The transfer of European intercultural discourse towards Latin American educational actors: a Mexican case study

Abstract

This paper analyses the ways transfer of the discourse on interculturality and intercultural education, as it has been coined and shaped by European anthropologists and pedagogues, towards educational actors and institutions in Latin America. My ethnographic data illustrate how this intercultural discourse is currently transferred through intellectual networks to different kinds of Mexican actors who are actively “translating” this discourse into the post-indigenismo situation of “indigenous education” and ethnic claims making in Mexico. On the basis of fieldwork conducted in two different institutions in the state of Veracruz, the appropriation and re-interpretation of, as well as the resistance against, the European discourse of interculturality are studied by comparing the training of “intercultural and bilingual” teachers through the state educational authorities and the notion of intercultural education, as applied within the so-called “Intercultural University of Veracruz”.