Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Education published a series of twelve volumes in the 1940s under the general title Pensamiento de América which presented excerpts from the writings of the leading thinkers of the American continent. Now the secretariat has begun another similar series with three volumes devoted to Alfonso Reyes, José Carlos Mariátegui, and Rómulo Gallegos. Other volumes will contain excerpts from the writings of Baldomero Sanin Cano, Rafael Heliodoro Valle, Vicente Rocafuerte, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Ricardo Rojas, José Ingenieros, Leopoldo Lugones, and Alcides Arguedas. Each volume will have the same format—an introduction by an important Latin American figure and selections from the writings of one of the Latin American thinkers. These volumes will prove useful, although practically everything in them is available in some other form.
The volume on Mariátegui was edited by the Ecuadorean scholar Benjamín Carrión, who selected for reprinting three chapters from Mariátegui’s classic work, “Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana,” published in 1928. The chapters are those dealing with the Indian and agrarian problems, religion, and the development of literature in Peru. Carrion wrote a short introduction and in an appendix added an article he published about Mariátegui in 1930.
Mariátegui was a product of the ferment in Peru after World War I which produced the Aprista movement. A self-educated man who died very young, Mariátegui remained in Peru during the 1920s when most of the others who later became leaders of Aprismo were in exile. Through his periodical Amauta he became the decade’s leading spokesman for the idea that his countrymen needed to study Peru, so that they might create a Peruvian type of socialism based on the institutions and customs which the mute Indian masses of the altiplano had preserved for centuries.
In 1928 Mariátegui helped to found the Peruvian Socialist Party, which affiliated itself to the Communist International in 1930, just as he died. Since then the Communists and Apristas have been arguing as to which party Mariátegui would have served had he lived. In the polemics since 1930 his figure and ideas have been distorted, especially by the Communists. This book will help to publicize his ideas and make more understandable the milieu out of which Aprismo developed.
By the 1960s the basic ideas of Mariátegui were so commonly held in Peru that the president of the republic could talk about Peruanizing Peru. The government was constitutional, and the country was making giant strides in overcoming its heritage of backwardness and underdevelopment. Mariátegui and the ideas he expressed were important in creating the intellectual climate which made the Peru of the 1960s possible.
