Introduction

Summary

The introduction provides an overview of the history of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) and of its anti-imperialist project of Latin American unity. It details the contributions that the book brings forth not only to the study of the Peruvian APRA and populism, but also to the scholarship on Latin American exile, trans-American solidarity, and hemispheric critiques of empire. The introduction offers a methodology for centring the complexities of transnational solidarity work at the core of the historical analysis. Finally, it presents a summary of the book’s chapters and main arguments.

“La nueva revolución de nuestra América será revolución de base y de sentido indio. De conciencia o de subconsciencia indígena expresada en una renovación económica y social.”¹ Thus advocated the Peruvian politician Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre in 1930, while living in Berlin, Germany. Indo-América, he argued, is “la expresión de la nueva concepción renovadora de América” and stems from the continental revolution under way.² Indo-América emerged at the beginning of the last century as a hemispheric and anti-imperialist revolutionary ideal, one that claimed to emphasize the Indigenous roots of Latin American culture and society. The American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), a highly influential populist and anti-imperialist movement in twentieth century Peru and Latin America more broadly, first envisioned and theorized Indo-América as a project of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial resistance, making it a key element of its political program during the interwar period.

This book has two intertwined objectives. First, it examines how and why the anti-imperialist project of the APRA took root outside of Peru. Second, it investigates the ways in which struggles for political survival in Peru shaped APRA’s consciousness of the global. Unlike most studies that interpret APRA’s formation as entirely within the framework of Peruvian national history, the conclusions of this book show how the experience of exile and transnational solidarity decisively shaped the formation and the ideology of this major populist movement. Furthermore, by evincing the role that local politics in Peru and international politics abroad played in shaping APRA’s call for hemispheric unity and Latin American solidarity, Journey to Indo-América explores more broadly how local dynamics shape global connections and collaborations.

Solidarity and Anti-colonial Visions of Latin American Unity

The American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) emerged in the mid-1920s as a hemispheric anti-imperialist movement. Established by a handful of leftist Peruvian exiles, this international organization demanded political, economic, cultural, and spiritual sovereignty for the people of Latin America. Its adherents, Apristas, rejected political institutions and revolutionary ideologies that came from Europe or the United States. They proposed instead to build a revolutionary doctrine Indigenous to the Americas, one that reflected Latin American realities rather than emulating ideologies that grew out of very different European conditions. As a result, Apristas positioned continental unity at the forefront of their fight against economic imperialism and mental colonialism. This vision, which they described by coining the term Indo-América, was intended to bring both freedom and moral revival to Latin Americans. The founders of APRA were university students and labour activists who had engaged in anti-governmental activities and attacked the political and social conditions that reigned in early twentieth-century Peru. The price they paid for their political activism was persecution, with arrests and waves of deportations starting in the spring of 1923.

The Peruvian students and labour activists who founded APRA initially conceived of their movement as an international organization, reflecting the context of its genesis in exile. The first Aprista committees were concurrently established in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City between 1926 and 1928. From exile, Aprista members came face to face with Latin American realities. Many echoed Haya de la Torre’s reflection on the impact that exile had left on his political beliefs: “mi reciente viaje por Centroamérica, tan fecundo en trascendentes experiencias, me ha permitido ver de cerca la lucha de uno de los más importantes sectores de la América Latina contra el imperialismo invasor de los Estados Unidos del Norte.”³ From exile, Aprista members also pursued militant activities, and organized and expanded their political movement into Europe and most of the Americas. They started to return to Peru in the summer of 1930 in order to found a national party, the Peruvian APRA party (PAP), in the hope of participating in the 1931 Peruvian elections.⁴

Today, Latin Americans continue to associate Indo-América with a form of resistance against Pan-American visions that are either entrenched in European outlooks or dependent on US dominance in the region. The discursive use of Indo-América, the name Apristas gave to the vast region south of the Río Grande, conveyed a forceful anti-colonial argument. By the end of the interwar period, Apristas came to prefer this name over Hispanic America, which they thought was too close to the legacy of Spain’s colonialism. They similarly rejected Latin America as a nineteenth-century French invention meant to feed anti-Spanish sentiments. Pan-Americanism was also problematic, they claimed, because of its links with economic imperialism and because it included the continent as a whole without distinction between North America and South America. This early political statement partly explains Indo-América’s enduring legacy as a symbol of Latin American resistance against foreign powers.⁵ The resilience of APRA’s Indo-América as a continental utopia and as a political weapon for anti-imperialist resistance also relied, as we shall see, on a surprising ideological malleability put at the service of a political cause in Peru.

