Dora Mayer

Dora Mayer (12 March 1868 – 7 January 1959) was an activist, essayist, and intellectual, who championed the rights of indigenous people in Peru.

Early life Dora Mayer was born in Hamburg, Germany, the daughter of Anatol Mayer, a merchant, and Mathilde de Loehrs.The family moved to Callao, Peru in April 1873. Educated at home, Mayer was a motivated autodidact, reading widely, and writing novels, plays, essays, and articles. As a journalist, she contributed to numerous publications and edited four herself: El Deber Pro Indígena, La Crítica ,Concordia and El Trabajo.

Like many other pro-indigenous activists of the time, Mayer was influenced by Manuel González Prada. In his 1905 manifesto Nuestros Indios (Our Indians), Prada had argued that indigenous Peruvians had been ravaged by exploitation and discriminatory attitudes and practices, rather than inherently doomed by their perceived racial inferiority. In 1909, Mayer co-founded the Asociación Pro-Indígena, or Pro-Indigenous Association, with philosopher Pedro Zulen and sociologist Joaquín Capelo. According to Frank Salomon, the Association worked principally through legal assistance and research, and 'invoked the Indians' status as legally entitled, though disenfranchised, citizens in order to win them such rights as protection from debt imprisonment.' The abstract of her paper, as described in a pamphlet produced for the Congress, read in part:The natives of Peru have been accused of dishonesty, hypocrisy, and idleness. It is a fact that modern civilisation has corrupted, rather than improved, them. European employers have done nothing, either from the material or moral point of view, to uplift and civilise them; on the contrary, they have merely set them an example of immorality... The Peruvians, nevertheless, have all the qualities of the cultivator; if they were given the means of developing these qualities and exploiting the natural wealth of their soil, it would mean their salvation, and further the progress of the country. In it, she notes that although the initial operations of the North American mining company were legitimate:as the company became initiated into the secrets of the judicial and political habits of the country, it made up its mind to take advantage of the frailties which unfortunately are to be found in our social system, and entered fully into the ways of fraud, bribery and violence... We would make no remark upon the easy corruption of the businessmen who arrived here, if the Anglo-Saxon peoples did not brag so much about their moral superiority over the South-Americans and started in their diplomacy from the idea that, whilst protecting their countrymen in the exterior, they were defending the cause of civilization and morality.

Women's rights On the role of women in society, Mayer prized the role of the homemaker, but acknowledged the disadvantages for women of domestic work being insufficiently recognised. In 2019, philosopher Joel Rojas edited a collection of Mayer's writings entitled The Sun that Dispels the Clouds: Essential texts, and an exhibition was held in Lima about her life and work. In the same year, the National University of San Marcos embarked on a project to digitise Mayer's materials held in their archives.