The pedagogy of revolution: Popular intellectuals and the origins of the Salvadoran insurgency, 1960--1980

This dissertation examines the evolving alliance between urban intellectuals and peasants during the two decades that preceded the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). It provides a ground-up history of the mobilization and polarization that brought El Salvador to the eve of civil war. It ponders the evolution of religious and political consciousness and notions of historical change among urban intellectuals and peasant leaders. It analyzes trans-class political and cultural interactions between city and countryside that informed this process, particularly secular and religious pedagogy. It argues that during the Cold War, the endemic confrontations between the university community and the oligarchic-military regimes led to the politicization of university students and, to a lesser degree, faculty. These two groups later played central roles in the formation of the insurgent movement. Chronic repression took place during a period of widespread ideological and institutional changes within the Catholic Church and at the University of El Salvador, which contributed to the radicalization of Catholic intellectuals that first joined the insurgency.;This study also emphasizes the role played by peasant leaders in the formation of the insurgency, particularly in Chalatenango, a northern department in El Salvador. It suggests that peasant leaders had a major intellectual influence on the movement. The alliances made between urban intellectuals and peasant leaders were largely formed through popular, institutional, and religious pedagogy, that is, rural cooperative training, literacy programs, and Catholic social doctrine workshops. Throughout the decade, this pedagogy was radicalized by the structural limitations of Salvadoran politics, political economy, and society. In turn, this emerging "pedagogy of revolution" strained and challenged those structures and politics. The state's coercive response to the growing social mobilizations was matched by a state propaganda profusely distributed in the media that depicted popular intellectuals as "the internal enemy." This propaganda enabled the victimization of popular intellectuals, that is, it legitimized paramilitary violence against teachers and peasant leaders, and motivated many of them to join the insurgency, thus becoming a direct cause of the civil war.