2 - Coming of Age in Exile: Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and the Genesis of APRA, 1923–1931

Summary

Chapter 2 studies how personal self-transformations in exile triggered the rise of new social and hemispheric consciousnesses among Apristas who were deported abroad in the 1920s. It traces as a case study the rocky relationship that the young student activist and future APRA leader Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre maintained during his first years in exile with the foreign allies, specifically the Scottish Reverend John A. Mackay and the US internationalist Anna Melissa Graves, who assisted him, and who tried to politically influence him. Transnational solidarity networks, the chapter shows, would herein assist in crucial ways APRA’s early formation as a persecuted political group. But this reliance on foreign assistance came with a price for the movement’s autonomy: it cracked open a space for progressive US allies and Christian missionaries to peddle their own agenda to Latin American critiques of empire.

Shortly before returning to Peru to participate in the 1931 presidential elections, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre brooded over the misery that the past few years of exile had forced upon him. “He sufrido y sufro demasiado,” he wrote to French intellectual and pacifist activist Romain Rolland. Reflecting on the recent past, the presidential candidate of the Partido Aprista Peruano (PAP) confessed he endured the worst times of his youth in the years following his deportation from Peru: “Y tengo sobre mi espíritu el peso de cuatro años, de 1924 a 1928, que considero los años malditos de mi juventud.”¹ This statement sheds light on a human reality often dismissed by official historians of APRA: suffering and yearning for better days compounded with the early political formation of many of its main leaders and ideologues. “The experience of living in a different culture and communicating in a foreign language irrevocably alters an individual’s world view and self-identity,” write historians Ingrid E. Fey and Karen Racine. “For some, it is traumatic; for others, liberating. For all of them, however, the experience is intensely personal.”² Chapter 2 underlines this reality by tracing the ways in which the lived experience of exile of Peruvian intellectual Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, one of the historical leaders of APRA, shaped his coming of age as a political activist and anti-imperialist thinker. Doing so also contributes to exploring how personal self-transformations in exile triggered the rise of new social and hemispheric consciousnesses among Apristas, particularly regarding the rampant injustices experienced by Indigenous populations as well as the imminent danger of US expansionism. These realizations sustained the rocky formation of their anti-imperialist movement throughout the 1920s.³

The mythology particular to the APRA party, and especially the one of its years in exile, has silenced private stories that risked harming the party’s reputation in the public eye. As a result, celebratory narratives remain prevalent in tales of exile, omitting the emotionally challenging and unsettling experiences that came with deportation. This is particularly true of the literature that focuses on the historical leader of APRA, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. Even after his death in 1979, hagiographic narratives of his early years in exile continued to invade the field.⁴ This is partially explained by logistics: Aprista militants and scholars have few sources to offer alternative perspectives. More problematically, this is explained by an urge to preserve the myth of Haya de la Torre. Seeing this leader as a god rather than a man with flaws and weaknesses provided important symbolic fodder for the cohesion of the Peruvian APRA party. Nonetheless, the stories behind the myths, especially the stories of exile, yield important understandings of APRA leaders. Sometimes ecstatic, sometimes dreadful, exile was always intimately personal.⁵

By focusing on the lived experience of this Peruvian student activist during his first exile between October 1923 and July 1931, Chapter 2 accomplishes two goals. First, it provides a window into the types of negotiations, often emotionally painful, that many APRA exiles had to address on a daily basis while living abroad. By tracing the ways in which Haya de la Torre’s political philosophy emerged progressively and unsteadily during his first period of exile, this analysis destabilizes the common belief that Haya de la Torre had a precise political vision for APRA from the moment of its alleged foundation in 1924. In fact, as historians have begun to suggest, APRA was neither fully formed as a political organization nor keenly defined as anti-imperialist movement as of 1924.⁶ The experience of exile was necessary in the 1920s for the young Haya de la Torre, as it was for many other APRA leaders, to break away from his past and fully engage with the formation of the anti-imperialist APRA.⁷

Second, because the question of survival in exile was intimately connected with the necessity of finding communities of support abroad, Chapter 2 concurrently traces the rocky relationship that Haya de la Torre maintained with foreign allies following his arrest and deportation from Peru in October 1923. Herein began for him nearly eight years of exile, during which he would transit through countries as diverse and far apart as Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, the United States, Russia, England, France, and Germany, to name but a few.⁸ As we shall see, Haya de la Torre’s feeling of alienation during his first months in exile markedly affected his approach to intellectual production. In the mid-1920s, Haya de la Torre seemed more occupied with everyday survival than with the production of meaningful political knowledge. Courting foreign allies was a crucial strategy, if not the only one, for meeting his basic needs. A combination of grassroots organizing and sustained correspondence between religious leaders and peace activists in Europe and the Americas, particularly Graves and Mackay, supported this young student leader during his first years in exile. These transnational solidarity networks would assist in crucial ways APRA’s early formation as a persecuted political group. But this reliance on foreign assistance came with a price for the movement’s autonomy: it cracked open a space for progressive US allies and Christian missionaries to peddle their own agenda to Latin American critiques of empire.

Survival in Exile

“Yo recibo con amor sus consejos. Los necesito. Usted debe decirme todo lo que piensa y todo lo que quiere porque yo soy buen hijo sumiso.”⁹ The Haya de la Torre who addressed these words to Anna Melissa Graves on December 26, 1923, had yet to grow into the charismatic APRA leader so many have praised for the legendary control he allegedly exerted over party members. Graves and Haya de la Torre first met in Peru in 1922, but archival evidence suggests that their relationship remained for the most part superficial until the latter was forced into exile in October 1923. Their paths overlapped again in Mexico City for a period of approximately two weeks, this time with lasting consequences. Cut from his homeland and from his community of student activists, Haya de la Torre was desperate for emotional comfort and material support.

