Most Scandalous Woman: Magda Portal and the Dream of Revolution in Peru by Myrna Ivonne Wallace Fuentes (review)

This study is a gripping political biography of one of twentieth-century Latin America's most important poets and political activists, Magda Portal. Through its deep contextualization of Portal's life and work, the book also provides a fascinating exploration of the formative years of Peru's major populist party, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA).

Born in 1900 to a lower middle-class Lima family, Magda Portal sneaked into university classes as a young woman. She soon won critical praise for poetry that scandalized many of her contemporaries, with its considerations of female sexuality and agency. Her personal choices were no less shocking. Portal's daughter Gloria was born eight months before Portal married the child's father, Federico Bolaños. Less than two years later, Portal left Bolaños and entered a romantic relationship with his younger brother, Serafín Delmar.

Portal's writings turned expressly revolutionary in 1926. She was deported to Cuba in 1927, along with other intellectuals and activists whom Augusto Leguía's government deemed communists. From Cuba, she escaped to Mexico, the heart of leftist political mobilization in Latin America. It was in Mexico that Portal met Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, the founder of APRA as an anti-imperialist movement. Together with other Peruvian exiles, Haya and Portal produced the Plan de México, which transformed APRA into a political party. Portal was the only female signatory of this foundational Aprista document.

As an early and prominent Aprista, Portal traveled across Latin America and the Caribbean, meeting with young activists and giving political talks. She energetically campaigned for APRA in Peru's 1931 election, even though she—like all Peruvian women—did not yet have the right to vote. She went on to head the Aprista Women's section, and, as the editor of the only authorized Aprista press, she effectively controlled the party's ideological production. The height of Portal's political prominence came in 1946 when she organized and led the First National Convention of Aprista Women.

Though she would be celebrated as a feminist icon in the 1970s, Portal advocated only limited female suffrage during her years with APRA, fearful that most women were vulnerable to clerical manipulation, and she dismissed Peruvian feminists as enemies of the working class. Wallace Fuentes does an excellent job of critically assessing Portal's writings about the "women question," showing that Portal herself did not meet the ideals she advocated.

Portal suffered terribly because of anti-Aprista state repression and Haya de la Torre's insistence on revolutionary self-sacrifice. She was jailed for 16 months, lived in exile in Chile during the 1940s, and was twice forced into hiding. When Portal surrendered to a court-martial in 1950, she stunned many Peruvians by forcefully denouncing APRA and accusing its leaders of betraying the Peruvian people. Wallace Fuentes offers a bold and original interpretation of Portal's shocking denunciation: Portal broke from APRA because of a profound "crisis of political faith" that was driven as much by her ideological disagreements with Haya de la Torre as by the collapse of her relationship with Serafín Delmar and the trauma of her daughter's 1947 suicide.

Wallace Fuentes draws on extensive archival records and Portal's diverse writings, as well newspapers, to trace, explain, and contextualize Portal's work, decisions, and importance. Crucially, the book moves beyond Portal's literary and political achievements to examine the intensely personal and psychological factors that shaped this remarkable individual. The book presents fresh ideas about Portal, including the provocative argument that her prominence inside APRA deflected attention from Haya de la Torre's presumed homosexuality. The reader will also gain a vivid understanding of the energy, tensions, and schisms inside APRA, as well as a clear sense of the gendered social constraints that Portal repeatedly challenged.

The...