APRA’s vision of Latin American unity was hardly new. Aspirations for hemispheric integration have shaped the continent’s political, social, and economic history for over two hundred years. From Simón Bolívar’s dream of a united Spanish America in the early nineteenth century to Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian revolution” in the early twenty-first century, Latin America has seen many attempts to forge collective projects that went beyond the confines of the nation-state. To be sure, individual countries in Latin America have asserted nationalist claims to exclusive sovereignty over territories and populations. At the same time, broad-based movements have championed unity and solidarity among Latin American peoples as the best vehicle to oppose foreign territorial expansion and cultural and economic influence. Continental nationalism first emerged in modern Latin America as an expression of hemispheric rather than national consciousness – a sense of belonging to the same continent-wide imagined community. Though different linguistic, cultural, and racial ideals formed the basis for an imagined Latin American community, the project of continental nationalism always carried an anti-colonial meaning against foreign intruders.⁶

In the wake of the Mexican Revolution and in the aftermath of the First World War, the first half of the twentieth century saw across Central America, the Caribbean, and South America a diverse, unorthodox constellation of radicals, revolutionaries, reformists, and populists take up the banner of Latin American unity and anti-imperialist struggle.⁷ Their reasons for doing so varied, and as a result so did their perspectives on regional identities. Some of these anti-imperialist thinkers advocated Hispanicidad, specifically a return to the spiritual and moral values of Spain, as the best way to contest US imperialism and excessive materialism in the Southern Hemisphere.⁸ Others preferred the larger European and cosmopolitan outlook Latin America provided to resist US intervention, or else celebrated the democratic character of the “Latin race” in contradistinction with foreign expansionism.⁹ By the late 1920s and 1930s, Indo-América surged as yet another model of anti-imperialist and hemispheric unity for the region. Whatever the successes, failures, or limitations of these movements, there is no doubt that such aspirations became, and are still, deeply embedded in Latin American political cultures.¹⁰

One such transnational project was that of Peru’s APRA. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, APRA became a powerful national party and saw its calls for Indo-American solidarity, Latin American unity, and anti-imperialist struggle resonate well beyond Peru’s borders throughout the Americas. While aprismo was never an ideologically or organizationally united movement, it generated social imaginaries and political symbols that became an enduring part of Latin American politics and culture for generations to come. APRA’s anti-imperialist ideology of the 1920s and 1930s inspired a generation of Latin American intellectuals, artists, and political activists in their quest for social justice.¹¹ It likewise influenced a diverse network of internationalists and self-proclaimed anti-imperialists in the United States who strived to improve inter-American relations during a period characterized by extremely tense US–Latin American relations.¹² Many of these people, Latin Americans and non-Latin Americans alike, would play important roles in the growth and survival of APRA throughout the interwar period, with lasting consequences for APRA’s critiques of Latin America’s structural inequalities. This book traces the ways in which engaging in interwar trans-American and transnational solidarity networks, while assisting in crucial ways the organizing efforts of young Peruvian and Latin American radicals and political exiles, also limited the radical possibilities for social and political change that first drove APRA’s anti-imperialist project of hemispheric unity.

Doing so places me in dialogue with a divided field of study regarding the revolutionary and transformative potential of Indoamericanismo for the Americas. A branch of the literature situates in Indo-América the first true alternative to Eurocentric modernity the region has known in the modern period.¹³ Scholars likewise celebrate the early Marxist interpretations of APRA leaders for vindicating the rights and demands of “Indigenous America” and for including the emancipation of the Indigenous peoples in their strategic vision for Latin America’s social revolution.¹⁴ Indo-América, especially its early (though brief) socialist inflections, appears in these analyses as the point of junction between the Andean tradition and the new modernity, a mediating force around which the collective and millenarian forces of the Indigenous masses found common grounds with Marxism.¹⁵ Indo-América has also been enthusiastically portrayed as a fusion of welded temporalities, an imagined uchrony (ucronia) where past legacies transcendentally bequeath to Latin Americans the possibility of emancipated futures.¹⁶

