Abstract
This article addresses the relationship between communist-oriented marxism and popular nationalism in two contexts: Brazil, between the 1950s and the 1960s, and Peru, between the 1920s and the 1930s. I start from the hypothesis that this two concurrent ideological tendencies shaped the Latin American leftist immaginary, from the late 1920s to the Cuban Revolution. I shall demonstrate how the relationship between communists and nationalists followed opposite patherns in both cases: going from hostility to alliance in the Brazilian context, and evolving from a common origin to antagonism in Peru. I will explain this crossed paths appilling to both internal and external differences in conjunctures, especially concerning the communist movement. With this comparison, I seek to question the “theory of populism”, which sought to explain the defeat of Brazil’s left in 1964 because of the convergence between communists and nationalists.
Keywords:
Marxism; Nationalism; Populism; Brazil; Peru