La literatura reescribe la historia: Colón se recrea en El arpa y la sombra de Alejo Carpentier

The author of historical documents and the writer of contemporary historical novels, appeal to a series of discursive strategies in order to represent its others, in this case the Amerindian. One genre of contemporary Latin American narrative refers to the letters of Christopher Columbus which intended to offer historical discourse of Spanish chronicles that proclaimed their historical " truth, " in this case the 1492 discovery of America. In this context, we find examples of the New Latin American Historical Novel as a literary genre that questions, problematizes, and deconstructs the colonial discourse in the history of Spanish America. In this article, I intend to address this alternative of historical fiction with the analysis of characters of indigenous peoples in two documents considered official history by the European historiography about the New World: the " Carta a Luis de Santangel " (1493) and " Relación del Tercer Viaje (1498), both by Christopher Columbus, and their alternate representation in a fictional work, El arpa y la sombra (1979) by Alejo Carpentier.