Mario Vargas Llosa and why he chose San Marcos and not the Catholic: “A manifestation of rebellion”

In a column, in an interview and in a greeting for the anniversary of its foundation. In 2001, in 2018 and this Friday, Mario Vargas Llosa has drained his love for the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, the oldest institution in America that has just turned 472 years old, and where the Nobel Prize winner studied.

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“I was seventeen years old when I started to study Letters and Law, the first by vocation and the second for resigned food reasons. My admission to this University was a manifestation of rebellion, ”he wrote in his Piedra de Toque column, published in El País more than two decades ago.

“My family would have preferred that I study at the Catholic University, where young people from ‘good families’ went, where beneficial relationships were forged for the future, and where students studied, instead of going on strike and politics.”

In the midst of the Odría dictatorship, Vargas Llosa evoked, “San Marcos was one of the exceptions to this state of political sleepwalking […] resisted being subjugated, and, in secrecy, engaged in politics […] He saved the dignity of a country, a good part of which accepted that a caste of felons deprived him of his freedom”.

San Marcos cemented his ideals: “Many of the things that I now believe, defend or hate, had their seed in that youthful adventure. We were quite sectarian – the dogma in those years of Stalinist orthodoxy suffocated – but we acted with idealism, animated by a burning desire to put an end to backwardness, injustice and despotism in Peru”.

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“San Marcos is one of the emblems of the boom periods in national history. It is the first university that the Spanish crown founded in America, […] a hotbed of ideas and values, a trainer of eminences. That has been in her best moments, every time she revived from those crises that seemed about to extinguish her. And that should be again in the future, when and if, as in a Borges story, Peru finally meets its elusive destiny,” reads the end of his column.

In 2018, when he presented ‘The call of the tribe’ in Madrid, the Nobel Prize winner mentioned again why he preferred that house of studies. “I didn’t want to go to the Catholic School, which was good for children, but to San Marcos, because I thought I would find communists there, and I did. How we were in Peru. Few and sectarian, ”he said in an interview with El País.

Five years later, having become the first writer in Spanish to enter the French Academy, Vargas Llosa has sent greetings for the 472nd anniversary of the founding of the institution.

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“I think there are very few universities in Latin America that have such a rich and leafy past, I am sorry that I am not present among those celebrations to hug my colleagues, who are many professors,” he mentioned in a clip broadcast on RTV San Marcos.

He wished, in the same way, that this university “continue to open its doors to all Peruvian youth of different categories in all regions”, as it has “fulfilled throughout the centuries.”

Respect is reciprocal. Among the central activities of the anniversary, the unveiling of a commemorative plaque in his honor has been included, which will be placed in the Patio de Letras with the Sanmarquina Bicentennial Medal, approved by the University Council.

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