Comité Nacional de Depuración Universitaria Collection [Mexican anti-communist student movement]

Mexico City: Comité Nacional de Depuración Universitaria, 1959. Six total items, including three flyers and three broadsides, measuring between 15 ½ x 11 ½ and 9 ¼ x 6 ¾ in. All very good to near fine, excluding dampstaining to four of six items, small closed tears to one item, and sig. Item #10505

Three flyers and three broadsides from a rightwing anti-communist student organization active in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1959, documenting a rightwing fixation on the university and academia as a site of struggle, felt in the United States today. 

The materials gathered here, all from July-September 1959, suggest that the Comité Nacional de Depuración Universitaria (or the Comité Depurador Universitario, as they alternately identified) was a short-lived front organization of the Mexican Nationalist Party (PNM). 

The PNM was a catholic anti-communist political party with roots in the extreme-right Catholic falangist organization the National Sinarquista Union; they opposed the ruling Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) for its secular reforms and often attacked it for corruption. The flyers and broadsides were addressed to the university community and lay out salacious accusations of financial mismanagement and call for the wholesale resignation of the UNAM leadership, including the famed future university rectors Pablo González Casanova and Javier Barrios Sierra. While calling for a “purification” of the university, the flyers also denounce UNAM leadership for its alleged communist sympathies and repression of anti-communist faculty and students. 

Of particular note in the collection is a propaganda leaflet authored by Jorge Siegrist Clamon, a rightwing Catholic student leader who was the leader of the Mexican Nationalist Party (PNM) in 1959. Also included is a reproduction of an essay written by the famed Mexican jurist and pedagogue José Vasconcelos in 1959 denouncing communist infiltration of UNAM. The collection is further of note for its commentary on the student demonstrations and riots a year earlier, when students seized and destroyed several dozen buses in protest of an increase in the fare. All together, the collection shows how the this sector of the anti-communist right sought to incorporate a critique of corruption with red scare politics while legitimizing themselves as part of a lineage with major figures from Mexican history.

A small collection shedding light on a seemingly undocumented rightwing student organization during a volatile stretch at UNAM and in Mexican politics that set the stage for the watershed 1968 Student Movement.

 

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