But Indo-América can also be reproved for its conservatism. APRA’s Indo-American project lends itself to the same criticisms launched against Indigenismo. Indigenismo was a political and aesthetic movement that sought to save and redeem the marginalized Indigenous peoples of Latin America from the perspectives of white and mestizo intellectuals.¹⁷ Not incidentally, the Indigenist movement proliferated during the period under study in this book, particularly in countries like Peru and Mexico with large Indigenous populations, and had a marked influence on APRA’s anti-imperialist project of hemispheric unity. Nonetheless, whereas the idea of Indo-América initially foregrounded the racialized inequities of Latin America’s economic and political development, its consolidation in later years as a political concept of anti-imperialist resistance and Latin American solidarity winded up having very little to do with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.¹⁸ That is not to say that APRA’s vision of global resistance to imperialism should be dismissed as a fraud. But we must bear in mind this pointed limitation in our attempts to decipher and reckon with Indo-América’s lasting ethos of Latin American unity and trans-American solidarity in the face of foreign power and global capitalism.

This is particularly the case since the interwar years saw the United States aggressively promoting its own hemispheric vision of Pan-Americanism, a vision that reflected its growing political, economic, and cultural power in the Americas. It was within this context of expanding US hegemony that APRA’s message of anti-imperialist Latin American solidarity first emerged. From the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s, this message provided a powerful and compelling counter-narrative to US imperialism. Yet by the following decade, APRA’s attacks against the United States had receded. More striking still is how APRA leaders ultimately accepted and fully engaged in the 1940s with the US-led vision of hemispheric integration as a viable political option. The new Pan-Americanism featuring non-intervention as a function of the Good Neighbor Policy (1933), as well as the rise of European Fascism, can only account in small measure for this political turnabout.

Journey to Indo-América argues that Indo-América, APRA’s project of hemispheric unity, came to be understood in the 1940s as a democratic bulwark against the rise of Fascism in Europe, rather than the anti-US movement originally intended not only as a result of world events, but more importantly out of the necessity of political survival at the national level. The ideological and political evolution of the anti-imperialist APRA cannot be fully understood without attention to the state persecution and exile of APRA members. Because of its anti-government activities, before 1945 APRA was never able to participate fully and openly in Peruvian politics. Its survival therefore hinged on the capacity to remain connected to foreign allies. Journey to Indo-América explores how the necessity of engaging with international networks of solidarity – on the one hand, in order to withstand repression in Peru, while on the other simultaneously organizing labour and the middle sectors and vying for control of their fast-growing party at the national level – shaped APRA’s anti-imperialist theses over time, as well as the project of hemispheric unity it promoted both inside and outside Peru. Journey to Indo-América simultaneously underscores the internal conflicts that rocked the Aprista movement from its inception onward. It advances that recurrent experiences of exile and ties to international solidarity contributed to firmly establishing the dominion of a moderate and anti-communist faction in the movement by the mid-to-late 1930s.

APRA’s Anti-Imperialist Theses

The first political platform of APRA reflected its international roots. In 1926, it released a five-plank program, which it called the “maximum program,” or program for Latin America, as a means to orient and coordinate the struggles of national liberation it hoped to help bring about at the continental level. Its fundamental proposals were: (1) action against Yankee imperialism; (2) the political unity of Latin America; (3) the nationalization of land and industry; (4) the internationalization of the Panama Canal; and (5) solidarity with all peoples and all oppressed classes.¹⁹ The APRA rejected political institutions and revolutionary ideologies that came from Europe or the United States. They proposed instead to build a revolutionary doctrine Indigenous to the Americas, one that reflected Latin American realities rather than emulating European conditions.²⁰ The influence of APRA’s anti-imperialist theses expanded well beyond Peru. Nationalist parties similar to the Peruvian APRA party surged in other Latin American countries, including: The Acción Democrática (Venezuela), the Liberación Nacional (Costa Rica), the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Bolivia), the Partido Febrerista (Paraguay), the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (Dominican Republic), the Mouvement Ouvrier (Haiti), the Partido Popular Democrático (Puerto Rico), and the Autentico and Ortodoxo parties (Cuba).²¹

In the 1920s and parts of the 1930s, Apristas defined imperialism primarily in economic terms. They had read John A. Hobson’s thesis on imperialism attentively and understood that territorial expansion was but one expression of imperialist phenomena.²² Travels to Europe in the 1920s introduced José Carlos Mariátegui and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, two prominent founders and ideologues of APRA, to dialectical materialism, which contributed to shaping their reading of the Peruvian and Latin American realities.²³ Although they initially flirted with communism, Apristas ultimately rejected the rule of the Third International and proposed to create instead an original movement Indigenous to the Americas. Aprista ideologues conformed to what Sheldon B. Liss has called “plain” Marxists, that is, Marxists “who work openly and flexibly, as did Karl Marx, and believe that his ideas are applicable to present situations.”²⁴ Apristas were, in sum, Marxists who refused ideological dogmatism. They dreaded one size-fits-all interpretations and would rather have abandoned Marxist claims than try to force social realities onto a given doctrine.

APRA’s most compelling work on anti-imperialism appeared during the 1930s. According to Apristas, capitalism in Latin America should not be destroyed, but rather controlled.²⁵ This conclusion stemmed from their peculiar reading of Leninism. Apristas argued that Lenin’s theses on imperialism did not reflect the historical and economic development particular to Latin American countries. They came to view communism as essentially a European phenomenon. Because the socio-economic problems of Europe and Latin America were different, the solutions that their respective problems called for were necessarily different as well, they argued, especially in regard to the relation between capitalism and imperialism. Here probably lies the single most important and original contribution of Apristas to Marxist thought in Latin America: Apristas, as Jeffrey L. Klaiber once wrote, turned Lenin on his head.²⁶ In contrast to what Lenin posited in his seminal work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, APRA argued that in non-industrialized nations imperialism represented the first rather than the final stage of capitalism.²⁷ Haya de la Torre first exposed and developed this thesis in El Antimperialismo y el Apra (1936) and refined it in later years in Espacio-Tiempo-Histórico (1948).²⁸ “El imperialismo es la ultima etapa del capitalismo en los pueblos industriales,” he maintained, writing on behalf of all Latin Americans, “pero representa en los nuestros la primera etapa. Nuestros capitalismos nacen con el advenimiento del imperialismo moderno. Nace pues, dependiente, y como resultado de la culminación del imperialismo.”²⁹ Other Aprista ideologues produced important works on Latin American anti-imperialism as well, including Carlos Manuel Cox, Fernando León de Vivero, Pedro Muñiz, Magda Portal, and Manuel Seoane.³⁰

APRA’s ideological take on imperialism had one major consequence in terms of political organization. In countries understood as still grappling with feudal and semi-feudal economies, as was the case in Peru and most Latin American republics, the proletarian class was weak or non-existent and could therefore not successfully lead the socialist revolution. The APRA proposed instead a multi-class alliance between the workers, peasants, and the middle classes, one that would constitute the anti-imperialist state. The idea of an “anti-imperialist state” is central to APRA’s thesis on imperialism. At the national level, the anti-imperialist state would exert control over foreign capital and orient it toward national development; it would not eliminate it. It would likewise work against the feudal oligarchies that had taken over the region as a result of the export-led economy of the late nineteenth century.³¹

Transnational Perspective on Aprismo: Populism, Exile, and Solidarity Activists from the North

Traditional scholarship on APRA has generally looked exclusively to the Peruvian national scene to grasp the complex evolution of this political group. In these studies, the movement’s foundational years passed in exile throughout the 1920s are merely mentioned, not studied.³² In contrast, I argue that we cannot adequately understand APRA’s history without considering the international dimensions of aprista activity. APRA’s vision of Latin American unity and of an Indo-American imagined political community was produced by a few prominent leaders of the party in dialogue with aprista supporters both outside and inside Peru. As such, the study shifts the focus away from exclusively APRA’s charismatic leader, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, taking pains to highlight the ideas and activities of lesser-known activists.³³

By attempting to trace the worlds of transnational activism that carried the growth of APRA and of its anti-imperialist Indo-American project, Journey to Indo-América argues that the yearnings for inclusion that propelled the populist moment to the forefront of Latin American politics between the 1930s and 1960s are best understood as the result of collective and radical labours of transnational organization rather than the leadership of unique, purportedly larger-than-life political figures. This argument deviates from the more classical top-down approach to Latin American populism in which the study of the “charismatic bond between political leaders and mass followers” prevails.³⁴ This scholarship’s emphasis on the patron–client style of leadership and charisma insufficiently addresses how populist regimes fostered popular support among the marginalized sectors of Peruvian and Latin American societies. In an attempt to expand this view, revisionist scholars in the 1990s and early 2000s shifted their focus toward the militancy of the rank and file of the labour movements affiliated with populist regimes. These scholars argued that Latin American populist leaders did not rely on mere feelings and emotional appeals to gather support for their cause. Rather, they had political program and developed political ideologies that supported their populist platforms, as was the case with APRA. This literature also demonstrated that grassroots mobilization and rank and file negotiations contributed to shaping populist programs and ideologies in the region.³⁵

