As a way to introduce Vallejo, I want to go over some basic facts and contexts for his early life. (If you’d like to jump right to his poems, you can simply scroll down after the break.)
—César (Abraham) Vallejo was born on March 16, 1892 (some say March 7) in a Santiago de Chuco, a province in Northern Peru that is a “remote, picaresque town set high up in the Andes.”
—He is the twelfth child (!) of Francisco de Paula Vallejo Benites and María de los Santos Mendoza Gurrionero who had married on June 22, 1869, some twenty-three years before his birth. Pictured below, his parents centered, all the other children (except César, absent that day, surrounding them).
—In César Vallejo: A Literary Biography (2013), Stephen M. Hart underscores not only the direct intergenerational relationship of colonization on Vallejo’s ancestors and relatives, but also the Catholic shame that was passed on from the greater community:
Both of César Vallejo’s grandfathers were Spanish priests, and both of his grandmothers were Indian women from the region. This led to some difficulties in the community of the time. As Oswaldo Vásquez Vallejo has suggested:
—About his childhood, Vallejo editor Santiago Aguilar has argued:
