The Popular Universities and the Origins of Aprismo, 1921-1924 Open Access

A multitude of events and currents of thought influenced the formation and rise of the Peruvian Aprista Movement: the Mexican and Russian revolutions, the university reform movement, the emergence of organized workers’ groups, the rise of foreign economic expansionism, and the impact of the ideologies of Marxism, socialism, and nationalism. Most of the studies of the Aprista Movement, however, have tended to emphasize its intellectual indebtedness to the university reform movement, with litde attention paid to the immediate and proximate way in which the Peruvian university students reacted to the reform movement.

Between the beginning of the university reform movement in Peru in 1919 and the appearance of the Aprista Movement in 1924 several important events occurred that decisively shifted the university reform movement into politics and stamped the Peruvian movement with several original characteristics distinguishing it from other university-based reform movements in the rest of Latin America. The most significant of these events was the founding of the González Prada Popular Universities for workers by Haya de la Torre and his companion students at San Marcos University in 1921. The purpose of the centers originally was to further the aims of the university reform movement by bringing the benefits of culture and learning to the poor and uneducated. When President Augusto B. Leguxa suppressed these centers in 1924 and exiled most of the leaders, Haya and his companions turned their cultural movement into the Aprista Movement and later into the Peruvian Aprista Party.¹

The Aprista Movement did not, therefore, flow directly out of the general university reform movement. On the contrary, for the three short but intense years in which they operated legally and publicly, the Popular Universities served as the vital testing ground for most of the ideology of the Aprista Party. Furthermore, the Popular University experiment provided the Peruvian reformers with a key asset lacking in other university-based reform movements of the period, namely, an intensive and relatively lengthy experience of mutual collaboration before being subjected to political repression.² Perhaps even more significantly, the longevity and continued mass support of the party in the face of electoral defeat and persecution throughout the 1930s and early 1940s may not have been due solely to its reformist program, but also to the ability of the Aprista leaders to deal effectively with their lower class constituency, a skill acquired in large part in the Popular University experience.

Since the turn of the century the concept of the Popular University had been germinating as part of the general thrust of the university reform movement throughout Latin America. The All-American Student Congress of Montevideo of 1908, the first of its kind in Latin America, had proposed the creation of university extensions to spread the cultural wealth of the old and very elitist universities to the new working classes emerging in many parts of Latin America. As envisioned in its simplest form, the university extension involved nothing more than the sending out of a few professors and students to dictate lectures on diverse subjects for the benefit of the workers. The Peruvian delegates, under the leadership of Víctor Andrés Belaúnde, implemented the Montevideo proposal by creating the University Center in Lima in 1908 and by collaborating in the first university extension in Peru, created that same year.³ However, this pilot project failed, like many others, due to lack of organization.⁴

The need to break down the social barriers that isolated the university from the lower classes and to convert it into an instrument of national integration were constant themes of subsequent student congresses held in Buenos Aires in 1910 and Lima in 1912. In 1913, the Universidad Popular Mexicana was founded under the inspiration of the leaders of the Ateneo, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Antonio Caso, Alfonso Reyes, and José Vasconcelos. This center of learning for workers in Mexico City operated as a subsidiary of the Ateneo and depended on the voluntary good will of professors and students for its existence. It closed down in 1922 due to lack of funds.⁵ Another Popular University was organized in Córdoba a year before the outbreak of the student movement of 1918, but it does not seem to have made a major impact on subsequent events. Although the first National Congress of Argentinian Students proclaimed the creation of university extensions or “social universities” to be an essential goal of their reform, no notable popular center resulted from the Córdoba movement in Argentina. In creating their own popular universities, the Peruvian students implemented and advanced in a much more concrete way the social aims of their Argentinian counterparts.⁶

In 1917 the Peruvian students created their own Federation of Peruvian Students (Federación de Estudiantes Peruanos, or the F.E.P.). Although the Peruvian students were stimulated by the action of the Argentinian students, the immediate impetus leading to the creation of the Popular Universities was the alliance formed between the students and the textile workers of Lima during the first successful strike for the eight-hour day in 1918-1919. The strike broke out in a textile plant in Lima run by the William R. Grace Company in December 1918, and by the end of December all of the textile plant workers of Lima and many other workers had joined in a city-wide sympathy strike. When a meeting of the Workers’ Committee established to formulate the demands of the strikers was broken up by President José Pardo’s troops, the workers issued an appeal to the F.E.P. for aid. The newly created F.E.P. acted swiftly in response to the workers’ appeal by appointing a committee of three students to act as a liaison between the workers and students. One of the three designated was Haya de la Torre, who soon became the dominant figure in sealing the alliance between the workers and students. On January 15, 1919, President Pardo granted the eight-hour day to all Peruvian workers. One of the immediate results of the strike, at the urging of Haya de la Torre, was the establishment of the Textile Federation, to include the approximately 1,200 textile workers in Lima.⁷

