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! c h a p t e r 7 ad-libs by the women of AMAUTA Magda Portal and María Wiesse In a 1929 review of Magda Portal’s essay on vanguard poetry, a contributor to José Carlos Mariátegui’s renowned Lima magazine Amauta (1926–1930) said little about the work itself but waxed ecstatic about its author.1 Calling her his “belligerent comrade” and “the purest feminine revolutionary ferment” of her time, the reviewer consecrated Portal as Peru’s New Woman, a combative muse who could motivate the journal’s radical cultural and political mission. She was, he proclaimed, “the woman who goes to the barricades with her unrest at her waist and a cartridge belt with incendiary metaphors . . . the agile woman of the steering wheel and the press, of the locomotive and the electoral outcry” (Delafuente, 102). This image of Magda the muse as a grand inspiration for Peru’s “new men,” as Mariátegui called them, recalls other renditions of women writers as bold embodiments of a national imaginary or artistic program: Ortega y Gasset’s Gioconda of the Pampa for Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Mañach’s Mariblanca de Cuba for Sabas Alomá, or Borges’s “proud” and “fervent” Norah Lange, a muse for the Argentine vanguards (Borges, Prologue, 5). Whatever feminist aura emanates from Delafuente’s exaggerated portrait of Portal is misleading, not only in its relationship to her complex selfrepresentation as an activist and writer but also as a gauge of Amauta’s cultural politics. In fact, if the careers of Mariblanca Sabas Alomá and Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta embody the exceptional ties between Cuba’s artistic vanguards and the country’s strong feminist movements, those of Magda Portal (1903–1989) and María Wiesse (1893–1964) exemplify by contrast the vast divide between the vanguards and Peru’s incipient feminism. As Francesca Miller and Elsa Chaney have demonstrated, the slow start of Peruvian feminism provides a counterexample to the relative progress in women’s civil rights during the same period in the Southern Cone and the Caribbean. According to Miller, the absence of a strong Peruvian middle class and the persistence of parochial Catholic schools as the foundation of women’s education explain in part the late arrival of a broad-based feminist movement in Peru, as secular schoolteachers 166 !Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture stimulated feminist critique elsewhere in Latin America (Miller, 79). The leaders of Lima’s muted early feminism were upper-class and their politics considerably more conservative than those of Portal, Wiesse, or the cultural worlds that they inhabited.2 In comparison to what one finds in Buenos Aires, Havana, São Paulo, or Mexico City, the images of women and gender standards circulating in Lima’s popular publications Mundial and Variedades were generally more traditional, and descriptions of the New Woman were more often framed as models of how Peruvian women ought not to behave. As a center of progressive thought within this milieu, Mariátegui’s circle and Amauta, the dominant wing of the Peruvian vanguards, imagined a Marxist-inspired new Peru as a response to the Leguía regime, which despite its reformist cast still catered to oligarchic structures. But the Amauta group and other Peruvian vanguard circles highlighted class and indigenous ethnicity.3 Given its internationalism, Amauta contributed less than one would expect to serious gender debates. In keeping with its eclectic cultural politics, the journal did designate its “women of the struggle,” such as Rosa Luxembourg or the Uruguayan poet Blanca Luz Brum, and it published prose and verse by Spanish American women writers: Juana de Ibarbourou, Amanda Labarca Hulbertson, Nydia Lamarque, Gabriela Mistral, and Alfonsina Storni. In a cultural setting with no comparable opportunities , Amauta offered a provisional intellectual home for a few Lima women. Along with Portal and Wiesse, Dora Mayer de Zulen and Ángela Ramos assumed noteworthy roles among the diverse group of writers and artists that coalesced around Mariátegui and the magazine. It is not surprising that a Lima journal with a strong literary orientation should attract intellectual women. Already in the nineteenth century the literary circle constituted a center for feminist activity in Peru, for example in the cultural endeavors of Clorinda Matto de Turner, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, and Argentina’s Juana Manuela Gorriti.4 Despite the biases marking his youthful writings on gender, moreover, Mariátegui’s views on women grew more progressive during the 1920s, coinciding with his Marxist conversion and his marriage to...

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