The feelings of alienation that Haya de la Torre first experienced in exile provide an important frame for his correspondence with Graves. Literary scholars and postcolonial theorists have amply studied the way that feelings of alienation intimately mesh with experiences of exile.¹⁰ Haya de la Torre did not escape this reality. Archival material suggests that the first months of impromptu travels left him feeling disconnected. Letters from Peru, when they reached him, took a long time to do so. Writing from San Angel, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Mexico City, where he had arrived on November 16, 1923, this student leader at the helm and heart of thrilling battles earlier that year now demanded updates on recent developments of the Peruvian student reform movement.¹¹ Yet nearly two months passed before any news of family and friends back home made it to Mexico. The news that eventually arrived unfortunately offered no solace: more abuses, more arrests, more affliction for students and workers back home.¹² The situation was not to be ameliorated. On January 19, 1924, Haya de la Torre expressed having one wish: “solo espero que pase el invierno y que vengan noticias del Perú.”¹³ Likewise, friends and acquaintances in Peru confirmed they had a hard time getting in touch with him, scrambling to gather news of his whereabouts either through newspapers or chasing rumors.¹⁴

The initial months of exile replicated the experience of despair that Haya de la Torre felt, in retrospect, after three unsuccessful years of student struggle in Peru. “Yo pretendí morir en las últimas y dramáticas jornadas que culminaron con mi prescripción pero ni siquiera esa esperanza alcancé,” he confessed to Romain Rolland on February 16, 1924, referring to the time he spent in prison before his deportation from Peru.¹⁵ In light of this confession, the hunger strike that this student leader had launched in the face of unfair persecution – what the official history of APRA traditionally portrays as a proud fight against the arbitrary rule of Leguía – seemed little more than a suicide attempt.¹⁶

From late November 1923 through February 1924 – less than three months – the contents of the letters that Haya de la Torre sent to Graves from Mexico suggest that a bond of friendship grew ever more intensely between them, charged by their shared political struggles and mutual admiration. So much so, in fact, that the tone of their initial epistolary exchanges, replete with praise and cajolery, came to resemble something close to courtship. “Continuamente pienso en V. y más que nunca admiro su gran corazón,” Haya de la Torre told Graves on December 8, 1923, shortly after her return to the United States.¹⁷ Two days later he wrote again, this time to respond to the missive that Graves had left him before leaving Mexico. “Mi corazón se ha estremecido ante su bondad, ante su cariño, ante su ternura maternal,” he stated. “Yo la admiro y la quiero a V. cada vez más, porque su espíritu es muy grande, quizá el más grande espíritu de mujer que yo he conocido.”¹⁸

Haya de la Torre’s admission to feelings of love before Graves’ maternal tenderness was not spontaneous. Indeed, Graves insisted that the international youth with whom she maintained epistolary exchanges referred to her and imagined her as a spiritual mother.¹⁹ Like many of her other correspondents, Haya de la Torre complied with Graves’ request without hesitation or, not initially at least, any sign of discomfort. The day after Christmas, after thanking Graves for the gift she had recently sent him, Haya de la Torre assured her that he thought of her as a mother.²⁰ By January 1924, he started addressing his letters to her with “mi querida segunda mama.”²¹ In September 1924, Graves claimed that she still maintained a feeling of maternal love for him.²²

Haya de la Torre’s thirst for connection and intimacy in the face of a lonely exile could partly explain the dramatic tone of his letters to Graves. The illusion of genuine intimacy provided by letter-writing lent itself particularly well to a style of political courtship that made room for passionate bonds to develop. Incidentally, the fact that he was not particularly close or intimate with his biological parents probably facilitated the emergence of a maternal metaphor in his correspondence with Graves.²³ His complaints about the inconsistency of his parents’ communication in exile, and especially his intention in February 1926 to definitely break with his family relatives in Peru because they had forgotten about him, seem to confirm this emotional distance.²⁴

But the experience of loneliness in and of itself cannot satisfactorily explain the flattering letters that he forwarded to Graves following her return to the United States in December 1923. Nor can the possibility of a love affair between them, whether it be because of Haya de la Torre’s alleged homosexuality or Graves’ repeated attempts to have him marry Margaret Robb, a young Protestant missionary to Peru.²⁵ This is because emotional hardships belied more pressing matters. Losing access to his community of support and affiliation in Peru not only had emotional consequences for Haya de la Torre; his need to cope with disconnection came hand in hand with the need to cope with scant resources. Courting allies and scouting around for new communities of support were therefore essential to compensate not only for his affective loss but also for his sparse access to material support. In exile, one had to engage in this activity as a means to ensure, at best, the pursuit of political activities and, at worst, the guarantee of everyday survival.

In this context, the words of encouragement that foreign allies extended to Haya de la Torre must have come as a soothing balm in his otherwise lonely life. On April 28, 1924, Mackay wrote a moving and very kind letter to Haya de la Torre, who still lived in Mexico City at the time. Mackay compassionately inquired about his condition. “He tratado de ponerme en tu situación,” he wrote, in reference to Haya de Torre’s exile, “sentir el dolor y hasta cierto punto la desilusión que tu debes haber sentido en los últimos meses, mirar el presente y el futuro con tus ojos, y me he preguntado: ‘Que haría yo en tales circunstancias?’.”²⁶ He assured Haya de la Torre that he had been on his (Mackay’s) mind more than usual as of late: What did he think? How did he feel? For how much longer was he planning to stay in Mexico? Mackay wanted to know. To better define the particular goal and pursuit of his mission on earth, Mackay encouraged Haya de la Torre to follow “every prophet” before him and leave, like Moses or Lenin, for the desert, for a place of seclusion ancillary to finding the peace and the inspiration necessary to reflect upon the moral and social problems that afflicted Latin America. There were indeed not many options available in the face of hardship and exile, thought Mackay: “Si vas a realizar la obra que te propones,” he pointed out to Haya de la Torre, “si vas a servir los verdaderos intereses humanos en este continente, necesitas la soledad.”²⁷

