Suffocating Atmospheres: Toxicity and the Politics of Breathing in Arguedas’s <i>The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below</i>

The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down BelowThe air is thick with foul odors; industrial smoke chokes the sky; a former miner coughs up black mucus as he struggles to breathe.Against this toxic backdrop, Jos e Mar a Arguedas's El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, 1971)-hereafter Los zorros-presents a dystopian vision of a landscape ravaged by industrial devastation.At its center is what I call the politics of breathing, in which the very act of drawing air registers the entanglement of colonial and racial violence.Published posthumously in the wake of Arguedas's 1969 suicide, the novel interlaces anguished diary entries with an unfinished narrative set at the height of Peru's fishing boom, while weaving in mythological foxes who personify the long-standing divide between the Andean highlands and the coastal region. 1 These disparate threads form a fragmented text that mirrors the chaos of its setting: Chimbote, a once-small fishing village rapidly transformed into one of the world's largest ports by the global demand for anchoveta fishmeal. 2 The novel situates readers within a boomtown in flux: multinational corporations and foreign investors rush to extract profit, while thousands of Indigenous Andean migrants arrive in search of work, often