Trees, Seas, and Ecofeminist Imaginary in the Vanguard Poetry of Magda Portal (Peru, 1900-1989)

The first Fiesta de la Planta took place on Christmas Day, 1921, in Vitarte, an industrial suburb of Lima, Peru. Home to a large textile mill, Vitarte at the turn of the century was a community of organized workers who successfully won an eight-hour workday in 1919. With a proletarian consciousness and new time on their hands, the workers welcomed the opening of Peru’s second González Prada Popular University in January 1921, with the revolutionary Aprista leader Raúl Haya de la Torre as the school’s director. Popular universities, which represented the alliance between intellectuals and the working classes, were founded throughout Latin America and provided classes for the poor with no tuition charge. University student activist volunteers, such as feminist poet Magda Portal (Peru, 1900-1989) in the later 1920s, taught workers and peasants basic academic and life skills, as well as Marxist-inspired theory.

As a spirited celebration of the popular university movement, Vitarte’s annual Fiesta de la Planta – with planta referring both to industrial and botanical plants – attracted some 5000 workers and their families from all over Peru to participate not only in tree planting, but also sporting events, a large communal meal, cultural activities and political rallying in support of worker alliances and organizing (Murillo Garaycochea in Pérez Ruíz, n. pag.). This tree-planting festival came not only to symbolize the cultivation of intellectual and worker solidarity in Peru, but also served as an initial metaphor through which Portal lyrically transcribed her early involvement in Peru’s popular struggle. Using the tree as an ecocritical point of departure in her early voice, Portal’s poetic subjectivity can be seen as inscribed with an ecofeminist ethos that was perhaps even more revolutionary in terms of egalitarian vision than what APRA offered. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, Portal was not a lone voice in an early Latin American ecofeminist expression: other female writers, chief among them Gabriela Mistral, merged ecological conservationism and feminism as two ideologies that mutually benefited each other and held similar goals of environmental and social well-being for all.¹ Uniquely, however, Portal articulates a particularly revolutionary form of feminism with an ecologically viable and inclusive vision of the world. The motif of trees in her early poetry opens the door to an ecocritical analysis of her later poetry, which foregrounds the sea as its primary symbolic landscape. By capitalizing on the experimental aesthetics of the vanguard movement, Portal evokes a deep relationship between her poetic voice and the rich landscapes of the sea, uninhabited and unhampered by men and their laws. This verse, free of the trappings of political slogans and ideologies that exclude women, weaves a feminist subjectivity dependent on the mysterious refuge of the sea. In this way, Portal serves as an original voice and precursor in Latin American ecofeminist discourse. By analyzing the poetic relationships among her feminism, the environment, and the ideas they represent, we can further our understanding not only of Portal’s revolutionary and feminist formation, but also of the different rhetorics that Portal brought to bear on Peru’s early environmentalist ethic and vanguard poetry.

Born in Lima in 1900 to a privileged family, Portal enjoyed a basic education and the free time to devote to the pastimes of reading and writing. Although the financial insecurity resulting from her father’s death would preclude her from officially attending university, she was able to audit classes at the University of San Marcos around the same time as the end of the Mexican Revolution and the university reforms of Argentina. Inspired by these events and the bohemian friends she met at the university, Portal was initiated into student activism, which would determine the course of her life as a revolutionary leader, feminist, international lecturer, writer, and vanguard poet. Among her most influential friends in 1920s Lima were poet César Vallejo and writer José Mariátegui, founder of the continent-wide APRA movement (Also referred to as Aprismo, the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana promoted, among other things, pan-Americanism...