Science, teachers and universities

Deodoro Roca was a lawyer, reformist university leader, journalist and human rights activist. He is especially known for having drafted the Manifesto Liminar of the University Reform of 1918 and for being one of the most prominent leaders of that movement.

Student at the Colegio Nacional de Monserrat. At the beginning of the 1910s he was president of the Law Students Center of the National University of Córdoba and in 1918, being already a lawyer, he drafted the famous Manifesto Liminar de la Reforma Universitaria, initiated in Córdoba, whose first paragraph begins as follows:

"The Argentine Youth of Cordoba to the Free Men of South America.
Men of a free Republic, we have just broken the last chain that, in the twentieth century, tied us to the old monarchic and monastic domination. We have resolved to call all things by the name they have. Cordoba redeems itself. From today we count for the country one less shame and one more freedom. The pains that remain are the liberties that are missing. We believe we are not mistaken, the resonances of the heart warn us: we are stepping on a revolution, we are living an American hour".

In 1925 he founded the Córdoba branch of the Latin American Union founded that same year by José Ingenieros. He was also founder of the Committee for Prisoners and Exiles of America, of the Committee for Peace and Freedom of America, of the Cordoba branch of the Argentine Society of Writers and of the Argentine League for the Rights of Man, precursor of the Argentine human rights organizations, which he also chaired.

He was director of the newspaper Flecha and the journal Las Comunas where he published most of his written work.

The famous "Deodoro's basement" in his house in Córdoba (Rivera Indarte 544) was one of the most important and progressive centers of Argentine culture in the 1920s and 1930s.

Deodoro Roca. (12 mar 2021). En Wikipedia. https://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Deodoro_Roca&oldid=133918304