Jose Carlos Mariategui

Latin American · Latin America · 1894 to 1930

Peruvian thinker who used Marxism as a method to study Peru, and who founded the review Amauta.

What it is

José Carlos Mariátegui (1894 to 1930) was a Peruvian essayist, journalist and political leader, and a Marxist. His main work is Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, published in 1928.

He was born in Moquegua and died in Lima at thirty-five. In those short years he founded a cultural review and a socialist party.

The main ideas

Marxism fitted to Peru. He took up Marxism as a method of study and used it to look at Peruvian society.
Indigenous Peru at the centre. He gave an important place to the Indigenous people of Peru, and to Indigenous themes and language in art and literature.
Against fascism. He wrote critically about fascism, which he had seen at first hand in Italy in the early 1920s.
Culture and politics. He founded the review Amauta, which published avant-garde writing, brought together a generation of intellectuals and gave support to Indigenous themes in art and literature.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine a reader in Lima in the 1920s who has been told that her country's problems can be solved by copying Europe. Mariátegui would ask her first to look at who works the land, who owns it and whose language is spoken in the fields, and to start from those facts. This is an illustration of his approach, not a quotation.

Books and moments

In 1919 the government of Leguía sent him abroad on a scholarship, which in effect removed an outspoken critic from the country. He returned to Lima in 1923.
In the 1920s he wrote essays on fascism.
He founded the review Amauta in 1926.
In 1928 he published Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, his main work.
In 1928 he broke with the movement of Haya de la Torre and founded the Peruvian Socialist Party.
He later used a wheelchair and kept working.

Questions and criticism

Marxism and myth. It is fair to ask how far a strict economic reading of history can leave room for religion and myth.
Who speaks for whom. He was an urban writer who spoke about Indigenous people. It is fair to ask how well that serves them.
An unfinished life. He died at thirty-five, so it is fair to ask where his ideas might have gone.

Close neighbours

The page on Karl Marx covers the thinker whose method he applied, and the page on Frantz Fanon covers another writer concerned with colonised societies.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

Karl Marx · He called himself a Marxist and applied Marx's ideas to Peru and its Indigenous majority.

Other Latin American thinkers

Bartolome de las Casas · 1484 to 1566
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz · 1651 to 1695
Leopoldo Zea · 1912 to 2004
Paulo Freire · 1921 to 1997
Enrique Dussel · 1934 to 2023

Sources we used

José Carlos Mariátegui · Encyclopaedia Britannica, read on 29 October 2026
José Carlos Mariátegui · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026