Dora Mayer and the nation's foundational dispute in the first issue of Amauta (1926)

Abstract

This paper analyzes Dora Mayer’s article, “Lo que ha significado la Pro-Indígena”, as an intervention in the avant-garde discourse of Amauta (1926). Through a close reading of the first issue of Amauta, it is argued that Dora Mayer disputes the narrative of the “new” constructed by this magazine, while simultaneously claiming the Asociación Pro-Indígena (1909-1916) and herself as the true foundational voices of modern indigenism. Using rhetorical strategies such as the reference to the myth of Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo, Mayer questions the “history” that relegates the Asociación Pro-Indígena to an obsolete past and instead positions it as the “pronounced word” that inaugurates the indigenous renaissance. In this sense, we will find that in this first issue of Amauta, there is an underlying confrontation between two different ways of thinking the nation. Finally, we will see that this implicit challenge to the rupturist discourse foreshadows ideological divergences that Mayer will explicitly develop in later writings, where she will question the “demolishing Sovietism” of Mariátegui and other avant-garde writers.