Chapter 3 analyzes the discursive use of exile by Apristas following the return to the homeland and the foundation of the Peruvian APRA Party (PAP) in 1930. It argues that APRA leaders who experienced exile in the 1920s used references to their past travels as regimes of authority in Peru. Discourses of deep connection to and knowledge of the Americas assisted in consolidating the political authority of exiled leaders as they began to convert the continental APRA into a national, mass-based party. The experience of exile, the chapter shows, was used rhetorically as an instrument of political power and persuasion. By highlighting the symbolic importance that travel came to occupy in APRA’s political imaginary abroad, this chapter concurrently revises the clash that opposed in 1928 two major APRA leaders, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and Carlos José Mariátegui. It reframes this episode as a prolonged conflict rather than a clear-cut rupture between aprismo and socialism, as usually portrayed by the historiography of the Peruvian left.

The introduction provides an overview of the history of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) and of its anti-imperialist project of Latin American unity. It details the contributions that the book brings forth not only to the study of the Peruvian APRA and populism, but also to the scholarship on Latin American exile, trans-American solidarity, and hemispheric critiques of empire. The introduction offers a methodology for centring the complexities of transnational solidarity work at the core of the historical analysis. Finally, it presents a summary of the book’s chapters and main arguments.