In addition to emotional comfort, Graves and Mackay offered financial assistance to their protégé. At their behest, a number of Christian intermediaries dispensed precious financial resources to see that the exiled Haya de la Torre would not lack the basics essential to everyday survival. On February 19, 1924, Haya de la Torre confirmed the receipt of Graves’ money from an acquaintance of hers who worked at the YMCA.²⁸ The following year a certain P. Hopkins, who lived in London, England, penned a note to Graves promising that he would soon make time to see her protégé. “I’ve been so busy during the past month that I haven’t had a chance to see Haya,” he apologized, “but I’m now in touch with him and expect to have a chat with him on Monday or so. I received your check for 45 dollars, and I’ll give this to him at that time or before Christmas.²⁹ These efforts did not fully eradicate the financial hardship that necessarily came with exile, but the Christian missionaries’ culture of mutual assistance regularly channelled Mexican pesos or British pounds into Haya de la Torre’s pockets when most needed.³⁰

Support from the Christian intermediaries took different forms besides cash. YMCAs in Mexico City and later in London provided community and cheap lodging.³¹ Letters of introduction penned by either Graves or Mackay helped connect Haya de la Torre to renowned intellectuals such as Romain Rolland.³² Graves also connected him to US journals, where he published articles in exchange for small but welcome monetary compensations. Protestant circles in Peru also helped Haya de la Torre get access to communist credentials in order to go to Russia in the summer of 1924. They likewise paid part of his tuition fees at the Ruskin College, England, in 1925.³³

Furthermore, in the face of intense government surveillance, external agents helped him to coordinate with allies and friends back home. To escape censorship, Haya de la Torre would send to Graves letters and political writings bound for Peru; the latter, usually travelling between the United States and European destinations, mailed Haya de la Torre’s packages under her name so that they safely reached her Protestant friends in Lima without being searched or raising suspicion; these friends, in turn, arranged the distribution of material within Peru. Christian intermediaries in Lima also collected and shipped materials destined for Haya de la Torre.³⁴ This network enabled Peruvian student leaders and family members to remain in touch.

From the fall of 1923 through the first half of 1924, Haya de la Torre reiterated his loyalty to those who had helped him smoothly transition into life abroad. Christian intermediaries had displayed a growing commitment to helping him both fight persecution and combat the burden of solitude that came with exile. Graves and Mackay constituted the central hub of a complex network of communication and assistance, which made it very difficult, if not impossible, for the recently deported Haya de la Torre to eschew their authority and power.³⁵ Soon, discrepancies in opinions and respective longings for self-assertion hindered this initial, synergistic epistolary relationship. The honeymoon period between Graves and Haya de la Torre would not last more than two seasons.

Experiencing Revolutions

In Mexico City in 1924 things were about to change for the lonely Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. The correspondence that he and Anna Melissa Graves had exchanged between winter and summer that year reveals that a spiritual rupture had been under way between the future APRA leader and his Christian mentors. While the latter group laboured to refine the symbolic politics necessary for the pacifist agenda they were forwarding in the Americas, Haya de la Torre, in exile in Mexico, slowly began to seek greater independence of thought and action. In this section of the chapter, I suggest that this leader was shaken by what he saw and whom he met abroad between 1923 and 1928. Exile changed his intellectual beliefs as well as his approach to politics.

Soon after departing from Peru, a series of unforeseen experiences changed Haya de la Torre’s worldview. “La conciencia del peligro imperialista norteamericano es en mi nueva,” he stated shortly after his arrival in Mexico in November 1923.³⁶ His brief travels to Panama, Cuba, and Mexico initially honed his appraisal of US imperialism. They sparked awareness of the threat that the northern giant posed to the region.³⁷ In addition to first-hand experiences, reading expanded Haya de la Torre’s worldview beyond Peru and the student reform movement, especially the anti-imperialist theses of the Argentinean intellectual Manuel Ugarte. Ugarte offered him the language and the analytical tools he needed, he felt, to start making sense of the social realities that he had witnessed.³⁸

From then on, things accelerated at a staggering rate. Mexico bombarded Haya de la Torre with discoveries and fresh influences that escaped the sole purview of his Christian mentors. The country was going through a very particular moment of its history. For one, the rise to power of President Álvaro Obregón in November 1920 ushered in a period of remarkable transformations in Mexican politics. Under Obregón, the Mexican State rose from the rubble of its violent revolutionary period (1910–1920) and launched a unique program of nation-state formation based on cultural regeneration and national consolidation. The Obregón administration devised and began implementing reforms that aimed to propel the Mexican nation into modernity. Furthermore, the example of the Mexican Revolution sparked imaginations worldwide. “Until now the Revolution was promises,” wrote US communist organizer Bertram D. Wolfe about 1920s Mexico. “Now the bright promises were to become reality in a new, marvelous, unpredictable world.”³⁹ Wolfe was part of the large contingent of US expatriates who had heard of Mexico and rushed there in search of utopia.⁴⁰ On the Latin American side, anti-imperialist advocates and intellectuals of all leftist hues began to praise the Mexican Revolution. It provided an example for the rest of the continent, many argued, which should be emulated.⁴¹

