Peruvian journalist, essayist, and founder of the Peruvian Socialist Party — the central Latin American Marxist thinker of the early 20th century and the figure who did the most to give Marxism in the Americas a vocabulary adequate to indigenous, agrarian, and colonial realities its European formulators had not anticipated. Self-taught (he left school at fifteen to support his family), disabled from childhood, and dead at thirty-five of complications from the amputation of his remaining leg, Mariátegui produced in a short working life a body of writing that subsequent Latin American political thought has never stopped returning to.
His early journalism in Lima was reformist-indigenist rather than socialist; a three-year forced exile to Europe (1919–23), paid for by the Peruvian government that wanted him out of the country, produced the conversion. He encountered Italian Marxism in the Turin of Gramsci's Ordine Nuovo — though whether the two men actually met is disputed — and returned to Peru with the commitment that shaped the rest of his work: that the Marxist analysis of class could be made adequate to Peruvian reality only if it took seriously the indigenous peasantry as the bulk of the working population, the Inca-era ayllu (collective landholding community) as a living socialist institution that survived centuries of colonization, and the latifundia-based Creole landowning class as the class adversary.
Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, 1928) is the central book — a compressed Marxist-indigenist analysis of the Peruvian economy, the "Indian problem," land, public education, the religious sphere, regionalism, and literature. The essay "The Problem of the Indian" made the argument that would resonate across 20th-century Latin American left thought: the condition of the indigenous population is not principally a racial, cultural, or moral question but a question of land, and no progress on the "Indian problem" is possible without agrarian transformation. Mariátegui founded the journal Amauta (1926–30) as the organ of this position and the Peruvian Socialist Party in 1928. His influence runs directly through Gustavo Gutiérrez and Latin American Liberation Theology, through indigenist political movements across the Andes, and through the broader heterodox Latin American Marxism whose best contemporary continuators include Álvaro García Linera and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui.