User:Oiseau mouche/Shunko (novel)

For the film of the same title directed by Lautaro Murúa, see Shunko (film) .Shunko is a novel by the Argentinean writer, teacher and scientist Jorge W. Ábalos, published in 1949 and which is one of the classics of Argentinean literature. In 1959, the Chilean actor and director Lautaro Murúa took the novel to the cinema in a film of that carries the same name, which was awarded the Silver Condor Award for being the best film of the year. The novel has been frequently used as a reading book (that is, as a study material) in the Argentinean school system. The theme of the novel is the relationship between a Quichua speaking boy from Santiago del Estero and his teacher from the big city. It is related to both discrimination and marginalization of indigenous people in Argentina, as well as a more democratic vision of the educational process, in which both the teacher and the student teach each other, learning from each other.

Synopsis
The argument is about the relationship between a teacher, educated in the big city, who is assigned to a rural school in Santiago del Estero province, where the students are Quichua native speakers. Little by little, it is the teacher who begins to learn from his students and establish a relationship of respect and mutual learning. "Shunko" in Quichua means "the smallest one". The novel focuses on the relationship between the teacher coming from the official Spanish-Argentine culture, and his "youngest" student, Shunko

Miscellaneous
[He taught us...] to be good, honest people (with values and principles), to know how to respect others and to speak in Spanish.
 * Ábalos was an outstanding Argentine scientist ( entomologist), who worked as a rural teacher in Santiago del Estero, from where he took the experiences he expresses in his novel.
 * In real life, Shunko was Benicio Palavecino, a man from Santiago born in 1929, who lived in the town of Tacañitas, on the banks of the Río Salado, who was a student of Jorge W. Ábalos, in the second half of the 1930s and who later migrated to Great Buenos Aires to work since 1953 at the Hipódromo de San Isidro, as a horse keeper.  In 2000, Palavecino, at the age of 70, was interviewed by the journalist Jorge Rouillon and when he asked him what was left of Ábalos, he simply replied:""

Benicio Palavecino, "Shunko"

When I wrote Shunko, I'm talking about forty-something years ago, back then many narrators wrote in a different way, "important" (things) ... This booklet, then, made with the straightforwardness of the individual who only tells what he sees, what he feels, it had no literary echo and was piled up on the shelves of my own house. When thinking of publishing them, driven by the naive attitude, I sent to print a large number of copies. The book had won an award from the Comisión Nacional de la Cultura (National Culture Comission). That excited me (it aroused my enthusiasm) and somehow made me be wrong ... But after a slow recognition by the public, the film arrived. A producer was interested in the book and with the impetus given by the film, with the advertisement that it carried, the book interested a publisher that made it available to the public and had "its chance". That's why sometimes I think how many good literary works can die due to lack of opportunity. Fortunately, it didn't happen that with Shunko.
 * The novel has been translated into several languages ​​and used many times as a reading book in Argentinean primary schools.
 * Jorge Ábalos has highlighted the fortuitous aspects that influenced the success of the novel:

Jorge W. Ábalos.