When President Pardo continued to harass both students and workers, the Workers’ Committee called for a joint student-worker general strike in May. By this time, however, the students had set into motion their own university reform movement. Dissatisfaction with the cautious moves of the F.E.P. led to the creation of a University Reform Committee, to force more energetic action in favor of student demands. The committee, headed by Jorge Guillermo Leguía, and composed of Haya de la Torre, Luis Alberto Sánchez, Jorge Basadre, Manuel Seoane, and other prominent student leaders, demanded the removal of eighteen professors at San Marcos, the suppression of certain courses in ecclesiastical discipline, complete renovation of the university government, student participation in policy decisions, and academic freedom for professors.⁸

The tense situation in Lima was heightened by the visit of Alfredo Palacios, the Argentinian socialist, who regaled the students with his reports of the reform advances of the Argentinian students. The general strike, which broke out on May 27, the day after Palacios’s departure from Lima, paralyzed the city and eventually led to the fall of Pardo, who was prematurely ousted by the newly elected president, Augusto B. Leguía. Leguía seized the opportunity to strengthen his position by acceding to the demands of both the students and the workers. In September, 1919, he issued a decree that effected the first major university reform in Peru since 1855.⁹ In October, Haya was elected president of the F.E.P., and one of his first actions was to call for a general congress of Peruvian university students to implement the objectives of the university reform in Peru. Leguía strengthened his liberal image by offering to subsidize the congress, set to meet in 1920. The year 1919 closed with reform victories gained on two distinct fronts: the factory and the university. But the aims of both had been achieved through mutual collaboration, a fact that was to deeply influence the ideology hammered out at the student congress of 1920, as well as the whole subsequent history of Peruvian unionism and politics.¹⁰

The first National Congress of Peruvian Students convened on March 11th in Cuzco and closed on March 20th. The preparatory committee and the direction of the congress were in the hands of Haya de la Torre as president of the F.E.P. Delegates attending were from the four Peruvian universities, San Marcos (Lima), San Agustín (Arequipa), La Libertad (Trujillo), and the University of Cuzco. The congress developed through two phases, the first of which was dominated by enthusiasts who championed the causes of patriotism and nationalism. In the second phase, the more serious and organized students under Haya de la Torre’s leadership took command of the congress. They fought to channel the general idealism of the students into a concrete project, the creation of the Popular Universities.¹¹ Haya had proposed the creation of a Popular University to the F.E.P. on two previous occasions, but the idea was rejected both times.¹² Now, however, with the prestige of the office of the presidency of the F.E.P. behind him, and buoyed by the success of the alliance between the students and the workers a few months earlier, Haya pressed again for action on the creation of a Popular University.

The actual proposal for the creation of the Popular University was made halfway through the congress. Under the direction of Haya de la Torre, the students drew up a fourteen-point resolution, defining the nature of tire Popular University. The first point of the draft resolution stated that the Popular University was to be under the supervision of the Student Federation, and not attached directly to San Marcos as in the case of the old university extension concept. Other points envisioned a double cycle of courses to be offered to the workers: in the first cycle emphasis would be placed on inculcating a greater appreciation of national culture, and in the second the emphasis would be on specialized and technical instruction. The methodology to be employed called for a maximum of student involvement and the use of a pedagogy adapted to the popular level. The tenth point called for the Popular Universities to generate other projects, such as community co-ops, libraries, recreation facilities, and medical centers for workers.

Although the resolutions declared that the aim of the Popular University was cultural, they also urged the Popular University to involve itself in “all workers’ conflicts.”¹³ This somewhat ambiguous stance between a purely cultural and a more political orientation created a tension that would characterize the short life of the Popular University. Ultimately, the political orientation would win out, thereby causing the downfall of the Popular University.

The purpose of the Popular University was to carry the culture and learning of the traditional and largely middle- and upper-class national universities to the lower classes. On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Popular University, Haya de la Torre summarized the students’ objectives in creating it: to educate the people, to redeem Peru from social injustice, and to erect a monument to the memory of González Prada.¹⁴ This equating of education with social justice was inspired in large part by an older liberal populism, which looked to education as essential to any revolutionary transformation of Peru. As early as 1858 Francisco de Paula González Vigil had called for the creation of night schools for adults, to teach them to read and write and to inculcate in them a sense of national pride.¹⁵ But the man closest to the students in time and spirit was, of course, Manuel González Prada. More than anyone else, González Prada had foreshadowed the popular university movement by calling for an alliance between workers and students, in order to overthrow the currently existing oppressive class structure in Peru.

