Mujeres Nuevas in Peru’s New Politics: Magda Portal Theorizes Women’s Political Participation in 1930s Peru

Among the handful of Peruvian exiles who founded APRA, Peru's most important opposition party in the twentieth century, there was only one woman: the poet Magda Portal. During the party's pivotal early years, APRA launched insurgent attacks against the regimes in power, their militants would assassinate presidents and leading members of Peru's elite, and they would grow from a small handful of exiled students and intellectuals into a party with broad popular appeal capable of inspiring tremendous personal loyalty from both its leadership and its rank and file. For more than twenty years, Portal remained the only woman in APRA's executive leadership, and her position as the only female founder and leader in APRA was difficult and complicated. To be an effective leader and propagandist, she had to transgress against widely accepted notions of femininity. Her own utopian political writings from the early thirties, however, did not stress or exhort gender transgression. Instead, she imagined a future Peruvian society where aprismo as a political identity and movement would create new men and new women. My paper will explore how Portal imagined women in the 1930's as a force in Peruvian politics and within the APRA party itself. How did she reconcile her utopian theories of a more egalitarian gender system cultivated in the ranks of APRA with more tactical positions taken by the leadership constraining women's rights, such as her opposition to female suffrage? Using archival materials including her formal political writings from party newspapers and magazines, as well as more personal and reflexive unpublished texts from her private papers, I will explore the changes in her view of the promise, and threat posed by expanding female political mobilization.