Manuel Zapata Olivella occupies a position of importance because of his straightforward approach in the areas of protest and ethnicity within the Latin-American perspective. Although it is popular to speak of the magic of realism as a backdrop to some literary social protest in Latin America, Zapata Olivella seems to have added another dimension to realism, where the force of cultural myths has become a possibility for defining cultural reality. The underlying morphology of his art form has an artistic dimension that provides a multivalent semiology. This technique extends reader participation.

The one basic difference in this approach, if one were to compare Zapata Olivella with most of his contemporaries, is that Zapata Olivella writes with what he has termed the associative relationship of myth, protest, and ethnic integration. His thematic thrust of protest is against group oppression, which he expresses in terms of economic deprivation, political abuses...