Many of González Prada’s antiestablishment, populist ideas were set down in his speech delivered to the Bakers’ Union in Lima in 1905. He looked with contempt upon the time-honored notion of the superiority of the intellectual over the manual laborer. He compared the interdependence of the brain and the muscles of the human body with the work of the intellectual and the manual laborer in society. Both functioned together, but in different ways. No one could say that the work of one is more valuable than the other. He warned the intellectual not to assume that he alone knows the road to justice in society. On the contrary, the intellectual must become a revolutionary who both stimulates the masses to action and follows the masses when they act. Furthermore, the working classes, once awakened from their slumber by the revolutionary intellectuals, will naturally tend to fight for what is their proper due in society. To those timid souls who would cringe before what they see as a rising tide of barbarians, González Prada proclaimed the populist’s creed: “We are not the inundation of barbarism, but the deluge of Justice!”¹⁶

Like many liberals of the nineteenth century, González Prada believed in the basic goodness of the common man and in man’s natural propensity to choose what is best for himself, when given a chance. At the same time, however, he never defined the exact nature of the coming era of justice, nor did he map out a clear program of how this universal justice was to be achieved. He died in 1918 without ever seeing his ideas fructify into any large scale or organized movement, although he had greatly influenced the different groups of workers and students. Haya himself fell sway to this radical populism in frequent conversations with González Prada shortly before the latter’s death. The Popular University was not baptized with González Prada’s name until 1922, however, in order that the new project not provoke opposition from the many conservative critics of Prada before it had even begun.¹⁷

The student congress appointed Haya in charge of preparing the ground for setting up the Popular University. The first 0Popular University was officially inaugurated in Lima on January 21, 1921, in the Palacio de Exposición, which was then the center for the F.E.P., and was in the 1950s converted into an art museum. All four dailies of Lima carried full news accounts of the inauguration, and a round of applause in the senate was accorded the new cultural project.¹⁸ A second Popular University center was created in the small textile town of Vitarte outside of Lima. These “universities” were not, of course, accredited institutions of higher learning in the usual sense of the word. Rather, they were centers of cultural improvement for uneducated lower-class workers and their families. They offered no degrees, required no tuition and depended entirely upon the good will of their teachers and students to function. The different centers of the Popular University operated at night time and were open to all workers, many of whom were women. Financially, the Popular University received a token sum of 50 soles a month from the F.E.P.

The teachers at the Popular University were nearly all students or professors at San Marcos University in Lima recruited by Haya de la Torre, who had been elected the first rector. Many of these first teachers, who gave their time voluntarily and gratuitously to the Popular University, represented some of the leading lights of the post-World War I student generation of Peru. Raúl Porras Barrenechea, later to win fame as an historian, conducted courses on American literature, and Jorge Basadre taught Peruvian history in the Popular University. Oscar Herrera, a science student at San Marcos and decades later the rector of Federico Villareal University in Lima, gave classes on geography and astronomy. Others among the teachers were Luis Heysen, the future Aprista leader; Eudocio Ravines, the one-time Communist and later director of La Prensa; and in 1923, José Carlos Mariátegui. Years later, some of the teachers—such as Nicolás Terreros, Jacobo Hurwitz, Luis Bustamante, and others—would become founders of the Communist Party in Peru, while Mariátegui would form his own socialist party.¹⁹ Luciano Castillo, who also taught in the Popular University, later formed a distinct socialist party.

The main organizer behind the Popular University, however, was Haya de la Torre, who besides functioning as rector also taught geography and social history. He appointed the teachers, organized most of the cultural and social activities, and with his speaking abilities, drew the largest crowds. The editors of El Obrero Textil, the principal organ of the Peruvian textile worker and a staunch supporter of the Popular University, even felt it necessary to refute in an editorial a claim made by one of their readers that without Haya de la Torre there would be no Popular University.²⁰

The students of the Popular University were mainly workers or field laborers from the coastal haciendas. At times as many as a thousand workers would gather in the halls of the Palacio de Exposición to listen to the more popular lecturers, such as Haya de la Torre or Mariátegui. In Vitarte, where the Popular University became the main attraction and diversion in the town, anywhere from 70 to 400 men, women, and children crowded into the local cinema where the classes were held twice weekly.²¹ In Lima the vast majority of the students were Spanish-speaking mestizos. At Vitarte, some 10 miles inland, most of the students were mestizos who belonged to the local textile union, but many Quechua-speaking laborers from the neighboring haciendas also rode in by horseback to attend the lectures. Like many coastal towns, Vitarte was a focal point of transition from the more Indian rural culture to the more mestizo town culture. At the public outings of the Popular University in Vitarte, for example, the men wore ordinary worker’s dress, but the majority of the women still wore the typical Indian garb of the highlands.²² In general, however, as most of tire Popular Universities functioned in coastal towns and cities, the majority of the students tended to be acculturated Spanish-speaking workers, usually associated with the new and growing labor movement.

