This study investigates the profound significance of the Catholic clergy in José María Arguedas’s posthumous masterpiece, The Foxes from Above and the Foxes from Below. While previous research has predominantly focused on literary analysis—often neglecting the fluid subjectivity of the clergy between the "sacred" and the "secular"—this paper adopts an interdisciplinary framework synthesizing sociological and theological perspectives. Utilizing Aníbal Quijano’s theory of the "coloniality of power" and H. Richard Niebuhr’s concept of "Christ above culture," the study re-examines the port city of Chimbote as a postcolonial site rife with capitalist oppression. Initially, the research demonstrates how figures like Father Cardozo, Gustavo Gutiérrez, and Pope John XXIII act as "sacred intermediaries," mirroring the boundary-crossing "foxes" of Andean mythology to subvert the rigid divide between the imperial center and marginalized peripheries.
However, this paper further introduces critical reflections: first, the sacred practices of these individuals remain constrained by the "systemic tension and historical complicity" of the Catholic Church, which historically served as an instrument of colonization. Second, entrusting the mending of social fragmentation to Western theology inevitably provokes an "epistemological tension between indigenous Andean cosmologies and Catholic theology." Ultimately, the conclusion reveals that while these clergy members embody Arguedas's hopes for national reconciliation, they also profoundly reflect the inescapable contradictions between individual redemption and institutional burdens within a postcolonial context.