These different approaches to Latin American populism, nevertheless, share the same national-centric framework of analysis.³⁶ With some recent and welcome exceptions, scholars have generally failed to explore in greater depth the extent to which interwar internationalism, as well as trans-American connections, informed the social and nationalist demands that infused the early populist platforms in Latin America.³⁷ This transnational study of APRA as an anti-imperialist movement, but also as a persecuted populist party composed of a multi-class alliance in Peru, contributes toward disclosing the transnational and trans-American networks that bred the rise of the Latin American populist moment of 1930–1960.³⁸

Another major theme of this book highlights the fact that exile, state persecution, and international solidarity were decisive for APRA’s anti-imperialism and for the creation of its Indo-American political project. Specifically, I show that Indo-América as a political project was not consolidated in the heyday of transnational exile in the 1920s, as is often suggested in the scholarship. Rather, Indo-América is best understood as a form of universal appeal developed in the 1930s by one democratic and non-communist faction of the APRA movement, called the Hayista faction, precisely to advance a political struggle inside Peru. The book comes to this conclusion by tracing the political struggles that foregrounded the idea and political vision of Indo-América, from the moment it first emerged as a new hemispheric consciousness during the 1920s to its transformation into the Peruvian APRA party’s main defensive strategy in the face of state persecution during the 1930s and 1940s.

The arguments I bring forth in this book about the weight that exile and state persecution exerted on the political activism of major APRA leaders place it in dialogue with the work of a small group of contemporary historians who have paid increasing attention to the APRA during its successive periods of political exile. Starting in the 1990s with the work of Ricardo Melgar Bao, a pioneering historian of the APRA exile in Mexico, recent scholarship has reconstructed Aprista networks of exile. This scholarship traces intellectual exchanges among Latin American political communities and studies APRA’s mythic and symbolic construction of exile.³⁹ Together, these scholars have added to our knowledge of exile and transnational solidarity networks as major catalysts of the leftist political projects that emerged in, and influenced, twentieth-century Latin America.⁴⁰ My book builds on these studies.

Beyond its original historiographic contributions to the study of APRA, this book more importantly centres APRA’s networks of solidarity and experience of exile as a detailed case study to understand better how political exile, including the experience of territorial displacement and “post-exilic relocation” in the homeland, shaped the growth of interwar Latin America’s left.⁴¹ As such, Journey to Indo-América adds to the studies that analyze the growth and political implications of transnational solidarity networks in the Southern Hemisphere from within the framework of studies of exile.⁴² In past decades, this scholarship has granted much attention to Latin American exiles and refugees who fled state authoritarianism during the last phases of the Cold War. It resulted in a rich and interdisciplinary field of study that has explored from different analytical perspectives how individual and collective experiences fostered political and cultural changes in mid-to-late-twentieth century Latin America.⁴³

My book adds to these scholarly efforts by studying the particular dynamics of Latin American exile during the interwar years, a period that has received less attention despite being marked by recurrent territorial displacements of radicals and student and union activists.⁴⁴ It also joins my peers’ ambitions to move away from mere heroic or victimized assessments of exile, a common binary narrative found in the testimonial literature of exile.⁴⁵ To do so, I analyze the gains and losses associated with the exilic experiences of APRA activists at both the personal and political level. This includes tracing how these gains and losses experienced in exile shaped the re-encounter of continental problems and fed the rise of Pan-Latin American consciousnesses. It also demands that I heed the conditions under which the return of Apristas to the homeland took place, at both the local and national levels. As this book shows, the story of rising global consciousnesses in exile doesn’t begin and end with territorial displacement abroad. Rather, for Peruvian leftist activists who politically came of age in exile, the experience of “post-exilic relocations” are what prompted the consolidation of their newly-gained cultural and political consciousnesses into the concept of Indo-América as a vision of continental solidarity and of modernity for Latin America’s future.

