A Public Domain Review collection (text by Erica X Eisen) of cover art from Amauta (1926–30), the Lima magazine José Carlos Mariátegui launched to “create a new Peru within the new world” — reading the global avant-garde through a socialist, Indigenous lens. Thirty-two issues, outlasting nearly every independent outlet around it.
Mariátegui, later the founder of the forerunner of the Peruvian Communist Party, spent two years in exile after the 1919 coup — NYC, Paris, Venice, Berlin — and came home, per art historian Natalia Majluf, probably Latin America’s foremost expert on contemporary European art. Amauta was the outlet he built:
- Published Freud translations, César Vallejo’s poetry, Rosa Luxemburg’s reportage, Gabriela Mistral, and Diego Rivera
- Arts editor José Sabogal — “the first Peruvian painter” — designed most covers; the skull-capped head of issue #1 became the magazine’s sigil
- “Amauta” is Quechua for teacher or sage; the name allegedly came from Sabogal and became Mariátegui’s own nickname
- House aesthetic: Indigenism, an antidote to Continental adulation — though critics noted its urban, white, bourgeois artists could veer into fetish
- The final issue, a wake-like cover reading “Now what?”, appeared just after Mariátegui’s death at thirty-five
- Leguía’s dictatorship intercepted mail, throttled circulation, forced a hiatus — the influence outlasted the repression
Mariátegui wanted a socialism built from the ground up in Peru, not imported from Europe — the covers are a record of trying to make the avant-garde speak to the Andes. The collection’s closing line keeps the project pointed at the present: a century on, his portrait is everywhere, “and the inequality and exploitation he decried have likewise endured.”