Chapter 1 traces 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 feared belligerent forms of nationalism, 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. Whereas these groups of historical actors often disagreed on the means to the end, still they agreed on which end to pursue. For all of them, the Americas provided a foil for the wrongs of Western civilization.

Chapter 4 studies the consequences that state repression in 1932–1933 had on the political capacities and on the calls for Latin American solidarity of the Peruvian APRA. It argues that trans-American solidarity buttressed the rise of APRA as a populist movement from the 1930s on. The simultaneous experiences of persecution and exile in the early 1930s on one side, and of political contests to control the rank-and-file of the party on the other, pressed upon the Aprista community, and more specifically upon the Hayista faction within that community, the necessity to cling to a discourse of Latin American solidarity to ensure political survival in Peru. The chapter shows that being connected to the outside world supplied to the Hayista faction two crucial political advantages as it vied for political control of the movement. For one, the APRA leaders who had experienced exile in the 1920s and who were deported in the early 1930s had access to transnational solidarity networks that others in the party lacked. Also, in addition to providing access to external resources, international connections gave the Hayista faction the opportunity to acquire symbolic capital in Peru.

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.

Chapter 5 explores the roles of APRA exiles and the workings of APRA’s transnational solidarity networks during the 1930s and early 1940s, a period during which Apristas suffered unremitting state persecution in Peru. It argues that the survival of Peruvian APRA then hinged on its capacity to remain connected to the external world. Communities of APRA exiles stationed abroad connected with non-Latin American allies, especially with past Christian and pacifist allies like Anna Melissa Graves, to create and sustain solidarity networks that worked in favor of the persecuted PAP in Peru. The chapter details the role that communities of exiled Apristas played in sustaining the integrity of their movement in Peru. It also studies the contribution and collaboration of foreign intermediaries and allies of the party and highlights their significance for the cohesion and the political survival of APRA in Peru.

The search for an alternative and non-Western concept capable of challenging “Hispanic America” or “Latin America” did not culminate in the Indo-American project. APRA’s Indo-América was by the 1940s much more a product of north–south conciliations than of the anti-colonial vindication of Indigenous’ rights in once claimed to represent. Nevertheless, the work of trying to envision the rebirth of the Americas in new ways did contribute to nourishing the ethos of continental unity and Latin American solidarity as a catalyst for opposing oligarchic rule and foreign hegemony. Radical elements from APRA’s continental program passed on to subsequent generations in Latin America. These new generations borrowed from APRA’s anti-imperialism while adding their own visions of social utopias, just as Apristas had inherited from their predecessors dreams of better futures that nestled within the mystique of united geographies.

Chapter 3 analyzes the discursive use of exile by Apristas 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. The experience of exile, the chapter shows, was used rhetorically as an instrument of political power and persuasion. By highlighting the symbolic importance that travel came to occupy in APRA’s political imaginary abroad, this chapter concurrently revises the clash that opposed in 1928 two major APRA leaders, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and Carlos José Mariátegui. It reframes this episode as a prolonged conflict rather than a clear-cut rupture between aprismo and socialism, as usually portrayed by the historiography of the Peruvian left.

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.

Chapter 6 studies the impacts that APRA’s engagement with transnational solidarity networks had on the evolution of its ideology, particularly that of its project of hemispheric and anti-imperialist unity. The chapter argues that Indo-América as a political project was not consolidated in the heyday of transnational exile in the 1920s. Rather, Indo-América is best understood as a form of universal appeal at which the Hayista faction arrived more definitely in the 1930s to advance a political struggle inside Peru. 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, comprised. Recurrent state persecution against the Peruvian APRA, the chapter shows, combined with the movement’s innovative political strategies in exile, contributed to imagining an Indo-American project that moved beyond the advocacy of social justice and the rejection of US imperialism originally at its core to focus on the defence of civil liberties and liberal democracy in Peru and the Americas.