Magda Portal

Magda Portal (Peru 1900-1989) was not only an acclaimed poet since her early youth but an audacious, free-spirited dissident, increasingly concerned with social justice. Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano referred to Portal as "an illustrious and daring rebel," while Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegría affirmed that "not only is Magda Portal an excellent poet, she is an important figure in Latin American history, a feminist voice that reflects the sufferings, needs and hopes of our continent." A key...See more

Magda Portal (Peru 1900-1989) was not only an acclaimed poet since her early youth but an audacious, free-spirited dissident, increasingly concerned with social justice. Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano referred to Portal as "an illustrious and daring rebel," while Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegría affirmed that "not only is Magda Portal an excellent poet, she is an important figure in Latin American history, a feminist voice that reflects the sufferings, needs and hopes of our continent." A key figure in a brilliant Peruvian "vanguard generation" of the 1920s, a group that included the great poet César Vallejo and the socialist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui, she went on to become a pioneering champion of women's equality, in the context of the larger battle for economic redistribution. Her efforts on behalf of women and the poor may be compared to those of Emma Goldman, Tina Modotti, Rosa Luxemburg, and the French-Peruvian labor leader Flora Tristán. Exiled from Peru in 1927, she was recruited in Mexico City into the revolutionary nationalist APRA movement. When Peru's autocrat was deposed, she would return with other exiles to Peru to become co-founder and women's leader of the APRA Party of Peru -American Popular Revolutionary Alliance. She undertook repeated forays into Peru's hinterlands, traveling high into the Andes and deep into the Amazonian jungle, recruiting women, and men, into the first mass political party in Peru's history. As national secretary of women's affairs, she traveled tirelessly, speaking and organizing, often living in clandestinity, and attempting with difficulty to balance the needs of motherhood and poetry. Her exceptional life was marked by serious hardship, involving imprisonments, exiles, and the ten year jailing of her lover, poet Serafín Delmar. When the APRA party veered to the right in the 1940s, abandoning their radical social agenda, she denounced that party and its leader, her long-time APRA colleague, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. With the rise of the women's movement in the 1970s in Peru, her life's work was embraced by a new generation of activists, and since then her legend has only increased in renown. See less