Many of the worker-students had been participants or leaders in the strike for the eight-hour day. Among them was Arturo Sabroso, a young anarchist and coeditor of El Obrero Textil. Years later Sabroso would be the founder and first president of the powerful Confederation of Peruvian Workers, and close ally of Haya de la Torre in politics. For Sabroso and many other workers, the Popular University was the medium for their conversion from petty anarchism to organized labor and national politics.²³ Furthermore, their enthusiasm for cultural self-improvement in the Popular University was a natural expression and continuation of their new political awakening. The Popular University thus served to bring together into an institutionalized setting, which demanded regular face-to-face contact and exchange of ideas, the student activists and workers who collaborated in the strike of 1918-1919.

Although the student-teachers aimed to expose their students to the full range of subjects and courses taught in the regular university, in practice they tended to emphasize the newest and most attractive subjects or ideas. In his lectures on geography, Haya attempted to synthesize his readings in Hegel, Marx, and Spencer, to demonstrate the impact of land on man and the formation of human culture. Humberto del Aguila, a law student at San Marcos and co-founder of La Razón with Mariátegui, gave a course in the history of the Inca civilization and also expounded on the latest developments in the theory of evolution to his audience.²⁴ Although academic subjects such as history, geography, and science were taught, the emphasis was placed more on practical subjects that would directly benefit the lives of the workers: personal hygiene, first aid for home and factory, and most important, reading and writing, for the vast majority of the students were illiterate. Care was also taken to include artistic appreciation in the program, and from time to time the Popular University offered courses in music, painting, ceramicmaking and cloth-weaving, the last two being ancient arts among the Incas.²⁵

The student-teachers also presented lectures highlighting the values of studying Incan culture and history in order to foster the cult of indigenismo. They encouraged their students to cultivate an interest in Indian arts and customs and to learn Quechua. In accordance with this objective, the Popular University held night social gatherings (veladas) from time to time; at these native artists would perform traditional dances of the highlands and play the quena, the typical Indian flute. These meetings usually ended with a speech by one of the teachers on the need to “vindicate” the rights of Peru’s long-oppressed Indians.²⁶ At the same time, each Popular University had a section for “Indian Affairs,” to teach Spanish to the Indian students and to attend to their particular needs.²⁷ In general, however, there were few Indians, and the lectures on indigenismo were intended primarily to awaken a new pride in Peru’s past and to create a sense of solidarity among the workers with the Indians.

From the outset the student reformers at Cuzco had resolved to overcome the great social and psychological barriers that divided themselves from the lower-class workers whom they intended to teach. They employed a didactic style calculated to catch the attention of their students, most of whom suffered from a social inferiority complex in the presence of members of a higher social class. Furthermore, most of the workers were exhausted after a full day’s work. Haya and his companion students discovered that they had to be “part teacher and part showman” to keep the worker’s attention. One of the important techniques that Haya and the others developed was a question and answer dialogue with the students. Other didactic techniques included the use of colorful posters of slogans that condemned alcoholism or coca chewing.²⁸ Public student recitals were held to instill in the students a sense of self-confidence. Morality plays were presented on the stage of the cinema in Vitarte. Once a month on a Sunday afternoon the workers put on a short morality play to demonstrate the evils of alcoholism, or to extol the virtues of hard work.²⁹

From the very beginning the Popular University waged a war on alcoholism among the workers. The young student-teachers gave lectures and admonitions to the workers on the ill effects of drinking, and they disseminated literature against it at every opportunity. They organized picnics on the weekends among the workers, which were intended in part to convince the workers that healthy recreation was possible without recourse to alcohol. At other times these outings were organized to foster a greater appreciation of nature, in particular the natural beauty of Peru’s countryside. Implicit, also, in the purpose of these outings was the desire to heighten the sense of unity between the workers and their teachers. This effort to inspire the workers to appreciate the values of the resources of their own country led to the institutionalization of one of these outings, which came to be known as the “Feast of the Plant” (Fiesta de la Planta). Each year this holiday was celebrated in Vitarte, with a mixture of solemnity and festivity, by thousands of workers from Lima and the surrounding towns.³⁰

Along with the temperance campaigns, the Popular University also conducted sanitation drives. In January 1922, the Popular University initiated a campaign to prevent the spread of typhoid by urging all restaurants to keep their facilities clean.³¹ Moreover, the students of medicine who taught in the Popular University gave special instructions to the workers on the dangers of venereal diseases. These efforts to improve the cultural and physical lot of the workers won widespread approval in the beginning. Most of the leading dailies of Lima, El Comercio, El Tiempo, La Crónica and La Prensa carried regular feature articles on the activities of the Popular University during the first two years of its existence. La Prensa even carried twice-weekly summaries of the lectures given in the Popular University throughout most of 1921, until President Leguía closed it down for its anti-government stand. El Tiempo reported with approval in one article that the workers of Lima had ceased to flock to the local bar on payday as a result of the labors of the Popular University.³²La Prensa acclaimed the Popular University for its educational achievement among the workers.³³

