José Carlos Mariátegui La Chira (June 14, 1894 - April 16, 1930) was a Peruvian writer, journalist, politician and Marxist philosopher. A prolific author despite his early death, El Amauta (from Quechua: hamawt'a, "teacher", a name by which he is also known in his country) is considered one of the greatest scholars of Latin American reality, being the synthesis of his thought the 7 essays of interpretation of the Peruvian reality (1928), a reference work for the intelligentsia of the continent. He was the founder of the Peruvian Socialist Party in 1928 (which, after his death, would be renamed the Peruvian Communist Party), a political force that, according to its founding act, would have Marxism-Leninism as its axial tool, and of the General Confederation of Workers of Peru, in 1929. For the sociologist and philosopher Michael Löwy, Mariátegui is "undoubtedly the most vigorous and original Marxist thinker that Latin America has ever known". Along the same lines, José Pablo Feinmann, Argentine philosopher and cultural critic, declares him the "greatest Latin American Marxist philosopher". Biography 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 brothers: 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, in which he was admitted to the Maison de Santé clinic in Lima. After a long recovery he was left with ankylosis in his left leg that would accompany him 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