| Summary: | This article seeks to explore the negotiation character of Estercilia Simanca Pushaina’s poetics with the purpose of demonstrating that her literature, in conventional alphabetic writing and in Spanish, translates in depth the epistemologies – based on the oral tradition – of the indigenous wayuu community, installed in the peninsula of La Guajira, between Colombia and Venezuela. This means studying Simanca’s literature in the light of history, concerning, in particular the phenomenon of economic smuggling that characterizes the wayuu indigenous community since the 17th century. Recovering the historicity of Simanca’s literature means putting the author’s and the wayuu community’s capacity of political agency at the center of the discussion. In her literature, Simanca gives an account of a multiple community that cannot be reduced to a fixed cultural identity: in the wayuu community, cultural reinvention is the key to ensuring its political autonomy. Simanca’s poetics testify to these strategies of cultural reinvention and political negotiation by opening a dialogue with the Colombian majoritarian society and highlighting the profound conception of temporality in the wayuu community and the socio-political relations that emerge from there.
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