The first anniversary of the Popular University was marked by the announcement of the decision to establish new Popular University centers in other parts of Peru. Within a short period of time six new centers were established in Lima alone. The first Popular University center to be established outside of the Lima area was that of Arequipa in January 1922, under the direction of the students of San Agustín.³⁴ Within the next few months Popular University extensions were established in Huaraz, Puno, lea, and even in the faraway jungle department of Madre de Dios.³⁵

After the first year of the Popular University, Haya accepted an invitation of the Y.M.C.A., of which he was an active member, to attend a youth congress in Uruguay. He made use of the opportunity to tour many cities in southern Latin America, including Buenos Aires, where President Hipólito Yrigoyen commended the young student leader for the work of the Popular University.³⁶ Indeed, the fame of the Popular University in Peru had traveled far and wide. When Haya visited Havana after his exile from Peru, he found the Cuban university students eager to set up their own Popular University in imitation of that of Peru. At Haya’s behest they founded the José Martí Popular University on November 9, 1923. In Chile the José Lastarria was founded, the Justo Arosemena in Panama, the Emiliano Zapata in Mexico, which lasted until 1937, and several others throughout Latin America.³⁷

The success of the Popular University in Peru increasingly began to overshadow other aspects of the university reform movement. Carrying the culture directly to the people had now assumed an importance outweighing the demand to remold traditional structures within the older universities. Revitalization of the nation through the establishment of voluntary centers of popular education and culture now seemed a far more efficient plan of action than waiting for the older universities to train the needed number of scholars and technicians to raise the educational level of the people. That would take generations to do what the Popular University could conceivably accomplish in a decade. Shortly after his exile, Haya wrote enthusiastically to the Argentinian students that the González Prada Popular University would one day become the “great social university of Peru,” which would “sing the repose of the other” (San Marcos).³⁸

Given the openly proclaimed social orientation of the Popular University, it was inevitable that it become involved in politics sooner or later. For the first two years of its existence, the Popular University operated mainly as a cultural center and refrained from engaging in overt political activities. Nevertheless, among the San Marcos student-teachers were to be found many young activists with strong Marxist and anarchist leanings who used the Popular University as a platform for their ideas. The Popular University tolerated this free expression of thought, for it fitted in well with the proclaimed liberty of speech of the student reform movement in general. The social aims of the Popular University had been loudly proclaimed but never clearly defined. The motto of the Popular University succinctly summed up this noncommittal stance: “The Popular University has no dogma but that of Social Justice.”³⁹ All factions were invited to enter the classrooms of the Popular University, although, of course, this liberality extended only to those who showed an interest in improving the lot of the Indians and the working class. In the minds of some of the young reformers this meant freedom to teach the workers the benefits of the new social system of the Soviet Union.⁴⁰

On a few occasions, the Popular University sponsored projects that served to channel the social impulses of the workers into concrete action. When the 5,000 workers of the American Copper Company in La Oroya went on strike in May 1921, the students and teachers of the Popular University took up a collection to send food and supplies to the strikers and their families.⁴¹ Such protest moves, however, were sporadic and spontaneous. They represented the lingering anarchical strain left over from the strikes of 1918-1919 before the union movement had gotten under way. Such anarchism also carried with it, in a modified way, overtones of the anticlericalism of González Prada, whose words were framed on the walls of the Popular University: “In Peru there are four million illiterates, thanks to the clergy and the politicians.”⁴²

The full politicization of the Popular University occurred as the climax of a series of protracted clashes between Leguía and his critics after he seized power in 1919. Among the earliest critics of Leguía were three journalists of El Tiempo, César Falcón, Humberto del Aguila and José Carlos Mariátegui, who founded an anti-Leguía magazine, La Razón, in 1919. Shortly thereafter, Leguía pressured the most brilliant of the three, Mariátegui, to depart to Europe on a four-year journalistic scholarship. The other two aligned themselves with the Popular University, as did Mariátegui on his return from Europe in 1923. On the university scene, Haya de la Torre headed a list of 32 students who denounced the Student Federation for according Leguía the title, “Mentor of the Youth.”⁴³ In reaction to a speech by Víctor Andrés Belaúnde protesting his anti-university policies, Leguía closed down San Marcos in May 1921.⁴⁴

