictions to be integral to the gradually hardening contours of Miguel Angel Asturias’s cultural self-definition. Asturias’s journalism constitutes part of the process through which the Spanish American author came to develop and express a distinctive yet culturally representative individuality. One of the most salient traits of Asturias’s early Parisian journalism is a propensity to attack his own class. The most revealing aspect of Asturias’s ordering of priorities—and the one that best helps to explain why his career flourished—lies in his unexpected ranking of Paris above Spanish America. The urgency of his quest for a means of rehabilitating Guatemalan national identity often becomes painfully evident. Guatemalan culture may regard the Maya as a remote ideal, but the Guatemalan’s blood links, Asturias insists, are with Spain. Asturias’s appalled reaction to Guatemalan ‘backwardness’ emerges even more strongly in a lurid, flagrantly unsuccessful short story he wrote during his stay.
