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

Abstract

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 little 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 Gonzalez 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. Legulia 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.'