Writing 'Indo-America': Gabriela Mistral in Conversation with Peruvian Apristas

• In Event: Transnational Intellectual Networks in Latin America

Abstract

The idea of Indo-America constituted an integral, yet dynamic and flexible, part of the political philosophy of Peru’s Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA). Building on a growing body of scholarship which interprets APRA as a fundamentally transnational organisation (without side-lining national context or trajectory) and examines the ways in which experiences of exile and travel impacted upon Apristas’ intellectual production, this paper spotlights one particular Chilean writer who collaborated in this cultural and political project of continental integration: Gabriela Mistral. It explores the multiple meanings of Indo-America as created and debated through epistolary exchanges between the Nobel laureate and key Aprista intellectuals, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, Luis Alberto Sánchez, Ciro Alegría and Magda Portal. It also investigates joint publishing endeavours, such as the prologues that Mistral and Haya de la Torre wrote for Joaquín Edwards Bello’s book El nacionalismo continental. I focus, in particular, on the role that the ‘Indian’ was allocated in the idea or project of Indo-America, and in doing so seek to undermine the dominant historical narrative that tends to present relations between Chile and Peru exclusively as hostile and antagonistic, and Chile as a country that, in contrast to Peru, failed to engage in discussions about the so-called ‘indigenous problem’.

Author

• Joanna E Crow, University of Bristol