Haya de la Torre was not indifferent to this scene. As he travelled in the Mexican countryside, he appears to have first grasped the importance as well as the social implications of paying heed to the Indigenous masses in a process of national redefinition.⁴² To the best of my knowledge, it was upon returning from this expedition that the term “Indian,” as a social category of people, first appeared in his discourse. Travels to Mexico, then, and not the Pre-Inca ruins of Chan-Chan in Peru, as asserted by Haya de la Torre after the official foundation of APRA, enabled him to gain awareness of the Indigenous question in Peru.⁴³ Only two weeks after attending a commemorative event in honour of revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, Haya de la Torre wrote to Graves to inform her that he felt a growing loyalty toward the workers but also the Indigenous of Peru.⁴⁴

The classic body of scholarship on APRA locates in these initial months of exile in Mexico the foundational stepping stone for the future ideological development of APRA. There, it is claimed, the “jefe máximo” travelled extensively and met with prominent Mexican personalities. This series of adventures ostensibly enabled Haya de la Torre to get fully acquainted with both the “mentalidad agrarista” and the Mexican agrarian reform process. Haya de la Torre’s process of literally absorbing the spirit of the Mexican Revolution was perhaps most important for the foundational myth of APRA, and for the defence of its staunch nationalist positions in later years.⁴⁵ These narratives insist on the success that Haya de la Torre had with groups of students and workers in Mexico. They also take pains to portray him as a leader in control of his destiny, politically mature and already knowledgeable about Indo-American ideology. Although scholars have more recently countered the argument that Haya de la Torre founded APRA in Mexico City on May 7, 1924, this foundational myth continues to persist in the popular imagination.⁴⁶ Yet his Torre’s first exile in Mexico did have lasting consequences for his political formation and for the future of the PAP, even if the specific effects differ from those suggested by celebratory narratives.

When in the spring of 1924 Graves commanded that Haya de la Torre “esperamos de ti una realización de tu responsabilidad,” she knew only too well that his new Mexican acquaintances were impinging on her and Mackay’s plans for Haya de la Torre to study abroad (which they viewed as the prelude to having him return to South America prepared to spearhead the spiritual revolution they longed for).⁴⁷ In the course of his first months of exile in post-revolutionary Mexico, Haya de la Torre had befriended the Mexican bohemia. The artists and intellectuals who formed the “grupo de México” were indeed renowned not only for their involvement in the communist movement but also for their romantic liaisons ruled by free love, two things Graves and Mackay found intolerable.⁴⁸

These new friendships began to nudge Haya de la Torre away from his pacifist position. By February 1924, he was meeting on a regular basis with Ella and Bertram Wolfe, two US communist organizers and members of the Mexican Communist Party.⁴⁹ In the middle of that month, Haya de la Torre relocated from San Angel to Mexico City to get closer to the action. He began to rent a small place a couple of floors above the Wolfes’ apartment. His new friends took him under their wing: they introduced him to their social circles, taught him English, occasionally loaned him small amounts of money, and even forwarded to him an invitation to travel to Russia.⁵⁰

Haya de la Torre’s new communist friends and networks of support were a thorn in the side of Christian mentors for two reasons. First, thanks to the networks of solidarity they offered, these new contacts contributed toward weaning him off the exclusivity of their financial backing. This could not be well received for protagonists who aspired to shape his destiny. Second, and more importantly, these friendships brought about drastic changes in Haya de la Torre’s worldview. The conversations that Haya de la Torre routinely had with the Wolfes, as well as the handful of encounters he had with Jay Lovestone, another US communist organizer in exile in Mexico, contributed toward shaping his approach to the role and purpose of revolution in new ways.⁵¹

New acquaintances and ambitions started tilting his interest away from the religious faith that had allegedly shaped his activist agenda in Peru and toward Marxist theories and atheism.⁵² The militant language that he used in his letters and publications to discuss politics became increasingly, and ever more precisely, coated with socialist idiom, especially when dissecting the repercussions of “capitalist oppression.”⁵³ Similarly, the Indo-American flag, which has to this day symbolized both the foundation of APRA and the originality of its project of continental integration, was in fact initially conceived in Mexico as a symbol for Latin American communism rather than for Indo-American resistance. On May 9, 1924, while recounting the series of student events he had recently helped organize, Haya de la Torre boasted to Lovestone: “Yo he obsequiado la bandera de Nuestra [Generación]. Es toda roja con la figura del continente latino en oro. [Es] una bandera comunista!”⁵⁴

Grimly witnessing the radicalization of their disciple, Christian intermediaries reiterated their desire to see Haya de la Torre flee to England and, from there, resume his university studies.⁵⁵ They feared communist indoctrination and dreaded that he would fall prey to foreign influences that embraced violence as a valid instrument of social change.⁵⁶ But Wolfe and Lovestone’s plans for Haya de la Torre to travel to Russia and see with his own eyes the worker’s paradise that radicals in Mexico kept talking about were too tempting.⁵⁷ In late June 1924, after agreeing to pass some time in England afterward, Haya de la Torre left for Russia.