A third and complementary theme of the book underlines interactions between apristas and APRA allies in Latin America and pacifist and Christian social justice activists from the United States and Europe. These solidarity activists cultivated an extensive correspondence with apristas both in Peru and elsewhere, and they used the information they gathered to attract international attention to the Hayista faction within APRA. As such, my work contributes to the renewed scholarly interest in hemispheric history, specifically by paying attention to the fluid and heterogenous nature of the interwar international movements and the political consciousnesses that informed the growth of APRA’s anti-imperialist theses for Indo-América.⁴⁶ Of particular interest to my work is the attention that historians Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton ask that we grant to “the missionaries’ role as critics of empire and as brokers between imperial power and those subject to that power.”⁴⁷ Doing so helps nuance the typical portrayals of missionaries and US civil society actors as agents of imperialism abroad. Examining the anti-imperialist currents of Protestant missions as well as US civil society actors involved in Latin America, and specifically those connected with APRA, reveals their contribution to US hegemony and informal empire to be far more complex and multifaceted, even contradictory, than suggested by earlier scholarship.⁴⁸ These ties of international solidarity between sectors of the Latin American left and critiques of empire from the North created a unique body of political and cultural work that widens our understanding of the complexities and contradictions associated with hemispheric relations, imperial power, and anti-imperialist struggle.

“As historians, we have been trained to identify our historical figures through the lens of geography or political groups rather than recognizing the intersections between socialism, communism, nationalism, pacifism, and civil liberties worldwide,” Michele L. Louro recently wrote in her outstanding monograph on Nerhu’s interwar internationalism. This is indeed how most scholars of Latin American anti-imperialism have so far approached the conflicts and tensions, but also the friendships and solidarities between different sectors of the Latin American left. These studies give the impression that the interwar left in Latin America was divided between clearly defined political groups and parties for whom collaboration was out of the question. But, as Louro argues, “What was so unique about the 1920s and 1930s was the ability to move across and within such categories and to rethink solidarities beyond the rigid frameworks afforded by strict orthodoxies or institutionalization.”⁴⁹ This fluidity also characterized the growth and formation of the APRA movement during the interwar period. The alliances between Apristas and US anti-imperialists and Christian social activists were helpful, but also fraught and difficult to maintain. They eventually gave way to contentious and fragile relationships. Nevertheless, they did contribute to providing the context in which APRA’s ideological production happened, and particularly the Indo-American project. This context, framed by trans-American solidarity, I show in this book, comprised a central tension that drove historical change in two opposite directions all at once; trans-American solidarity enabled the survival and support of Latin American anti-imperialist thinkers, but while doing so it eventually curbed the critiques of US empire that Apristas were willing and able to formulate.

Theory, Methods, and How to Evade the Charismatic Strongman

Methodologically, it is crucial that my study reflects the plasticity and resilience of collaborations between historical actors who did not see eye to eye on every subject, but who put the same premium on global and international unity as remedies for the crises they sensed creeping worldwide. To do so, I seek to challenge the widespread belief that conflict never lasted, or even truly existed for that matter, in the APRA movement. The story goes two ways. Either Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, by far the most celebrated (and detested) historical leader of APRA, exercised such iron discipline over party members that only harmony prevailed between them. Or conspicuous ruptures regularly cleansed APRA of dissident elements, each time adding to the sway of the moderate party leadership as well as the internal cohesion of its membership. In the first version, the possibility of conflict is dismissed by negation: the myth of a united APRA refuses any likelihood of disagreement or quarrel in the history of the party. The second version, in contrast, eschews the possibility of conflict by inflation: occasional political ruptures realigned APRA in clearly defined and easily recognizable factions that henceforth jousted with one another – the legitimate APRA on one side, the dissidents on the other. Lingering conflict, in other words, did not exist within the organization. Only its final expression did.⁵⁰

In contrast, my objective is to centre conflictive relationships, political negotiation and organizing, and the complexities of transnational solidarity work at the core of my story about APRA. This goal is informed by the work pioneered in the past fifteen years by scholars who revolve around two prominent research groups in the field of Latin American intellectual history – the Seminario de Historia Intelectual de América Latina, Centro de Estudios Históricos – Colmex, México, and the Centro de Historial Intelectual (CHI), Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina. Together, these research groups encouraged the growth of a renewed scholarship on the intellectual history of continental nationalism. This cohort of innovative intellectual historians has been committed to approaching their primary source material dynamically, not hesitating to borrow from other social science disciplines in their attempts to unveil and historicize the creative processes at play behind published texts⁵¹. As a result, one of the major and ongoing contributions of this field in recent years has been to draw attention to the transnational intellectual networks that underpinned the formation of projects of hemispheric unity in Latin America from the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries. My work on the history of transnational APRA, including their collaboration with non-Latin American allies, builds from this insight.

