The walls of Mexico’s
normales rurales, training schools for the countryside’s teachers, are covered with similarly themed murals. Pained by student committees, activist groups, and local artists, the images depict rural education’s early origins, teachers as protagonists in the nation-building project, popular struggles waged by peasants, workers, indigenous people and students, instances of state repression, and portraits of national and international guerilla leaders. Communist insignia such as the hammer and sickle as well as images of Marx, Lenin and Engels are ubiquitous. The Mexican Federation of Socialist Campesino Students (FECSM by its Spanish acronym), founded in 1935 to advocate for the interests of these schools, mediates much of the artistic production and is itself visually represented on many campus walls. My presentation will analyze the dozens of murals that adorn each of Mexico’s 17
normales rurales in the context of the schools’ history, tradition of political militancy, self-conception, and national education policy.
Established in the 1920s to train teachers for the Mexican countryside, normales rurales were made exclusively for the sons and daughters of poor, rural dwellers and aimed to form community leaders as much as teachers. Their condition as boarding schools offering the basic material conditions necessary to study made normales rurales especially attractive to families whose hand-to-mouth existence, labor needs, and remote locations, made access to education beyond the first grades, a virtual impossibility. While conditions in Mexico and at these institutions have changed in the century since their founding, they remain schools for the poor with a radical political tradition. My presentation will explore the murals’ visual narrative contextualizing it within the schools’ century-long history, one I have written based on archival and oral testimonies.
