Jose Carlos Mariategui is born in Moquegua, Peru, on June 14. His parents: Maria Amalia La Chira Ballejos and Francisco Javier Mariategui Requejo. He has two siblings: Guillermina and Julio Cesar. His father abandons the family when Jose Carlos is still quite young; to support her children, his mother moves to Lima.
The Mariategui-La Chira family moves to Huacho, the home of the maternal relatives.
Jose Carlos attends school.
He has an accident at school and is moved to a hospital in Lima. He suffers through a four-year-long convalescence; his left leg remains fragile, and he cannot continue his studies.
His father, Francisco Javier Mariategui, dies on November 9, in El Callao.
Mariategui begins work as a "gofer" at the daily newspaper La Prensa.
He becomes a linotypist's assistant and proofreader.
February: His first article appears in La Prensa, signed with the pseudonym Juan Croniqueur. He joins the editorial service and helps organize reports from the provinces.
He is entrusted with editing police and lottery news.
Mariategui joins the editorial staff at La Prensa.
He begins to write articles on a regular basis for La Prensa, on literary and artistic topics. He collaborates on the magazine Mundo Limeņo.
He begins his collaboration with the horse-racing magazine El Turf and the women's magazine Lulu, writing social notices, short stories, and poetry.
January: Las Tapadas (The Veiled Women), a play he has written with Julio de la Paz, debuts. The reviews are unfavorable.
February: He begins a retreat at the Convento de los Descalzos (Convent of the Barefooted). The poems he writes there are published in the magazine Colonida.
June: Mariategui leaves La Prensa. The following month he starts at El Tiempo as editor and parliamentary reporter, with a column, "Voices", dedicated to critical commentary on national politics.
He is named co-director of El Turf, publishes the dramatic poem "La Mariscala" (The Marshal's Wife), written with Abraham Valdelomar, and plans o book of poetry, Tristeza (Sadness), which is never published.
For a short time, Mariategui publishes the daily newspaper La Noche in contraposition to El Dia, which was linked to the Pardo government. He takes a Latin course at the Catholic University, wins the Lima municipal prize given by the Journalists' Circle for his article "The Traditional Procession", and is elected vice president of that organization.
November: The Bolsheviks take power in Russia; Mariategui is involved in the "Cemetery Scandal" (he and his friends are arrested for dancing with a visiting foreign ballerina in the city cemetery to the strains of Chopin's "Funeral March").
June: Along with Cesar Falcon and Felix del Valle, he founds Nuestra Epoca, a magazine with a socialist orientation. He is attacked by a group of young army officers for his article "Bad Tendencies: The Duty of the Army and the Duty of the State", published in its first issue. He is one of the founders of the Committee for Socialist Propaganda and Organization, which he soon leaves because of internal differences.
Mariategui leaves El Tiempo toward the beginning of the year.
May-August: He publishes the newspaper La Razon, which supports the general strike for lowering the cost of subsistence goods, as well as the university reform movement. The newspaper is closed under pressure from the Leguia government because of its oppositional line.
October: Mariategui is sent to Italy by the Leguia government as a propaganda agent for Peru, a method of concealing his deportation.
November: He arrives in France and meets with Henri Barbusse in Paris. He continues on to Rome.
December: He meets Anna Chiappe at a restaurant in the town of Nervi.
Mariategui begins writing for El Tiempo; his articles are later collected as Letters from Italy. He begins his study of Marxism with a systematic reading of the pertinent literature.
July-October: He travels through northern Italy (Turin, Milan, and Venice), closely following the Turin strike movement and the factory council phenomenon.
January: As a correspondent for El Tiempo, he attends the Livorno Congress of the Italian Socialist Party, where the left wing splits and forms the Italian Communist Party.
February: Mariategui marries Anna Chiappe; their first child, Sandro Tiziano Romeo, is born in December.
He founds the first Peruvian Communist cell along with Cesar Falcon, Carlos Roe, and Palmiro Machiavello.
