Alberto Hidalgo (1897–1967) was a Peruvian writer and poet. Early in his literary career Hidalgo published the poems “Panoplia Lírica” (1917), “Las voces de colores” (1918), and “Joyería” (1919) in the magazine Colónida. These poems set Hidalgo apart from his contemporaries, establishing his reputation for innovation and nonconformism. Hidalgo admired the movement of Futurism, and was one of the first to introduce it to Latin America. Between 1916 and 1922, Hidalgo created the poetic platform for a one-man aesthetic movement, called Simplismo. He edited the avant-garde publication Índice de la nueva poesía americana with Jorge Luis Borges, and created the journals, Oral and Pulso. Some of Hidalgo’s works include Actitud de los años, Carta al Perú (1957) and Poesía inexpugnable (1962). Hidalgo also wrote stories, plays, and a series of books on Sigmund Freud published under the pseudonym Dr. J. Gómez Nerea.
José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) was a Peruvian political activist, an essayist, and a self-taught Marxist who applied Marxist theories of historical materialism to Peruvian economic and social issues. Mariátegui launched a leftist paper La Razón that supported university reform, the enforcement of an eight-hour work day, and lowering the cost of subsistence goods. The Leguía dictatorship (1919–30), threatened by Mariátegui’s criticism, offered to send him to study in Italy. In Europe, Mariátegui met top socialist thinkers, such as Antonio Gramsci, Henri Barbusse, and Maxim Gorky, and in Italy, he witnessed the rise of Fascism, which he attributed to the failures of the left. In 1923, he returned to Peru where he became a supporter of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana before withdrawing his support to form the Peruvian Socialist Party in 1928. Mariátegui founded Amauta (1926–30), a Peruvian magazine that provided a platform for avant-garde essays on art, culture, literature, and Marxist politics. In his collection of essays, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928), Mariátegui emphasizes the importance of combining avant-garde literary practice with indigenous themes and language. He believed that a socialist revolution could evolve in Latin America through local culture and practice without the strict application of European-derived socialist theories. In Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, Mariátegui asserts that poverty among the indigenous people of Peru is caused by the imposition of the colonial latifundia system to replace traditional forms of collectivism. Mariátegui died in 1930 at the age of thirty-six due to complications related to an earlier leg injury.
The letter written by Alberto Hidalgo to José Carlos Mariátegui shows the evidence of a gap in ideologies between those, like Mariátegui, who wanted to use the arts to address national and indigenous causes, and those like Hidalgo, who were skeptical of nationalism and indigenism in art.