The Popular University, too, had increasingly fallen into government disfavor. More and more it was viewed as a hotbed of radicalism by conservative elements. El Comercio had long since dropped the Popular University from its columns, and La Prensa, which Leguía had closed down and turned into a government newspaper in 1921, took a more critical stance toward the activities of the Popular University. In May 1923, Mariátegui returned from Europe, and Haya invited him to lecture in the Popular University and to collaborate in directing the new organ of the Workers’ Federation and the Popular University, Claridad, which Haya had founded in March of that year. By coincidence, the announcement of Mariátegui’s first lecture, on the impact of revolutionary Russia on the modern world, appeared on May 23, the date on which the Popular University launched its most serious venture into politics: the protest movement against the consecration of Peru to the Sacred Heart.⁴⁵

The Popular University spearheaded the protest against Archbishop Emilio Lissón’s planned ceremony. Weeks before the announced date for the ceremony, Haya de la Torre organized a number of dissident groups, Protestants, Catholics, anarchists, students and workers of the Popular University into a single protest block, “The Popular Front of Manual and Intellectual Workers.”⁴⁶ On the day of the consecration, Haya and several thousand workers and students, most of them affiliated with the Popular University, marched through the streets of Lima denouncing the plans of the archbishop and the president. In the face of such opposition, Archbishop Lissón was forced to suspend the ceremony.⁴⁷ After two workers were killed by government troops during the march, the Popular University issued a manifesto summoning all workers and students of Peru to join in a nationwide strike.⁴⁸ The various workers’ unions and groups of Lima promptly cooperated. From that moment on Leguía looked for his opportunity to destroy the Popular University, which had overtly become a center of political dissent against his regime.

After May 23 the government launched a steadily intensifying campaign against the Popular University. La Prensa voiced the dictator’s sentiments by frequendy denouncing the Popular University as a center of Bolshevism because it fostered a dangerous fraternization between workers and students.⁴⁹ On July 16 the police disrupted with gunfire the inaugural ceremonies for the new Popular University center of Callao in the Palacio de Exposición. In October, in the midst of the student elections for the presidency of the F.E.P., in which Haya ran for a second term against Manuel Seoane, the police seized and deported Haya from Peru. The government then closed down the Popular University centers and their organ, Claridad.

In the belief that the main source of trouble had been removed, the government permitted the Popular University to reopen in January of the following year. Oscar Herrera assumed the title of Rector, and Mariátegui took over the direction of Claridad. With Haya gone, however, Mariátegui emerged as the undisputed center of attention and natural leader of the Popular University. He was the only lecturer in the Popular University who had won fame in his own right before coming to teach there.⁵⁰ The workers respected him because they knew that he had begun as a worker himself, and the intellectuals admired his brilliance and force of conviction. Mariátegui’s first reaction to the Popular University when he returned from Europe was one of skepticism. His studies in Marxism in Italy convinced him of the need to ground the class struggle in a clear-cut strategy and to gird it with discipline. He was disconcerted both by the lack of a well-defined class consciousness in the Popular University and by the somewhat formless orientation that guided it. Years later, after he had definitively broken with Haya, he referred to the Popular University as an “instrument of intellectual domination by the petty bourgeoisie.” ⁵¹

Nevertheless, Mariátegui had returned from Europe with the intention of working for the creation of a class party, and he found the Popular University a useful platform from which he could develop his ideas and attract a following. When he learned of the protest march planned for May 23, he at first objected because he believed that that kind of activity resembled old-fashioned anarchism, which was ineffective because it was sporadic and emphasized short-term over long-term goals.⁵² Later, however, he reconciled himself to the protest movement because May 23 symbolized the end of the Popular University as a cultural project and its blood baptism as a center of social protest. After that day, Mariátegui believed that the university students of Peru had left behind them their naïve notions of reforming Peru merely by exerting themselves to raise the cultural and educational level of the lower classes.⁵³

Mariátegui steered the Popular University toward the Left and used it as a platform to preach the ideals of revolutionary Marxism. The new Claridad, which reappeared in January 1924, revealed the extent of this radical departure from the more or less undefined political orientation of the pre-May 23 days. In it Mariátegui declared that the “Popular Universities are not agnostic or colorless institutions like the university extension.” Rather, they are schools that exist for the “creation of a proletarian culture.” ⁵⁴ At the sixth anniversary of the founding of the Popular University, Mariátegui addressed the workers on the significance of the Popular University. The Popular University had gone through two stages in its development, Mariátegui observed. In the first stage, which ended on May 23, 1923, the Popular University consolidated the workers and broke the class bonds that tied them to the Civilista regime of Leguía. But in the second stage, dominated by Mariátegui, the Popular University took a more critical view of the struggle and defined its objectives more sharply. Whereupon, Mariátegui proposed the formation of a sociological seminar to study and apply the Marxist historical analysis to the problems of Peru. This seminar was to be the core nucleus of the Popular University.⁵⁵