Although the authority that Graves and Mackay exerted over the young Haya de la Torre began to crumble within weeks of his arrival in Mexico City, complete spiritual rupture materialized in Moscow. There, he squarely rebelled against the symbol of Christianity and pacifism that his early mentors were so fervently disseminating across their transnational networks.⁵⁸ “No tengo ni la divinidad de un Jesús ni el Talento de un Tolstoy,” he told Graves on August 20, 1924.⁵⁹ Haya de la Torre appeared eager to correct the discrepancy between himself as symbol and himself as a young man and mature political activist – what he was and what he aspired to become. Gaining in confidence, Haya de la Torre bluntly signalled his concern to Graves: “Yo creo que es un deber de mi conciencia decirle a U. que no soy sino un hombre común, sin valor ninguno, que ha jurado entregar su vida por la causa de los oprimidos, de los que en mi país son víctimas,” he stated on August 20, 1924.⁶⁰

The timing of this revolt was not fortuitous. A few weeks earlier, Haya de la Torre was powerfully and profoundly moved by the dizzying first impressions from his initial travels to Russia. Between July and August 1924, journeying in the humid weather particular to the Volga region, an illness that he attributed to his imprisonment in Lima the year before came back to afflict his lungs. Never had he imagined possible such genuine kindness and true abnegation as he witnessed in Russia, he told Graves upon his return to Moscow.⁶¹ He highlighted how “obreras y obreras [sic] que nunca me habían conocido me cuidaron como a un hermano o hijo.” “El pueblo ruso que no piensa tanto en el ‘time-money,’” “puede amar así tan grandemente al prójimo.”⁶² The attentiveness with which workers in the Volga had taken care of him shook Haya de la Torre’s deepest convictions. The feelings evoked by his experience in Russia were so intense that his ideas about peace were transformed.⁶³ He still cared for peace, but now he understood better its costs and therefore deemed defensive wars to be legitimate and justifiable.⁶⁴ The workers’ paradise that Haya de la Torre’s friends had raved so much about was indeed a paradise; a violent revolution had been necessary to bring it to life.

Shortly after, in a letter on August 23, 1924, Haya de la Torre voiced his need for self-assertion. He clearly marked the breach that now distanced his aspirations from Graves and Mackay’s. “Usted me dice que ha perdido gran parte del respeto que antes tenía por mi y yo le contesto que a mi me pase igualmente,” Haya de la Torre replied to Graves’ accusations of betrayal.⁶⁵ His discourse shone with pride and independence: “Yo he roto para siempre mi subordinación a la familia y a la clase a que pertenecía, y estoy dispuesto a romper muchos otros vínculos, todos, por ser leal a mi mismo.” He continued, “Así he escrito al Dr. Mackay: No acepto ayuda de amigos cuando ellos quieren que a cambio de su ayuda o de su amistad cambie de modo de pensar.”⁶⁶ He argued that he would never be cowed again before the lure of financial support. He promised himself that, from now on, he would be the one imposing the conditions of his friendships.⁶⁷

New Political Consciousnesses and the Formation of APRA

Despite his strong resolutions, Haya de la Torre struggled to completely cut the ties that bound him to the ambitions of his Christian sponsors. For one, they were not willing to let go of him. When he voiced his desire in Mexico City to have more room for thinking on his own and for meeting new people, Graves countered with backroom manipulation. She used her connections in hopes of retaining some degree of influence over the kind of political formation that he received in exile.⁶⁸ What’s more, exile forced material hardship upon Haya de la Torre, making it difficult to let go of his Christian mentors. In APRA’s early years, between 1925 and 1928, the organization grew, certainly, but not fast enough to provide financial assistance to its members. Thus at least until 1929, the need for material support, more than emotional comfort, thwarted Haya de la Torre’s attempts at self-assertion.

In the fall of 1925, after a silence of seven months, Haya de la Torre renewed contact with Graves. He claimed that he wasn’t doing well. “I have lived more than seven months in England and always without any tranquility,” he wrote in English on November 12.⁶⁹ He hated the weather in London, where it was cold and rained all the time. Also, he didn’t have the means to buy appropriate winter clothing. Money went missing. Work opportunities were rare and paid badly.⁷⁰ These material hardships only served to compound the psychological distress that appeared to beset him at the time, and which not incidentally, he meticulously and unabashedly detailed to Graves in his letters. He confessed to feeling terribly lonely and missing home. Above all, he missed his friends. He missed being part of something bigger than himself.⁷¹ “Morally and materially this year has been very bad. Never, after two years of exile have I wanted to go home so much,” he stated on December 29.⁷² The letters that Haya de la Torre sent to Graves between November 1925 and March 1926 report a great deal of suffering.⁷³ Europe was, according to the latter, “a bitter exile” filled only with “sorrows and troubles.”⁷⁴

As 1925 came to an end, Haya de la Torre rejoiced in the prospect of new beginnings. He tried to remain positive, he told Graves, for he trusted he would soon return to his America. “I wish to do my best next year in my America,” he wrote. “I think I will go back at [sic] summer and I will be glad, strong and happy again.”⁷⁵ With new beginnings also came the possibility of reconciliation. Three days before the New Year, he communicated his wish to restore relations with Graves: “I hope in our particular way that 1926 shall be a year when you will be not in the material sens [sic], but in the spirtual [sic] sens [sic] a friend of mine”⁷⁶ Graves agreed; they would be friends again.

Yet why would the proud Haya de la Torre so brazenly disclose the slew of miseries that afflicted his life? He was desperate for money – so much so, in fact, that he admitted that the lack thereof had become an obsession in his life in London.⁷⁷ The erratic tone of his correspondence at the time tends to corroborate this confession of financial anxiety. His letters to Graves were littered with financial concerns and details of his precarious situation. Haya de la Torre carefully explained to Graves, for example, how difficult it was for him as a foreign and poor student in England to be successful in school. He worked by day in a press agency, wrote by night, and in between still tried to make it to lectures. Here and there he also sold articles to South American journals and sometimes received financial help from the Comité Latino Americano in Buenos Aires through the intermediary of the Argentine anti-imperialist José Ingenieros, with whom Haya de la Torre had developed a friendship.⁷⁸ But all that wasn’t enough to make ends meet. He maintained that he had accumulated too many debts in London since his arrival in August. Besides, he stressed, he wanted to become more serious in his studies.⁷⁹

Detailing the emotional toll of poverty proved to be an astute rhetorical strategy for attracting money. When in December 1925 Haya de la Torre wrote to Graves about his misery and pleaded to be friends again, he also communicated his hope to receive a weekly allowance from her instead of sporadic sums of money. “If you are able to make any arrangements with a Bank or office and if I could to [sic] get some money every week I would be much better, indeed.”⁸⁰ Graves acquiesced to his wish. In fact, she had already resumed her financial support along with her friendship some time back. On November 16, 1925, Haya de la Torre acknowledged receipt of a twenty-dollar check from her.⁸¹ One month later, he was waiting for more: “I have just received your post card and I hope to have your cheque [sic] from Mr. Hopkins soon.”⁸² Graves continued to send money through the remainder of this stay in England.

