Most Scandalous Woman

Peruvian poet and revolutionary Magda Portal (1900–89) has long lived in the shadow of her male compatriots Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre and José Carlos Mariátegui—undeservedly so, as this poignant work by Myrna Ivonne Wallace Fuentes demonstrates. With rich, evocative writing and vivid descriptions of the worlds that Portal inhabited, Wallace Fuentes paints a portrait of a revolutionary in multiple senses of the term—in aesthetic innovations, in politics, and in her confrontation with the gendered constraints of the era. It is both an inspiring and a painful story of a human being demanding to be free—as an intellectual, as a writer, as a revolutionary, and as a woman—and the toll that such demands took.The book is more than a biography. Wallace Fuentes uses Portal's life as a means to explore more broadly the creation and growth of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) over the course of the twentieth century, and the party's best-known protagonist, Haya de la Torre, plays a persistent role as both foil and companion to Portal. Even so, the pleasure and power of the book is in Wallace Fuentes's careful examination of Portal herself. Asking early on in the text why “women in politics bear deeper emotional costs” than men, Wallace Fuentes centers her analysis on Portal's efforts to achieve not only political but romantic and personal freedom (p. 7). This attention to affect and interiority—which can be methodologically and interpretatively risky—is one of the major achievements of the book, especially given that Wallace Fuentes is a judicious and persuasive analyst.María Magdalena Julia del Portal Moreno was born into a middle-class family in 1900 in a suburb of Lima. She was only five years old when her father died, and her childhood was one of poverty and uncertainty. By the early 1920s she had become Madga Portal, a prizewinning poet and a revolutionary. Wallace Fuentes emphasizes how, from a young age, Portal made radical choices: upon winning a poetry prize in 1923 she snubbed Peruvian president Augusto Leguía, an act that morphed into legend over time. She had a child out of wedlock, waiting until eight months after the birth of her daughter to marry the father. She subsequently took her daughter and fled with the father's younger brother, with whom she was romantically involved, for Bolivia, where she immersed herself in revolutionary politics and writing. Like other young intellectuals of the period, Portal's politics were deeply influenced by the revolutions in Russia and Mexico and the radical essays and fiction that both preceded and emerged from them. As she struggled to break free from traditional class and gender expectations, she garnered notoriety as a revolutionary, a founder of APRA, and a “woman with a gun.” That she had penned a collection of short stories entitled El derecho de matar (The right to kill) only expanded that reputation. Returning to Peru in 1930 after the fall of Leguía, Portal and her comrades established a Peruvian section of APRA and sought to build the party, although they faced repeated repression over the course of the 1930s and many militants, including Portal, served lengthy stints in jail. When APRA was finally legalized in the 1940s, Portal along with Haya de la Torre was its core. She was the only woman on its National Executive Committee, and she organized the First National Convention of Aprista Women in 1946. According to Wallace Fuentes, this was to be the apex of Portal's political life. Only months after the convention, her daughter, Gloria, killed herself. As increasing internal divisions and government repression tore at APRA, Portal excoriated the party's leadership for its perceived failings and abandoned it.All of this Wallace Fuentes covers in some detail, but it is her attention to Portal's own sense of her own agency and history that makes Most Scandalous Woman a compelling read and one that does justice to Portal's remarkable life. Throughout the book but particularly in the first part, which covers Portal's life until she leaves for Bolivia with her young daughter and lover, Wallace Fuentes provides readers with a sparkling mix of literary and historical analysis, drawing heavily from Portal's poetry to understand her motivations, her politics, and her ideas. The latter parts of the book lose some of that richness, perhaps because Portal's writing itself changed. Wallace Fuentes is limited in her source base by the fact that much of Portal's personal archive—her papers and diaries—has been lost. What she accomplishes with what remains is impressive, but the book—and Portal herself—would have been even more compelling if she had expanded her archival base to move beyond the words of Portal and a relatively limited coterie of intellectuals and organizers. The day-to-day world of politics and organizing is opaque at best, and the analysis at times feels overdetermined by the subjects themselves. Even so, this is a small price to pay given the depth with which Wallace Fuentes is able to explore the choices—at times agonizing, at times exhilarating—that Portal made in her life. This is an invigorating work, empathetic and impassioned without devolving into hagiography

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