Indigenous youth in intercultural universities

Abstract

Since the turn of the millennium, so-called intercultural universities have been created and developed throughout the Latin American subcontinent as an institutional response to claims made by local, regional and national Indigenous movements and, in particular, by Indigenous youth. To our knowledge, there are very few experiences of turning an Indigenous language into a “normal” channel of academic communication. After a brief contextualization of postcolonial educational policies for Indigenous peoples, this chapter presents a broad Latin American panorama of these intercultural universities, before critically analyzing in more detail the situation of these institutions for the case of Mexico, the country with the largest experience with new public higher education institutions targeting Indigenous peoples. Most students who enter an intercultural university at the beginning tend to deny their mother tongue and to hide their ethnic identity – a very normal reaction after having suffered from discrimination throughout the monolingual secondary educational levels.