Figuraciones de la explotación en “Los mensú”, de Horacio Quiroga y El río oscuro, de Alfredo Varela: trabajo, esclavitud, animalidad

Abstract

In a time span of twenty-five years, Horacio Quiroga and Alfredo Varela offered their literary version of the exploitation suffered by rural workers in yerba mate plantations of Misiones during the early decades of the twentieth century. With divergent aesthetic and ideological positions, but with similar plots and topics, "Los mensú" by Quiroga, and El río oscuro by Varela, are presented as narrations built around the figure of the mensú worker and a deceitful and ensalving system. The present work aims to study a procedure repeated in both texts as a means of representing the exploitation of the mensú: his animalization. Highlighting both the points of contact and the contrasts, the following discussion explores the ways in which the animalization of the mensú is introduced in each text as well as its nuances and variations.