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.

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.

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.