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The Universidad Popular Mexicana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

John S. Innes*
Affiliation:
Eastern Washington State College, Cheney, Washington

Extract

During the early, most chaotic years of the Mexican Revolution, there flourished in the capital city a briefly successful communication between the young intellectual elite and the workers. In the Universidad Popular Mexicana from 1913 through 1922, intellectual leaders of the Generation of 1910 sought eagerly to instill in the popular classes not only immediately practical knowledge but also the signal intellectual awakening they themselves had recently experienced. Their revolution against positivism was not precisely identical with the political revolution beginning in 1910, but insofar as the official positivist doctrine was discredited, so was the old regime itself fatally undermined.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1973

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References

1 “El sentido humanista de la Revolucion Mexicana,” in Caso, Antonio, et al., Conferencias del Ateneo de la Juventud, ed. Luna, Juan Hernández (México: Univer-sidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1962), p. 172.Google Scholar

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9 Loc. cit., p. 7.

10 Loc. cit.

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14 Personal interview with Juan Hernández Luna, March 16, 1968, Mexico City.

15 Million, , Marxist, p. 12.Google Scholar Lombardo Toledano represented the University at the labor congress, held in Saltillo, Coahuila, in May, 1918, which organized the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM). At the time he played a minor role in the congress, though he did propose the organization of culture centers for the workers. Later, when he founded his own Universidad Obrera, it was for more nearly doctrinaire and didactic political purposes.

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17 All these events were reported in Reyes, , Fundación, p. 12 Google Scholar; bound in Varia (in Reyes archives). Here also are listed the corporate donations for 1912–1913. Donations from both individuals and corporations are listed in each issue of the Boletín, in the articles entitled “Crónica de la Universidad.”

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25 Boletín, II (March, 1916), 1, pp. 2–16.

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27 Boletín, I (May, 1915), 1, p. 48; it was located in the first floor above street level at Aztecas 5, an address frequently publicized in the Boletín.

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33 Pruneda, , Boletín, 2, 4, p. 153.Google Scholar

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38 Reyes listed several courses taught in the Escuela de Altos Estudios by ateneístas: esthetics by Caso, the science of education by Ezéquiel Chávez, French literature by González Martínez, English literature by Henríquez Ureña, Spanish language and literature by himself, and architecture by Mariscal ( Reyes, Alfonso, Pasado immediato, y otros ensayos [México: El Colegio de México, 1941], p. 61).Google Scholar

39 Stabb, Martin S.. In Quest of Identity : Patterns in the Spanish American Essay of Ideas, 1890–1960 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina, Press, 1967), p. 46.Google Scholar