Adela Montesinos: the poet who fought with her pen and her ideas of freedom

In Peru, there have been and there are many ways to support the thousand and one battles that, as a society, we still have to resolve.
Teodomiro Gutiérrez Cuevas, the precursor of the claim of indigenous rights in Peru

And it is that from there you also fight and you can achieve some victories that remain in the collective memory, despite the passage of time.
Carnival of Tinkuy, a party in Huánuco celebrated with the “War of the Oranges”

One of those rebellious souls who helped shape Peru into the shape it has today is the poet, writer, feminist and political activist from Lima, Adela Montesinos y Montesinos, who with her work fought against laws that have tied women’s hands since the turn of the 20th century. It’s his story.

Born on September 12, 1910, into a wealthy Arequipa family, her parents were Guillermo Montesinos Pastor and María Julia Montesinos Martínez. He had a brother, Alphonse, who became a senator of the Republic.

Although he did not go through economic hardship, Montesinos embraced the ideals of social justice from an early age.
At only 19 years old, she began her life as a journalist in the Arequipa newspaper ‘Noticias’, although she used to sign her controversial articles under the name of Alma Moreva.

In these journalistic notes, which caused more than a stir in the high society of the “white city”, Montesinos spoke of the need that all women had at that time, and still today, for autonomy. economic and emotional.

In the same way, she led a fierce fight against the discrimination suffered by those women who dared to become single mothers and so-called “illegitimate children”. In addition to defending the horizontal family. All of these issues have long been the subject of public debate.

In 1929, Montesinos was the only woman to found the Communist Party of Arequipa. For the following year, this organization will change its name and will be called the Communist Party, a few months before the death of José Carlos Mariátegui.

During the founding ceremony, she will not be one more, but will go down in history because she dares to declaim a poetry of her own. What the comrades didn’t know yet was that Montesinos was preparing, perhaps unknowingly, for another even bigger moment.
This important occasion will not take long, because in 1931 a great meeting is organized in the Plaza San Martín due to the increase in the products of the basic basket of the time. It was all about the 1929 crack and Peru was one of them. On this historic day, Adela Montesinos took the microphone and delivered a moving speech against the government.

It was precisely in 1931 that she met the young communist university leader of the National University of San Marcos, Pompeyo Herrera Mejía, with whom she married.
However, the dictatorship of Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro already had Herrera Mejía between their eyebrows until they managed to capture him and deport him to Chile.

Adela therefore saw no other solution than to accompany him in his exile. But just months after arriving in the neighboring country to the south, Herrera died of tuberculosis.

Despite the pain this caused her, Montesinos did not back down from her feminist struggle and during her stay in Santiago she joined the Movement for the Emancipation of Women to achieve the union of Chilean women. To this end, she continues her facet as a journalist and writes a large number of articles in favor of the cause under the pseudonym ‘Fernanda Martínez’ for the newspaper ‘La mujer nueva’.

She also worked as a factory worker while editing a magazine.
Adela Montesinos was one of the main promoters of women’s suffrage in Peru. (Andean)

Widowed and with children, Adela returns to Peru to put at the service of Acción Femenina, a group she founded in 1936, everything she learned in Chilean lands and pursues what she knows how to do best: Write articles.
Only this time, she will do it from a point of view focused on a new form of motherhood. What will not change will be his fight to denounce the inequality that continues to exist before the law between legitimate and illegitimate children.

Remarried in Arequipa, her new husband makes her see the reality of peasant communities and this only reaffirms her convictions. Then she devoted herself to work in the fields as a midwife and doctor.
These tasks were carried out as the events of World War II were kept informed. For this, he used a truck battery that served as a generator.

Adela also collaborated with Radio Nacional during her second visit to Lima. In the same way, she participated in the foundation of the Association of Writers and Artists (ANEA), in which she was librarian.

In the words of her daughter Dunia, Adela Montesinos has always breathed the “ideological, militant and revolutionary” oxygen that only feminism was able to generate in her.
Finally, in 1973, he published his unique collection of poems entitled “Arcos Hondos”. Adela Montesinos died in Lima on April 2, 1976.