Yet while material hardships more likely led Haya de la Torre to reconnect with Graves, he took pains this time around to place limits on the nature of their friendship. “You know,” he warned her, “friendship can not be forced and you forced it when you insist in to [sic] remember me that you give me materials [sic] help.” Haya de la Torre was, in a way, establishing rules to make sure that he would be able to benefit from Graves’ financial support without the burden of moral obligations in return. How they addressed their letters to each other was one of these rules. In the postscript added to the just-quoted letter, dated November 12, 1925, Haya de la Torre signalled his intention to use hereafter only formal salutations with Graves. The goal was to curb the passionate tone of their previous exchanges.⁸³

In his letters to Graves, Haya de la Torre now claimed to be a free and unbending man, exempt from all obligations besides those dictated by his own conscience. At the very least, this was how he liked to imagine himself. Starting early in 1926, he began to feel that an important phase in his life was coming to an end. After introspection, he came to realize that the hardships of exile had transformed him into a man of action, a pragmatic political activist.⁸⁴ He now longed for mentors who chose realism over idealism.⁸⁵ By January 1926, Haya de la Torre thought of himself as an “active revolutionary” rather than an “intellectual revolutionary.”⁸⁶

From 1926 through 1927, the tone and content of Haya de la Torre’s correspondence reflected the series of self-transformations that he had so far experienced in exile. In a letter addressed to Graves and dated February 5, 1926, he interprets the personal transformations that he had gone through in exile. This letter determines that his coming of age came as a result of a sustained process of self-transformations that began in Peru, in 1921, and that continued all through his early years in exile, until 1925. “I am changing now. I am a new people [sic],” he wrote.⁸⁷ According to him, the end of 1925 marked an important rupture in his life. Then ended his “boyhood,” he stated. Then he became a “man,” a complete, individual adult in control of his own destiny.⁸⁸

Haya de la Torre had needed to emotionally break away from his past and shatter the ties that kept him fettered to his early mentors before he was able to fully embrace his role as a politician and begin devising his own political thoughts about the future of the Americas. He believed that the hardships of exile had enabled him to reject the sentimentalism of his youth and that it assisted his evolution into a realistic fighter. A gendered metaphor helped him express this self-transformation: as a man, he proclaimed, he was a leader in control of his own destiny, capable of a rational and mature form of political leadership.

Significantly, the period of Haya de la Torre’s coming of age as a mature political activist in exile corresponded with APRA’s own growth as a mature political movement. A string of political achievements from 1926 onward contributed toward positioning APRA at the forefront of the Latin American anti-imperialist struggle, on a par with the communist Liga Antimperialistas de las Américas (LADLA) and the Argentine-based Union Latino Americana (ULA).⁸⁹ The further expansion of Latin American anti-imperialist solidarity networks in the late 1920s and especially the 1930s, after the foundation of the Peruvian APRA Party (PAP), made Haya de la Torre less reliant on the financial support of Christian intermediaries and freed up new resources to help support Latin American exiles active in APRA’s development.⁹⁰

Shortly after penning the February 5 confession to Graves, Haya de la Torre travelled to Paris, where a group of Peruvian exiles had begun to organize APRA.⁹¹ He passed most of September 1926 in the French capital, assisting his peers in forming APRA and concretely defining its revolutionary line.⁹² Interwar Paris was then a breeding ground for radicalization among Latin American critiques of empire and anti-colonial activists from the Global South. It provided refuge to expatriates from Latin America, Asia, and Africa where intellectual and political interchange bloomed, as these expats reflected upon their respective struggles for national liberation.⁹³ It was after this short but intense stay in Paris that mentions of APRA first appeared in Haya de la Torre’s correspondence with Graves. He seemed thrilled, ecstatic even.⁹⁴ He was at long last participating in a project larger than himself: “Our APRA is every day [growing] up. It is magnificent,” he wrote to Graves toward the end of 1926.⁹⁵ The release in Labour Monthly of one of APRA’s foundational texts, “What is the A.P.R.A.?,” authored by Haya de la Torre, came around this time.⁹⁶

Historians of APRA have so far argued that Haya de la Torre was the leader of this political organization from its very beginning. And indeed the sub-title of the Labour Monthly article, which bills its author in the byline as the “leader of the ‘United Front’ Latin America Anti-Imperialist Party,” suggests that he was the leader of APRA as early as December 1926. Yet evidence culled from the understudied archives that I have been citing suggests that this designation more likely stemmed from the need to boost the legitimacy of Haya de la Torre before a British readership that did not know him well. In effect, he was far from exercising sole control of what looked more like a promising political movement than an established anti-imperialist stronghold. He himself readily acknowledged in a February 1927 letter his subordinate status. Anticipating news from other Aprista exiles, Haya de la Torre was lingering in Oxford as the weeks passed by. As he explained to Graves, he was unable to make any plans, much less travel anywhere, because “I am wainting [sic] for the orders of my comrades. They want to [meet] me at Buenos Aires for a month and to pay my travelling over there. I am wainting [sic] for the decision of the differentes [sic] celules [sic] of the APRA. […] They are who can advise or order my movements.”⁹⁷

It is plausible that Haya de la Torre wrote these lines to Graves only to escape her daunting and repeated demands. Yet archival evidence from the mid-to-late 1920s likewise hints at such indecision or lack of command. He wrote to Ella Wolfe at the very end of 1924, eager to learn more about a radical party forming in Peru.⁹⁸ He admitted knowing very little about this project to create an “international” and “anti-imperialist” party, and thanked Wolfe for the news she supplied.⁹⁹ “No tengo aun noticias exactas,” he wrote, “pero parece que antes de seis meses tendremos ya un estremecimiento formidable.”¹⁰⁰ These exchanges show Haya de la Torre as an interested participant, rather than a commanding leader.

