Rebellion Now and Forever: Mayas, Hispanics, and Caste War Violence in Yucatan, 1800-1880 (original) (raw)
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Journal of Social History, 2022
Student activism has long been a crucial line of inquiry in the study of radicalism in the twentieth century. Most historical works have focused on the urbanbased student movements that emerged during the global uprisings of 1968. In Unintended Lessons of Revolution, Tanal ıs Padilla shifts our attention away from city-based student movements and instead analyzes the escuelas normales (normal schools), rural boarding schools that trained the children of campesinos to be teachers in the Mexican countryside. The normalista schools made international headlines when, on September 26, 2014, Mexican security forces intercepted a group of students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College as they attempted to commandeer buses in Iguala, Guerrero for an upcoming march in Mexico City. By the end of the night, six were dead and forty-three students were disappeared, with state officials claiming that a local drug cartel was responsible for the disappearances. Despite the government's claims, protests broke out across Mexico and then around the world, unified in their charge: "fue el estado" ("it was the state") that was responsible for the atrocity. It is within the shadow of Ayotzinapa that Tanal ıs Padilla situates her study of normalista radicalism and its challenge to the Mexican state. Unintended Lessons of Revolution provides readers with a long dur ee examination of normalista activism throughout the twentieth century. The book covers three specific time periods: the foundation of the rural normales during the 1920s and 1930s; the years of Mexico's economic miracle (1940-1968); and the post-Tlatelolco guerrilla insurgencies of the 1970s. National in its scope, Unintended Lessons of Revolution places rural student activism within broader discussions on the nature of the Mexican Revolution, the Cold War, and the seventy-one years of one-party rule under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI). From the inception of the escuelas normales, state officials envisioned rural student teachers as intermediaries between the state and peasant communities. Through the advancement of "socialist education" initiatives in the countryside, student teachers were tasked to promote literacy, hygiene, civic engagement, and racial immersion among the nation's largely Indigenous peasantry. During the administration of President L azaro C ardenas (r. 1934-1940), the rural normales took on a more explicitly revolutionary purpose. Student curriculum and
Organizing Opposition in the Teachers\u27 Movement in Oaxaca
1990
[Excerpt] This essay examines the continuing struggle of rank-and-file teachers to democratize the SNTE, a union of between 800,000 and one million members linked to the PRI. In particular, the essay analyzes the dissident movement's strategy of organizing to hold and win elections in union locals, and assesses the advantages and limitations of this strategy over a ten-year period (1979-1989). What were the implications of organizing within an official union for the movement's internal organization, demands, strategies, and ability to achieve its goals? This essay is divided into three parts. The first looks at the official union as an institution that structured the protest movement within it. The laws, procedures, organizational structure, and leadership of the union set boundaries for the movement's actions, shaping, though not fully determining, its demands, strategies, organization, and what it was able to achieve. The second part examines how the movement overcame some of these constraints in pursuing a legal or institutional strategy to democratize the union. This part also analyzes the gains and limitations of the movement's legal strategy as experienced by those sections of the movement that obtained legal recognition. The last part looks at how changes in the movement's political environment affected the ability to achieve its goals. This section focuses on the Oaxacan case and argues that the relations between government and union officials were crucial to understanding the movement's important breakthroughs, as well as the limits to organizing within official unions.