April-May: He attends an international conference organized by the League of Nations.
June: He leaves Italy and tours Europe while awaiting his return to Peru. He visits France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Belgium and studies the revolutionary movements that have been shaking Europe since the war.
January: Mariategui embarks for Peru from Belgium on the steamship Negada.
March: He returns to Peru, is interviewed by Angela Ramos for the magazine Variedades, and plans to edit a newspaper or magazine.
April: He establishes contact with Haya de la Torre and the Popular University through Fausto Posadas, the workers' editor of La Razon.
June: He begins his lecture series, "History of the International Situation", at the Popular University.
September: He begins his collaboration with the magazine Variedades, writing the column "Figures and Aspects of International Life".
October: Haya de la Tore is deported by the Leguia government. Oscar Herrera becomes rector at the Popular University and Mariategui the editor of the magazine Claridad. He is arrested at an editorial meeting of this periodical, along with a group of professors and students of the Popular University.
November: Announcements appear for a magazine entitled Vanguard: A Weekly Magazine of Ideological Renovation. The Voice of the New Era, to be edited by Mariategui and Felix del Valle. The project was never concretized.
January: Mariategui concludes his lecture series at the Popular University.
March: Issue 5 of Claridad is dedicated to Lenin. Mariategui is the driving force behind the founding of the Claridad Workers Publishing House.
May: He has a severe health crisis; his life is saved by the amputation of his right leg.
September: He begins a collaboration with the magazine Mundial, edited by Andres Avelino Aramburu, writing the column "Polemical Motives" and, later, "Let Us Peruvianize Peru".
Mariategui is proposed by students for a university chair but is rejected by the rector.
October: He founds Miverva Publishers, which publishes his first book, The Contemporary Scene, as part of its Modern Library series.
February: Books and Reviews, the organ of Minerva Publishers, appears; it will serve as an economic and circulation base for the journal Amauta. With the founding of the first APRA cells, Mariategui agrees to participate in this united front in Lima.
September: Amauta, a monthly journal of ideological definition, first appears.
February-March: Mariategui polemicizes with Luis Alberto Sanchez over the indigenous question.
June: The Leguia government denounces the existence of a supposed "Communist plot" and initiates repression against worker and intellectual activists. Mariategui is interned in the San Bartolome Military Hospital. Amauta and Minerva Publishers are shut down. Mariategui studies the possibility of moving to Buenos Aires or Montevideo.
December: Amauta reappears.
April: A break occurs between Mariategui and Haya de la Torre. Mariategui makes contact with the Trade Union Secretariat of the Third International through the Spaniard Miguel Contreras. He sends Julio Portocarrero and Armando Bazan to the USSR as delegates to the Fourth Congress of the Profintern (Red International of Trade Unions) in Moscow and the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku.
September: Mariategui defines his socialist orientation in the Amauta editorial "Anniversary and Balance Sheet". He begins work on the foundation of the Socialist Party.
October 8: The Socialist Party is formally constituted, with Mariategui as general secretary.
November: Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality is published. The workers' biweekly Labor begins publication.
February-April: Mariategui's short novel, The Novel and Life, is published in the magazine Mundial.
May: The Organizing Committee for a General Confederation of Peruvian Workers is constituted and sends Julio Portocarrero to Montevideo as a delegate to the Constituent Congress of the Latin American Trade Union Conference.
June: Hugo Pesce and Julio Portocarrero are delegates to the First Latin American Communist Conference in Buenos Aires. Mariategui is named a member of the General Council of the Anti-Imperialist League, a group whose guiding force is the Third International.
September: Mariategui's house is broken into and searched, this time because of a supposed "Jewish conspiracy". Labor is closed.
February: Eudocio Ravines secretly returns to Peru and is named general secretary of the Socialist Party.
March: Mariategui enters the Villaran Clinic in a medical emergency. He dies on April 16.