He read theology and earned a Master of Arts at Royal and Pontifical University of San Carlos Borromeo[1][b] In 1750 Landívar entered the Jesuit seminary at Tepotzotlán in Mexico.

[3] In 1765 he wrote a poem about the 1751 earthquakes in Santiago de los Caballeros which was published along with his Rusticatio Mexicana after the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish possessions in 1767.

[citation needed] According to the historian Ramón A. Salazar, writing in 1897, editions of Rusticatio Mexicana were scarce and the work almost unknown in Guatemala.

When Salazar was Minister of Foreign Affairs in the government of General José María Reina Barrios in 1893, he asked the Guatemalan consul in Venice to visit Bologna and find out everything he could about Landívar.

After the overthrow of the Guzmán government in 1956 there was a considerable boom in the creation of Catholic schools and in 1961 the Jesuits founded the Rafael Landívar University.