Paying for progress : politics, ethnicity and schools in a Mexican Sierra, 1875-1930
2004
and Three. Both discuss local politics, inter-ethnic relations and schools but Chapter Two for Cuetzalan focuses on taxation, whereas Chapter Three for Huehuetla focuses on inter-ethnic relations in municipal and pueblo councils. Part One finishes with a comparative section which contrasts the experience of Cuetzalan and Huehuetla, with that of the liberal bastion of Xochiapulco, where Mary K. Vaughan has shown Porfirian schools to have been so successful 27 I argue that the differences in these municipalities' experience of local government and in their relations with the state, resulted in different forms of citizenship. These local variations in the articulation of communities with the nation-state account for the differences in the role of schools in the community and in the educational results obtained. Part Two begins with Chapter Four, which opens with an examination of Porfirian order at the local level, focusing on the role of village bands compared to schools. This is followed by an account of the changes brought about by the Revolution, especially with regard to fiscal centralisation and the erosion of local autonomy. Chapters Five and Six discuss in greater depth the changes in the administration, inter-ethnic relations and the running of schools in Cuetzalan and Huehuetla. Additionally, in the chapter for Huehuetla, the new policies for Indian education and the teaching of Spanish are considered. The last section in Chapter Five, `The Legacy of the Revolution', presents conclusions for the case of Cuetzalan and the last section in Chapter Six, `Federal, State and Local Initiatives', presents conclusions for Huehuetla and draws comparisons with
Paedagogica Historica, 2019
On 26 and 27 September 2014, 43 students from the "Profesor Isidro Burgos" Rural Normal School in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, Mexico, disappeared, and six people died. In this article, I analyse the event as the result of long-term historical processes, from the perspective of the social mobilisation that caused the students' disappearance on the one hand, and from the history of rural normal schools on the other. The starting point is to relocate political history within the history of education in order to understand the agency of political actors in the definition of educational processes, and the questioning of the reciprocal relations of school and state. The study is based on widely diverse sources: official documents from schools, statistics, news items from newspapers and social networks, and observations of the mobilisations of 2014. The disappearance of the 43 rural normal students is the result of a long process of abandonment in the countryside, of discrimination against young people of rural origin and Indians, all in the framework of a process of state dismantling which places teachers and normal students in positions of severe vulnerability.
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 23:2, pp. 181-197, 2004
This article identifies four different responses to educational policy in peasant villages. Acceptance, appropriation, resistance and opposition to schools are considered as forms of negotiating the educational contract. Peasants contributed to education through legal and customary practices. In return, they sought to influence the terms of schooling. However limited, such influence was possible because the Mexican state had scarce resources and depended on villagers' support. Taking into account the difficulties of peasants' subordinate position, their struggle over schooling is defined as a defence of autonomy rather than an exercise of citizenship.
Contemporay Social Movements in Mexico
Social Movements 1768-2018, 2020
Guerrero has a history of poverty and repression, but also of resistance, where the students and teachers of Ayotzinapa have been in the forefront. The Ayotzinapa movement draws on the history of the teachers’ colleges, which have existed in the state since the 1920s. These colleges were founded by Minister of Public Education José Vasconcelos, with the goal of educating peasants living in Mexico’s countryside (Padilla 2009). Since their founding, these schools have a socialist and activist orientation and are active in the peasants’ struggles for land distribution. However, they lost much of their funding from the federal government since the switch over to a neoliberal economic model in the 1980s. Protests led by young adults and students in Mexico have gained significant attention in recent years. This chapter looks at the origins of these movements, which were influenced by political corruption and the war on drugs. In particular, the formation of the student-led group #YoSoy132 against presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, and the kidnapping and disappearance of 43 students. The students’ kidnapping led to a series of contentious events assigning blame on the federal government. The use of social media helped garner not just awareness, but support beyond Mexico’s borders. Whether or not this qualifies as a social movement under Charles Tilly’s terms shall be determined after a brief analysis of the events.
Two rural teachers in Durango, Mexico. From the Cristiada to Henriquismo
Diálogos sobre educación, 2019
In this paper I will explain my parents' participation in a convulsive period of Mexican history. My father was a rural teacher in the state of Durango and my mother, although not trained as a teacher, also worked as one in different places within the state. During their years as teachers they worked under threat because they had to follow the State education policy of socialist education. They were persecuted and more than once they had to leave the villages in the middle of the night. Years later my father joined the Henriquez movement, which would ultimately be defeated, and had to leave Durango for Mexico City. Based on the family documents left by my father (personal accounts, some letters and official documents, photographs), I intend to describe the vicissitudes of a couple who obeyed orders in their teaching work and later fought against the establishment through partisan politics, being defeated in the end.
In 2004, a grassroots educational change project was launched in a few marginalized Mexican public schools; it gradually expanded to more schools through teacher outreach, and is currently being scaled-up through a nationwide initiative aimed at transforming instructional practice in 7000 schools. I discuss this initiative in terms of the possibilities it opens to understand and promote educational change as social movement. I advance three discussions: 1) Re-framing learning and teaching as a fundamentally human and political act 2) Re-conceptualizing policy as a dialectical interaction between policy and practice 3) Reflecting on the role of researchers as organic intellectuals.