Additionally, my theoretical framework is inspired by the German sociologist Karl Mannheim’s warning regarding the pitfalls that await those who study ideology through exclusive individual perspectives.⁵² “The aim […] is to investigate not how thinking appears in textbooks on logic, but how it really functions in public life and in politics as an instrument of collective actions.”⁵³ Writing in the 1930s, Mannheim took issue with the individual-centric approach that recent advances in psychology had brought forth in works that studied the action of thinking. Mannheim stressed that the ways in which individuals think are constrained and delineated by the group from which they think. According to Mannheim, understanding how individuals think with and against each other in a given historical and sociological context can bring us, if not to the truth, at least close to it – to what he calls the “optimum of truth.”⁵⁴ This warning assists my analysis of the relationship between political activism and intellectual production. By paying too much attention to published material or to official Aprista propaganda, we lose sight of the collective struggles that underpinned the unsteady creative process of the historical actors I study. Behind the lure of polished pages lie murkier realities associated with the lived experience of exile and the struggle to survive politically.

The Aprista web was dispersed throughout the Americas and Europe, and so are its remaining traces. Though an impressive number of primary sources exist on APRA, its lack of geographical concentration is a challenge for the researcher. When Aprista actors moved between Peru and exiled communities, they often brought personal letters and political documents along with them. In the space of exile, they were also persecuted and sometimes arrested. Police forces from different countries worked in collaboration and exchanged seized APRA material. Likewise, Peruvian diplomats located in foreign countries with communities of Aprista exiles shipped back to Peru important information on the Aprista committee’s activities. Finally, over the course of the century, various United States institutions have acquired, unsystematically, APRA pamphlets and publications. The search for APRA material, in other words, is not territorially bounded to the places in which Aprista exiles resided. Researching Indo-América through the lens of APRA exile, therefore, required that I myself embark on a transnational journey. The book is based on original research in a total of eighteen Peruvian, Mexican, French, and US archives. It is based on a wide variety of sources, including personal correspondence, diplomatic reports, criminal files, religious publications, political flyers, propaganda material, cultural magazines, newspapers, as well as official studies and scholarship produced by APRA.

One caveat is in order regarding the challenges that reckoning with the one historical figure I wanted to ignore forced on my historical practice. When I began to delve into APRA’s past a decade ago now, the last thing I wanted to do, as this Introduction I trust makes clear, was yet another study that associated this political movement with Haya de la Torre’s leadership. My objective at that point was not only to decentre the history of the APRA by adopting a transnational lens of analysis, but to remove Haya de la Torre altogether from my historical narrative. Too much had been said and written about this leader. Too much passion for or against him made it impossible to see clearly in the collective dynamics of this anti-imperialist movement. I wanted him out.⁵⁵

As a result, during my time in graduate school, I found myself drifting in endless archival detours, desperately seeking ways to forego the work and life of Haya de la Torre in my attempts to understand better the collective dynamics of APRA’s exile, only to be thrust, without fail, right back to him and to the significance he had for the movement. Of course, one reason for Haya de la Torre’s omnipresence in the history of the party is that most of the archives that exist on APRA, whether located in Peru or abroad, are organized in accordance with the leaders of APRA that official histories of the party have recorded. Yet the same thing happened again and again when I spoke with contemporary Aprista sympathizers in Peru. They would share with me personal memories of their time in the party without even realizing, it seemed, that the recollection of events that they were describing to me wasn’t actually theirs, but rather that it came from passages they had probably read over and over again, and which I recognized from official histories of the party in which Haya de la Torre took up the whole place. It proved impossible in Peru to talk about my project without reverting to the figure of Haya de la Torre. Everybody made sense of the research questions I was asking – whether it be about APRA’s anti-imperialism, its foundational years in exile as a political diaspora, or the originality of its continental program for all of Latin America – through this single historical figure.

Every time the archives or a sympathizer of APRA forced upon my reflections a return to Haya de la Torre, it made clearer the inescapability of this historical figure to fully understand the development of APRA, both inside and outside Peru. This character invaded as much the lore and the collective memory of the Peruvian Apristas as he did the US state department archives or the official propaganda of the party. Was I wrong to try to walk away from him, I began to wonder? Did he, after all, control the movement from its foundation onward, as the literature suggested? I was not wrong, and Haya de la Torre, as we shall see in this book, did not control the movement alone or at all times. And yet, to say that things did not go as planned is a euphemism: Haya de la Torre, it turns out, lurks around every single chapter of this book.