The early part of 1924 was marked by premature hopes of overcoming the difficult times as tensions eased up. However, in September of that year the Leguía regime set about with greater earnestness to complete the business left unfinished after deporting Haya de la Torre by closing down the Popular Universities in Trujillo, Arequipa, Cuzco, Vitarte, Barranco, and Lima.⁵⁶ Even more damaging, between September 1924, and the early part of 1925 the leading teachers of the Popular University were all deported:Oscar Herrera, Luis Bustamante, Eudocio Ravines, Jacobo Hurwitz, Nicolás Terreros, Luis Heysen, Manuel Seoane, Enrique Köster, and many others.⁵⁷ Along with the teachers many leading labor leaders and workers from the Popular University were also deported. The Popular University of Lima—which alone of all the others in Peru managed to weather the storm and reopen—maintained a shadowy, underground existence until 1927. However, after 1924, the tone of the meetings was overtly political, and little pretense was made of fulfilling the original cultural finality of the Popular University.

In the meantime, Haya and his student companions brought the Apra into existence in Mexico in May 1924. From then until the time they returned to Peru in 1930-1931, most of the essential points of the Aprista ideology were further clarified and refined. The Aprista’s decision to convert the Apra into a political party designed to win power in Peru was the pretext that Mariátegui used to break with Haya and form his Socialist Party in 1929, along with Eudocio Ravines and Ricardo Martínez de la Torre. Mariátegui strongly objected to the populist, multi-class character of the Aprista Movement as well as to its more moderate stance on imperialism.⁵⁸ Other former teachers of the Popular University also began to part company with the Apra for the same ideological reason. Nicolás Terreros and Jacobo Hurwitz broke away from the Aprista cell in Mexico and joined the Communist International.⁵⁹

Although the history and ideological development of the Aprista Movement itself lie outside of the scope of this study, a few observations may serve to underline some of the ways in which the original Gonzalez Prada Popular Universities influenced the origins and orientation of that movement. Significantly, one of the first acts of the new party in Peru was to recreate the popular universities, this time no longer as independent autonomous cultural centers, but rather as integral organs of the Aprista Party. The stated aims of the newly restored Popular University were to “educate the Peruvian people, raise their moral standards, inculcate in them a love for their country, wage war on alcoholism, and prepare the people to lead honest lives as citizens of the country.” ⁶⁰

However noble and disinterested the ends of the new Popular University were, its life was as secure or insecure as the party with which it was associated. One of the first acts of Sánchez Cerro after assuming power was to harass and eventually close down the Popular University centers. When the Aprista members of parliament protested this action, the dictator seized the occasion to expel 23 of them from parliament in February 1932.⁶¹ Shortly afterwards, the Apra was forced to enter its first period of underground existence, from 1932 to 1945, interrupted by a brief breathing spell after the assassination of Sánchez Cerro in 1933.

During the period of clandestine existence, the Popular University lived an active but precarious life, functioning in the homes of Apristas at nighttime. Under Sánchez Cerro there were some five Popular University centers operating in different parts of Lima. The important role that the Popular University played in the lives of party members is illustrated by the example of Aprista political prisoners on the prison island of San Lorenzo off the coast of Callao, who established an improvised “Popular University” among themselves. They held surreptitious “classes” from 1942 until May 1945, when the party was officially legalized throughout Peru under President Manuel Prado.⁶²

After President Bustamante y Rivero was overthrown by General Manuel Odría in October 1948, the Aprista Party was outlawed once again, and the Popular Universities reverted back to the techniques of underground life, still fresh in the memories of all Apristas. When the party was legalized in 1956 in exchange for its support of Manuel Prado’s second term, the Popular University also surfaced publicly. The Popular University of Lima continues to function as an adjunct of the Aprista Party, within the confines of the general party headquarters. It offers free nocturnal classes to workers in the technical arts, English, accounting, and the handicrafts. Each year, also, Haya de la Torre delivers a series of lectures at the Popular University on such diverse topics as Toynbee’s concept of history or Aprista political strategy.⁶³

The impact of the original González Prada Popular University, however, went far beyond the initiative to recreate the popular universities within the party. In many ways, the party itself was an extension and a fulfillment of the aims and objectives of the first Popular University, a reality frequently stressed by Aprista leaders. In his presidential acceptance speech in August 1931, Haya declared that the Aprista Movement had arisen indirectly from the university reform movement, but directly from the Popular University.⁶⁴ On another occasion he termed the Popular University the “vanguard” of the Aprista Movement.⁶⁵ One of the lessons that the future Aprista leaders learned during the Popular University experiment was that they could not solve many particular problems without a total political transformation of the entire country. For example, Haya cited the discovery by the young student reformers that the lack of good hygiene among the workers was not due merely to lack of proper instruction, but to their low economic status as well.⁶⁶

Ideologically, the Apristas described their movement as a “Popular Front of Manual and Intellectual Workers.” This concept had, of course, originated much earlier with González Prada. Haya himself proposed the formation of a “Popular Front of Manual and Intellectual Workers” in a speech that he gave to workers and students at the University of Trujillo in 1922.⁶⁷ The term did not acquire its later great significance for the Apristas, however, until 1923 when the leaders of the protest movement of May 23 first designated themselves with that title. This same multi-class populism appeared in the Aprista program drawn up by Haya in Mexico after his exile in 1924.

