"The Revolution's Last Stronghold": Normales Rurales and the Legacies of Radical Education

When President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz shut down 15 of the 29 normales rurales in 1969, students protested that these schools, which trained the countryside's teachers, were the revolution's only remaining stronghold. With ejidos left to languish, land reform grinding to a halt, and labor and campesino unions defeated or co-opted, only in the normales rurales, argued students, their parents and numerous campesino communities, were the ideals of a more just society still put into practice.

Created in the years after the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution, the normales rurales were designed exclusively for the sons and daughters of poor, rural dwellers.  As boarding schools, often build on expropriated haciendas, they housed youth from various parts of the country, covered the students' basic needs and provided the necessary school supplies. From the perspective of the state, the normales rurales offered a willing army of educators to help consolidate the new revolutionary order. For students, they represented a chance to escape rural poverty.

But as the state consolidated its power by 1940, it found the normales rurales increasingly less useful. Campesinos, on the other hand, saw them as ever more essential and normalistas struggled continuously to protect them from government abandoned and official attacks. In the process, the normales rurales developed alliances with surrounding communities and acquired an ever greater repertoire of struggle. Through the use of archival sources and oral histories, this presentation will explore the experience of students at the normales rurales to explain how the legacies of socialist education, the students' poor background, the missionary duty instilled early on by the state, and the interactions of youths from different parts of Mexico converged to foster a militant form of class-consciousness.