José Carlos Mariátegui

Childhood and youth

Mariátegui was born in Moquegua in 1894. His parents were María Amalia La Chira Ballejos and Francisco Javier Mariátegui Requejo. Among his ancestors was the illustrious liberal thinker Francisco Javier Mariátegui y Tellería. He had two siblings: Guillermina and Julio César Mariátegui.

In 1899, he moved with his mother and his brothers to Huacho and in 1902, after an accident at school, he was admitted to the Maison de Santé clinic in Lima. After a long recovery he was left with ankylosis in his left leg for the rest of his life. Having become unable to partake in the recreations typical of his age, he began reading and reflecting.

In 1907, his father Francisco Javier Mariátegui died in the port of Callao.

In 1909, Mariátegui joined the newspaper La Prensa to perform auxiliary tasks, first as a rejones (folder) and then as a linotypist's assistant. Despite not having completed his school studies, he was trained in journalism and began to work as a columnist, first in La Prensa (1914-1916) and then in the newspaper El Tiempo (1916-1919), at the same time that he collaborated in the magazines Mundo Limeño, Lulú, El Turf and Colónida. Using the pseudonym Juan Croniqueur, he ridiculed Lima's frivolity and exhibited a vast self-taught culture, which brought him closer to the avant-garde intellectual and artistic nuclei. He became friends with the writer Abraham Valdelomar, with whom he formed a dilettante duo whose duels of wit they reproduced in their chronicles. Around that time (which he later contemptuously called his "stone age"), he enthusiastically cultivated poetry but never published his announced collection of poems, Sadness.

In 1918 his interests turned to social problems. Together with the journalist César Falcón and Félix del Valle, he founded the magazine Nuestra Época, in which he criticized militarism and traditional politics but of which only two issues came out. In 1919, also in collaboration with Falcón, he founded the newspaper La Razón, in which he supported university reform and workers' struggles. This newspaper did not have a long life either and was closed by the government of President Augusto B. Leguía, officially for having expressed contempt for members of parliament, although it was most likely due to the growing popular demands that it encouraged.