Though my repeated attempts to dodge this historical character did not pan out the way I had foreseen when I first embarked on this research project, I was at least able to question and recast his so-called unique leadership. In that sense, Haya de la Torre still appears in the book, but less as the focal point of the study than as the narrative thread around which the story unfolds. If his archival presence was inescapable, I indeed began to realize, then I needed to adapt my research questions in a way that gestured to this historical figure but did not make the story about him. Doing so opened a whole new set of historical questions about the ways that exile, solidarity work, and calls for Latin American unity shaped part of Latin America’s left during the interwar period. Specifically, granting attention to moments of conflict in my sources forced me to trace the options made available to APRA leaders to exert dominion over their widespread and ideologically diverse movement. This, in turn, forced me to make sense of the connections I had observed, but failed to analyze, between the prevalence of a Latin American ethos of solidarity and resistance in APRA on one side, and the centrality of transnational solidarity work to APRA’s political survival during the interwar period on the other. Journey to Indo-América tells the story I uncovered as I threaded my way through these connections.

Organization of the Book

Six chapters structure the central arguments of the book. Documenting the transnational history of APRA, specifically how exile and state persecution shaped the growth and evolution of this major populist movement in Peru, demands that I foreground the collaborations that APRA leaders developed with non-Latin American allies. The first chapter begins this task by tracing the common ideological grounds that made possible the formation of an alliance in the early 1920s between Reform-minded students in Peru and a number of Christian missionaries and religious pacifists from Europe and the United States. These students, many of whom formed the APRA movement shortly after, viewed in continental solidarity a remedy to the moral crises they sensed around them. For many Christian pacifists, who like the Scottish Reverend John A. Mackay and the US internationalist Anna Melissa Graves dismissed the right of nations to claim territorial possessions, the references they saw in the Peruvian student reform movement to the Bolivarian ideal of a united America was inspiring. They viewed in these young Latin American radicals an opportunity for spiritual renewal in the Western World.

The next two chapters tackle the weight that exile had in the formation of this political movement between the mid-1920s and early 1930s. Chapter 2 traces how the lived experience of exile contributed to fostering new political consciousnesses in 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 Mackay and Graves, who assisted him, and who tried to politically influence him. Chapter 3 turns to the discursive use of exile following the return to the homeland and the foundation of the Peruvian APRA Party (PAP) in 1930. It argues that APRA leaders who experienced exile in the 1920s used references to their past travels as regimes of authority in Peru. Discourses of deep connection to and knowledge of the Americas assisted in consolidating the political authority of exiled leaders as they began to convert the continental APRA into a national mass-based party.

Chapters 4 and 5 together explore deeper the transnational solidarity networks that worked in favour of the Hayista faction in the APRA movement in the 1930s. Following the arrest by Peruvian authorities of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre in May of 1932, a number of foreign allies organized a movement of solidarity with PAP. Their cross-border calls for a new democratic order in the Americas, as I show in Chapter 4, took Haya de la Torre as a symbol of their fight against dictatorships and communism. By delving deeper into this specific transnational advocacy campaign, the chapter argues that, in addition to providing access to external resources, international connections gave the Hayista faction the opportunity to acquire symbolic capital in Peru and helped to assert its authority in the APRA movement. Chapter 5 turns to the roles of APRA exiles and the workings of APRA’s transnational solidarity networks during the 1930s, a period during which Apristas suffered unremitting state persecution in Peru. It argues that the deportations of party leaders paradoxically gave to the APRA movement political opportunities impossible to leverage otherwise, re-asserting the tight entanglement between exile and the development of the APRA movement in Peru. APRA leaders in exile connected with foreign allies in the Americas to create and sustain solidarity networks that assisted the persecuted PAP in Peru.

The final chapter reveals the impacts that APRA’s engagement with transnational solidarity networks had on the evolution of its ideology, particularly of its Indo-American project. I suggest that it is precisely during the 1930s and early 1940s, after the foundation of the Peruvian APRA party and a national political platform, that APRA propelled Indo-América to the centre-stage of its political doctrine. Indo-América had emerged in APRA as a new cultural and anti-imperialist consciousness in the late 1920s thanks to the experience of exile, but, as this last chapter concludes, it became politically consolidated as a result of the experience of recurrent persecution in Peru after the first homecoming of Apristas in 1930. Recurrent state persecution against PAP, I argue, combined with APRA’s innovative political strategies in exile, contributed to imagining an Indo-American project that moved beyond the rejection of US imperialism originally at its core to focus on the defence of electoral political rights and liberal democracy in Peru and the Americas. By that time, Apristas had all but stripped from their continental program pledges of social and moral revival for Indigenous people it had once, if briefly, included.