Magda Portal

Magda Portal was one of the founders of Peru’s American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA). Readily entangling her political and poetic practices, she advocated a radical literature centered on Indigenous peoples and the working class, in whom she saw the roots of Latin American cultural identity. Her elegiac writing captures life’s dualities, integrating the austerity of Peru under authoritarian rule with her own internal landscape—one shaped as much by the hardships of deportation and incarceration as by the embodied ecstasies and anguishes of motherhood and romantic love.