Peruvianizing Peru: Covers from Amauta Magazine (1926–30)
“This magazine . . . does not represent a group. It represents, rather, a movement, a spirit” — or perhaps a “specter”? Whatever the preferred translation, the intention was clear: with these words, editor José Carlos Mariátegui was announcing the arrival of a radical new publication on Lima’s avant-garde scene. Amauta, as his endeavor was called, aimed to “create a new Peru within the new world”, to analyze the latest political and cultural currents around the globe in order to better understand how to build socialism at home. At a time when independent outlets were winking in and out of existence from one month to the next, Mariátegui’s project endured across thirty-two issues from 1926 to 1930, offering a venue for translations of Sigmund Freud, poetry by César Vallejo, reportage by Rosa Luxemburg, political writing by Gabriela Mistral, artworks by Diego Rivera, and more. In the process, Amauta helped shape the intellectual and artistic terrain of conversation in a way that has endured long after its final print run.
Mariátegui, who would later found the forerunner of the Peruvian Communist Party, is considered one of the luminaries of Latin American Marxist thought for the immense philosophical contributions he made during his short but eventful life. A precocious writer, Mariátegui landed a job at the newspaper La Prensa at just fifteen and would publish his first article two years later. But after Augusto Leguía seized power in a coup d’état in 1919, the new government pressured Mariátegui into going abroad as a way of disposing of a vocal critic. Yet rather than falling silent, he flourished; Mariátegui’s two-years of travel, richly chronicled in a column for El Tiempo entitled “Letters from Italy”, played a vital role in honing his political and cultural analysis and in shaping his vision for what would later become Amauta. In New York City, he met with Soviet journalists from the news agency TASS, which would later run his writing on Indigenous issues; in Paris, he interviewed Henri Barbusse; in Venice, he first came across the disarticulated odalisques of Alexander Archipenko; in Berlin, he was taken by the biting social commentary of George Grosz. By the time he returned to Lima in 1923, writes Natalia Majluf, Mariátegui was probably Latin America’s foremost expert on the contemporary landscape of European art — and he was eager to set up an outlet of his own to explore it.
But Mariátegui did not found Amauta merely to interpret Europe’s vanguard movements; the point was to transform them to suit the particular circumstances of 1920s Peru. In the realm of the visual arts, Mariátegui felt the correct trajectory for the Andean avant-garde lay in Indigenism, which sought to shine an aesthetic spotlight on the region’s native peoples as an antidote to the mainstream adulation of the Continent. In this he aligned himself with José Sabogal, whom Mariátegui dubbed “the first Peruvian painter” and who was Indigenism’s primary exponent. As Amauta’s arts editor, Sabogal contributed the majority of the magazine’s cover designs, starting with the skull-capped head that graced its very first issue and that would become, in time, a kind of sigil.
Indigenism would eventually fall out of favor with many on the Left: for some, the movement’s domination by urban, bourgeois, and generally white artists — Sabogal was of Spanish descent, though he posed in Indigenous dress in at least one portrait — lent their work a certain fetishistic falseness. For other critics, Indigenist paintings seemed endlessly fascinated by solitary figures traversing mountain passes but had considerably less space for depicting struggles under and against less picturesque oppressive forces. (It’s notable that one of Sabogal’s covers seems like an Inca-inflected nod to Jean-François Millet’s The Sower (1850) — Millet having himself occasionally run afoul of accusations that he depicted the poor without depicting their poverty.) But there is no questioning the sincerity of Mariátegui’s commitment to building a just society for and alongside Peru’s Indigenous communities — far beyond an understanding of these figures as mere emblems.
It was Sabogal, allegedly, who gave Mariátegui the idea to call his magazine Amauta, a Quechua word for a teacher or sage. In time, the title would morph into a nickname of Mariátegui himself. The mirroring of publication and publisher did not stop there: Amauta’s final issue, the cover of which features a black-and-white wake-like scene, was published shortly after Mariátegui’s death at just thirty-five years of age. “Now what?” the first line of text on the cover reads.
The magazine’s premature shuttering not long after seems to imply a melancholy kind of answer to the question. But it is not the only one that we might give. Leguía’s government intercepted Amauta’s correspondence, interfered with its circulation, and at one point forced a months-long hiatus; and yet, a century after the magazine’s first issue went to press, its influence continues to be discussed and debated. Its founder’s home is a museum, and his portrait can be seen everywhere from roadside murals to the walls of Lima’s principal art gallery. Mariátegui’s influence has evaded and outlasted these attempts at repression — but the inequality and exploitation he decried have likewise endured.
Enjoyed this piece? We need your help to keep publishing.
The PDR is a non-profit project kept alive by reader donations – no ads, no paywalls, just the generosity of our community. It’s a really exciting model, but we need your help to keep it thriving. Visit our support page to become a Friend and receive our themed postcard packs. Or give a one-off donation. Already a supporter? A huge thank you for making all this possible.
Jul 8, 2026