Espionage and Education: Reporting on Student Protest at Mexico's Normales Rurales, 1960–80

Among the numerous forms of social protest that Mexico witnessed during the 1960s and 1970s, students from the normales rurales played a central role.  These training schools for rural teachers represented one of the most important promises of educational reform. The normales rurales were designed exclusively for the sons and daughters of peasants and indigenous people and were meant to both provide a form of social mobility and to aid in the process of national consolidation after the 1910-1920 revolution. It was these teachers who would spread the state’s revolutionary ideals to the most remote corners of the nation.

When the government abandoned its commitment to these institutions in the late 1950s, they became hotbeds of political radicalism. The normales, in turn, were targeted by Mexico’s extensive spy network. This presentation will use a selection of documents produced by government infiltrators to examine some of the themes of normalista protest. More significantly, the presentation will interrogate these documents from the perspective of how they might aid in writing about student protest specifically and rural discontent more generally. Because normalista protest was so intimately tied to wider community grievances, government agents reported regularly on the interaction between students and the local struggles they supported. Likewise, the community came to the students’ aid and rural dwellers were important participants in their fight for educational reform. This presentation will thus examine the perils and possibilities these documents hold for writing about the history of rural education and the government’s response to the protest its neglect elicited.