Recent studies have questioned the Apra’s claim to be a broadly based national party, particularly as regards the Indians. In the 1931 election, for example, the Apra drew 44 percent of its vote from the northern coastal departments, 30 percent from Lima, and only 26 percent from the rest of Peru. The key to the Apra’s strong appeal in the north seems to be its strong anti-imperialist rhetoric, which served to consolidate the highly organized sugar hacienda workers and certain middle-class groups, both of which felt themselves displaced and exploited by the great foreign-owned sugar monopolies. By way of contrast, in the more backward and less-industrialized south and central sierra region, the Indians perceived little threat from foreign imperialism. According to this interpretation, the rapid growth of the Apra was due more to special social conditions affecting coastal workers than to the Apra’s reformist, pro-Indian propaganda.⁶⁸

Nevertheless, even in light of this more correct appraisal of the Apra as primarily a regional and urban labor party, it still came the closest to being the only really national party in the 1930s and 1940s in Peru. The much smaller and more ideologically rigid socialist and communist parties, for example, failed to offer a program as comprehensive and as elastic as that of the Apra, which brought together such diverse and newly politicized groups as urban factory workers, hacienda laborers, university students, and the lower middle class. While there were undoubtedly unique social conditions that brought these groups together in 1931, it is also important to stress that the successful collaboration of students and workers in the Popular University had predisposed future Aprista and pro-Aprista leaders to think in terms of populist strategies long before the Apra became a reality in Peru.

The Apristas have also been criticized for failing to translate their indigenista rhetoric into effective pro-Indian legislation.⁶⁹ Nevertheless, both the Popular University and the Apra played an important role in making the issue of Indians’ rights a subject of national controversy. The cult of indigenismo had, of course, been in vogue long before the Popular University. González Prada, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Joaquín Capelo, and others had strongly influenced the university generation of the early twentieth century, as well as certain workers’ groups in Lima. But the Popular University, with its glorification of Peru’s Indian past and fostering of Quechua, Indian dances, and artwork, turned indigenismo into a popular cultural form among the working classes. For these largely mestizo workers the new indigenismo served as a cultural expression of their new political awareness. For the middle-class university students who taught them, it served as a vehicle of expression for their new reformist nationalism. Similarly, the Popular University’s advocacy of woman’s rights carried over into the Aprista’s ideology in the 1930s.⁷⁰

Undoubtedly, one of the most important influences of the Popular University on the Aprista Party was its sense of a cultural and educational mission to the rest of the nation. After the electoral defeat in October 1931, Haya assured his followers that the mission of the Apra was not to “arrive at the Palace,” but to teach and uplift the people. The Apra would still govern Peru, Haya declared, because to govern meant to educate, inspire and redeem the people. Haya compared the Apra to a “school,” the principal function of which was to raise the cultural level of the Peruvian people.⁷¹

Furthermore, the Aprista program of 1931 reflected the Popular University’s general objective of improving not just the mind, but the total person as well. The Popular University’s emphasis on personal hygiene, physical fitness, and honesty in dealing with others foreshadowed the Aprista’s stress on moral and physical fitness as a key to national regeneration. Likewise, the Aprista’s proposal for the establishment of centers of public sanitation stemmed from the public health campaigns of the Popular University. Finally, in their educational program the Apristas called for the establishment of agricultural schools, specialized workers’ schools, and “popular universities” throughout the country.⁷²

The popularity of the Apra as well as its capacity to survive sustained political repression in the 1930s in Peru must be attributed in great part to its all-encompassing program, which offered an integral solution to both the personal and social problems of the lower classes. The key to understanding this totalizing thrust of the Apra is found in its origins in the Popular University, which functioned as a combination civic club, labor union, self-help cooperative, social and educational center for the lower classes. Perhaps the greatest lesson that the young student reformers learned during their three-year experience in the Popular University was that fundamental social reform in Peru could not be accomplished solely through the spontaneous efforts of private individuals to improve certain aspects of the lives of the lower classes. Rather, they came to realize that the social regeneration of Peru could only be effected through a total transformation of all of society itself. It was this realization—that culture, education, and politics are ultimately inseparable—which led to the transformation of the Popular University into the Aprista Movement in 1924 and which decisively shaped Aprista ideology in 1931 and thereafter.

Author notes