More evidence that Haya de la Torre was not the sole leader of the budding APRA comes in the inconsistency with which the movement’s members discussed the question of leadership within their diasporic community, discussion that points to how APRA’s command was not yet centralized within a defined body of political executives, as it would be in later years. For example, one year after Haya de la Torre’s pledge to Graves regarding his subordinate status in the organization, the Uruguayan poet Blanca Luz Brum, by then greatly involved in the organization of the APRA cell in Chile, reported to José Carlos Mariátegui how much she admired a certain Humberto Mendoza, “fundador del Apra, y de grandes actividades obreras.”¹⁰¹ Depending on their respective geographical locations and local experiences with a specific APRA community, APRA members had different understandings of who led the organization and how it worked.¹⁰² Despite the fact that Brum had joined APRA in Peru in 1926–1927, by February 1928 she thought of the movement’s leadership in light of the initiatives spearheaded by this Mendoza in Chile.¹⁰³

The growth of the APRA movement as a diasporic community in the mid-to-late 1920s accelerated following the publication of its seminal text “What is the A.P.R.A.?” in December 1926.¹⁰⁴ Aprista cells began to appear in a number of Latin American and European cities shortly thereafter. The first Aprista committees were concurrently established in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City between 1926 and 1928.¹⁰⁵ Involved in the organization of the APRA cell in Paris, France, starting in 1926 were: Eudocio Ravines, Felipe Cossío del Polmar, César Vallejo, José Félix Cárdenas Castro, and Luis Heysen (Heysen arrived in Paris in 1928 after spending time in exile in Argentina). Those who participated in the growth of APRA in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the late 1920s were: Manuel Seoane, Luis Heysen, Fernán Cisneros, Oscar Herrera, Blanca Luz Brum, César Alfredo Miró Quesada, Enrique Köster Cornejo, and Juan de Dios Merel.¹⁰⁶ Active in the Aprista committee of Mexico City, Mexico, in 1927–1928 were: Carlos Manuel Cox, Manuel Vásquez Díaz, Esteban Pavletich, Serafín Delmar, Nicolás Terreros, Jacobo Hurwitz, and Magda Portal.¹⁰⁷ By the end of the decade, Aprista committees had appeared in a number of other cities as well, including Santiago de Chile (Chile), La Paz (Bolivia), San José (Costa Rica), Santa Ana (El Salvador), and New York City (United States).¹⁰⁸

On paper, these APRA cells gave the impression that they were professional and sizable political organizations. The articles that they authored in Aprista journals founded in exile, such as Indoamérica in Mexico and Atuei in Cuba, or in foreign publications amiable to APRA, such as the cultural magazine Repertorio Americano in Costa Rica, contributed to this impression.¹⁰⁹ In reality, though, these committees comprised a handful of actors only.¹¹⁰ The historian García Iñigo-Bryce records this fact in a vivid and very telling image: “Anecdotally,” he writes, “Luis Alberto Sánchez recalled that the members of the Paris cell could all fit on one sofa.”¹¹¹ This was true of all Aprista committees at the time. Nevertheless, what these Aprista exiles lacked in number, they made up for in heartfelt conviction and dedication. In addition to publishing their political writings in the foreign press, they used a number of different strategies to educate Latin Americans on the dangers of US imperialism and on the need for Latin American solidarity. Archival records show that they organized public conferences and lectures, spearheaded solidarity protests with Latin American nationalists, such as the Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto César Sandino, and founded anti-imperialist studies centres abroad. APRA’s events reputedly brought together influential Latin American and Caribbean anti-imperialist thinkers from all over Latin America and the Caribbean.¹¹²

As APRA kept expanding in the mid-to-late 1920s, geographical distance started to make political coordination increasingly difficult within the transnational APRA community. This was reflected in the anti-imperialist theses they began to sketch from distinct national and political contexts, and more specifically in the ways in which they envisioned differently the necessity of hemispheric unity to oppose US expansionism. Some in the movement saw in “Latin America” a satisfactory expression of continental sovereignty and anti-imperialist resistance, whereas others rejected the “romantic bluff” of Latinism and began to champion the anti-colonial essence of “Indo-América” for being altogether “against North America and far from Europe.”¹¹³ Beyond this double opposition to global powers, however, the idea of Indo-América that materialized in Aprista circles in 1928–1929 came without clear interpretations of what it meant or proposed to achieve politically. That is because the idea of Indo-América, let alone as a political concept, was not fully formed as of the late 1920s.

To be sure, most Apristas began to reckon with Latin America’s racialized economic and political development during their stay in exile. They came to view the injustices experienced by the Indigenous populations – not only in Peru but wherever they went in the Americas, Apristas came to realize – in light of the colonial and neocolonial oppressions particular to that region.¹¹⁴ Yet at the time, Aprista exiles neither fully incorporated this racial awareness into their vision for Latin America’s unity nor imagined their shared continental identity in the same way. Throughout the 1920s, references to “América Hispana,” “Latin America,” “Nuestra América,” “América,” or “Indo-Iberian America” unsystematically dotted APRA’s publications.¹¹⁵ As for Haya de la Torre, it was only in 1930, while living in Berlin, that he welcomed and seriously pondered the use of Indo-América to name APRA’s project of hemispheric unity.¹¹⁶ I shall return to this point in the following chapters. For now, let us heed the malleability with which Aprista exiles envisioned continental consciousness during their first exile.

