Anticolonialism in the Classroom: The Institutionalization of Mexican Multicultural Education Reform, 1977–85

At the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, Mexico witnessed a nation-wide dissident teacher trade union movement. Teacher activists simultaneously challenged the corrupt and undemocratic leadership of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE), the largest union in the Americas, as well as rising policies of austerity in Mexico. This dissident movement formed part of a larger civil society movement to democratize a country ruled by a one-party political system for much of the twentieth century. Concomitant with the dissident teacher trade union movement were the efforts of policy makers and grassroots activists to transform the indigenous education sector. In what was part of a global turn toward cultural and human rights frameworks, officials in the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) and the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) shifted their policies toward a more robust multiculturalism. Federal education authorities institutionalized bilingual instruction (instruction in Native languages as well as Spanish) in primary schools and INI officials began to train indigenous linguists to serve as leaders in community development and alternative education initiatives. Institutionally, the INI embraced the concept of etnodesarrollo (ethnic development) as a way to center indigeneity in their development agenda. At the grassroots level, bilingual teachers in the southern state of Oaxaca also moved toward more culturally pluralist pedagogies and education models. This paper analyzes this period of education reform in Mexico through archival and ethnographic research in the southern state of Oaxaca. In doing so it emphasizes the continuities between the multicultural turn of the 1980s and the New left and Third-Worldist politics of previous decades.