By: Roman Gurrola –
Part 1: Introduction
This short essay seeks to contextualize the events of September 26th and 27th, 2014 where students from the rural school of Ayotzinapa were murdered and forcefully disappeared by Mexican Army elements. It provides a brief historical precedent to the events calling into question what has been assessed as Mexico’s revolutionary process in a false periodization of armed struggle and consequential peaceful modernization, albeit moderate repression. Using Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s conceptualization of de-Indianization, I will argue that Mexico’s mestizo led formation of the state continues its genocidal project against Indigenous communities. Using historian Adolfo Gilly’s understanding of the ‘interruption’ of the Mexican Revolution, I will argue that although rural, mainly Indigenous communities of the rural schools like Ayotzinapa have been targets of the officially Revolutionary, socialist, modernizing national state project. Normalistas, or students of the rural schools, have situated themselves in continuation of the revolutionary project of agricultural reform and democratic participation of the Mexican Revolution. Threatened by the growth and prosperity of Rural schools where the Normalistas, in Tanalis Padilla’s analysis author of Rural Resistance In The Land of Zapata, the Mexican state has created a narrative of criminalization, which constructed the Normalistas into enemies of state, which allowed for their identification, persecution, torture and disappearance. Normalista life, as that of Indigenous people, workers, and rural communities at large, has been targeted for social death for decades, and Guerrero has been an epicenter of these struggles.
- The normales in Mexican statecraft
The normales are a product of the Mexican Revolutionary process and institutionalization. Their reason for being established was in order to engage rural communities with state sponsored programs of de-Indianization, of “social diffusion,” health campaigns, popular education, “against alcoholism and superstitious practices,” for physical education programs, to introduce modern ways of working the land and increase production, beautification of communities and to shift attitudes against women.
The state sought to impose a modernistic, developmentalist culture to regulate rural and indigenous communities, to intervene in gender and popular education patterns, as well as to provide public space for beautification and health projects in which the mobilization of the population was required. Also included in the state-rural community relations are the implementation of Committees for Justice and Good Governance, as part of the curriculum, to act as regulatory bodies in mediating conflict, creating a space for the administration of the schools at the local level, and the selection of student leaders as community leaders engaged not only in curriculum related matters but as catalysts of politicization.
Socialist education sought to exclude “all religious doctrine, combat fanaticism and prejudice, for which the school will organize its curriculum and activities in ways that will permit the youth a rational and exact concept of the universe and social life.” In effect, a socialist worldview was imparted, nominally, onto the students, as a way to introduce mechanism to combat indigenous practices, but also as a way to create space for the student to locate him/herself in the broader context of statecraft.
This revolutionary nationalist socialist project did result in the creation of stronger student-community relations, in allowing a minimal space for students to voice not only school related demands (funding, infrastructural, supplies, technology related ones) but also aided and assisted the radicalization of communities through a merger between traditional indigenous and rural forms of organization and self-representation with class analysis and a clearer socio-economic philosophy which allowed the communities related to the schools, such as Ayotzinapa, to be able to locate themselves within broader capitalist and imperial trajectories. Although socialist ideals were implemented in the school to de-Indianize, they eventually were transformed by residents into a socialism in tandem with a cultural resistance of rural and indigenous life, of the campesinos as subjects against the project of the state, and as such, symbol and reality of the failure of the inherently racist mestizo and Eurocentric state to transform residents into its modern subjects.
What resulted from the state interventionist project shows both the vulnerable and marginalized social zones of indigenous and rural communities in Mexico’s modernization process as well as their pivotal role as zones of exteriority to the totalizing project of national subsumption of Indigenous and rural lifestyles. Through political education implemented in the schools, pupils and community residents have understood their problematic relationship to the state and its leaders, on the one hand residents feel the revolution is unfinished while on the other they asses themselves as part of the evolving history of Mexico through incorporations of revolutionary and nationalist leaders into their curriculum, practices, and visual-mural depictions, some of which were guerrillas.
Cultivando Consciousness | Cultivating Consciencia 