Part of APRA’s strength as a growing and decentralized movement rested on this ideological flexibility. Theirs was a work in progress that welcomed inconsistencies. But distance also took a toll on the sense of shared community between activists spread out across the Americas and Europe. The years passed in exile ultimately destroyed the possibility of harmony in groups that were not well defined, let alone organized, to begin with.¹¹⁷ If initially these actors had worked hard to remain politically attuned to one another, the years brought new aspirations and daily realities that undercut the need to remain closely in touch with the homeland. “Hace mucho tiempo que no leo periódicos del Perú,” Haya de la Torre, still in Oxford, admitted to a friend in April 1927. “Casi estoy ignorante de todo lo que pasa allá.”¹¹⁸

Two years later, due to internal disputes regarding APRA’s political orientation as well as the exhaustion caused by constant travelling, Haya de la Torre confirmed to Luis Heysen, an active member of the APRA cell in Buenos Aires and Paris, that he was ready to end his political activism and definitively quit the movement that he had helped create.¹¹⁹ According to letters that he sent from Berlin to Rolland in 1930, Haya de la Torre was eager to find the geographical stability and peace of mind that he felt necessary to think and finish a book project.¹²⁰ His letters to close friends corroborate the news that Heysen had forwarded to Graves the year before: Haya de la Torre wanted time to rest. Moreover, he craved a life away from politics for a while.¹²¹

Yet Haya de la Torre’s disengagement from APRA, beginning in the spring of 1929, did not shake the movement’s political organization, which suggests diffuse leadership as of the late 1920s. The APRA cells in France, Mexico, and Argentina remained active and efficient. The growing influence of Eudacio Ravines in the Parisian group of APRA exiles starting in 1927, as well as the importance of Buenos Aires as a centre of Aprista activities (as documented by Leandro Sessa and Martín Bergel), testifies to a logic of dispersed, non-vertical, and shared leadership during the first period of exile.¹²²

Before the promise of a democratic Peru with the fall of Leguía in the Peruvian winter of 1930, APRA exiles returned home and began to organize their movement at the national level. By September of that year, a dozen or so of these Apristas had established themselves in Lima, whence they orchestrated the integration of APRA as a national political party. Haya de la Torre was nominated as the PAP’s presidential candidate. He agreed to return to Peru in July 1931 to campaign for the upcoming elections and endeavoured to establish his leadership of APRA. Although ultimately defeated, he defiantly rebuffed his electoral opponent Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro on the day of his inauguration as president, December 8, 1931, and declared himself the only true and moral leader of Peru.¹²³ The self-transformations that he had experienced in exile had prepared him, he felt, for the task at hand. Indo-América had revealed itself to him as he travelled throughout the Americas.¹²⁴ Additionally, realism by then shaped his approach to power and political struggle. Exile, with the encounters it prompted and the emotional and practical challenges it thrust on Apristas, was the starting point, the incubator, for transformed political consciousnesses.

Conclusion

Chapter 2 revealed an untold story about how the young Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre experienced exile following his deportation from Peru. It aimed to shift the analytical gaze away from tales of betrayal or celebration of this legendary and uncontested leader of APRA and focused instead on the social strains that he had to go through during his early years of political militancy in exile. The coming of age of Haya de la Torre in exile as an independent individual and pragmatic politician enabled him to fully engage with the formation of APRA and its anti-imperialist project in the late 1920s. To conceive differently of collective identities, Haya de la Torre first had to realign how he approached and conceived of his own individual identity. To be sure, we should be wary not to indiscriminately extrapolate his first experience of exile to all Apristas who were deported in the early to mid-1920s. Different socio-political contexts and personal development generated different responses and reactions in the face of hardship. Gender, in particular, can affect the experience and the meaning of exile in different ways.¹²⁵ Nonetheless, these conclusions point to how the lived experience of exile shaped the early militancy of other founding members of APRA. They also show that Haya de la Torre did not assume the leadership of APRA as early and as decisively as the scholarship suggests. Neither was he always a man as thoroughly in control of his destiny as portrayed in celebratory narratives. Like many of his peers in exile, Haya de la Torre often felt at a loss and isolated from the political struggles that were rocking Peru during the 1920s.

Additionally, this chapter attended to the movement and exchange within some of the transnational networks of solidarity that made viable the formation, under persecution, of APRA. John A. Mackay and Anna Melissa Graves, two foreign allies who were close to Christian pacifist groups, constituted a beneficial hub of transnational networks in the 1920s for young Peruvian exiles, and for Haya de la Torre in particular, eager to foster the liberation of the Americas without as yet the means to do so. This situation changed starting in the late 1920s, when APRA gained momentum as a viable and functional political movement. The growth of Latin American anti-imperialist networks of solidarity in the late 1920s ultimately relieved part of the burden of financial support of Mackay and Graves as intermediaries and freed up new resources to help support Latin American exiles active in the development of APRA. The consolidation of the PAP at the national level in the early 1930s, as we shall see, also played an important part in explaining these changing relations. For now, however, let us continue our exploration of how exile affected the early formation of APRA as well as the role that a newly formed hemispheric consciousness came to play in this political movement. The next chapter traces how exile, from the lived experience that APRA leaders underwent in the 1920s, turned into a discursive referent that was used to boost the legitimacy of one specific faction within the APRA leadership following the return to Peru in 1930.