González Prada Popular Universities

González Prada Popular Universities, politicized educational efforts in Peru during the early 1920s that were inspired by the student leader and politician Víctor Raúl Haya De La Torre. These popular universities offered free evening courses for workers while the Peruvian university under the regime of Augusto B. Leguía (1919–1930) was disrupted. Moreover, they were effective, practical means by which a growing populist movement, led by Haya de la Torre, won large sectors of labor away from earlier anarchist influences. Haya emphasized some of the anarchist elements of his own ideology among the universities' participants. The young Haya had been influenced in Lima by the eminent anarchist intellectual Manuel González Prada. Socialist leader José Carlos Mariátegui, besides offering a series of important lectures, collaborated with Haya until 1928 in the organization of the popular universities, which later were the basis of Aprista unions.

See alsoGonzález Prada, Manuel; Haya de la Torre, Víctor Raúl; Mariátegui, José Carlos.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Steve Stein, Populism in Peru: The Emergence of the Masses and the Politics of Social Control (1980).

Additional Bibliography

Alexander, Robert Jackson, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, and Julia Elisa Alva Parodi. Haya de la Torre, Man of the Millenium: His Life, Ideas and Continuing Relevance. Lima: Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre Institute, 2001.

Portocarrero, Ricardo. "José Carlos Mariátegui y las universidades populares 'González Prada'." La aventura de Mariátegui: Nuevas perspectivas. Ed. Portocarrero Maisch, Gonzalo, Eduardo Cáceres y Rafael Tapia, Rafael. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1995

Soto Rivera, Roy. Víctor Raúl, el hombre del siglo XX. Lima: Instituto "Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre," 2002.

                                          Alfonso W. Quiroz