Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Abstract

The long political history of the rural normales (teacher training institutions) has been dominated by recent manifestations of student teachers depicted in acts of flagrant resistance to the state and then further obfuscated by the outsize repressive state violence enacted in retaliation. Tanalís Padilla's unparalleled study of the rural normales, spanning the twentieth century, makes revelatory observations about the fraught relationship between these iconic institutions and the state. At the peak of revolutionary reform, the rural normales were the gem of Cardenista educational policy, representing the state's commitment to a social justice orientation and a recognition that rural education had its fortunes tied to agrarian reform.As Cold War concerns about a radicalized countryside sullied ideological commitment to the fate of rural Mexicans, the rural normales became hubs of political energy that drew the suspicion—and armed response—of the increasingly wary state. Unintended Lessons of Revolution draws from declassified intelligence documents, the press, the US State Department, the Mexican Ministry of Education archives, local school archives from across the nation, memoirs of former teachers in training, and oral histories. The scope is national, featuring evidence from most of the nearly three dozen official rural normales, but it homes in on the geographies of resistance in Guerrero and Chihuahua to mount an argument about the entrenched animosity that student teachers (normalistas) experienced in those regions. It provides the much-needed historical context for the events leading up to the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa student teachers and dignifies the struggle of the rural poor for equity in access to education.The book opens with chapters on the institutional history of rural normales, tracing a chronology from their crucible in the missionary spirit of the José Vasconcelos years to their politicization in the socialist education era and the conservative turn of the 1940s. As the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) steadily withdrew resources from the rural normales, citing inefficiencies and moral corruption, student teachers of the mid-twentieth century appealed to the “revolutionary ethos” in which their beloved institutions were founded a generation before (p. 188). The 1950s ushered in a wave of rural and working-class discontent, as strikes from student teachers and railroad workers spurred each other into solidarity and unions shifted from state-dominated institutions of control to hotbeds of subversive activity in the eyes of the PRI. The proximity and suasion of the Cuban Revolution accelerated the political urgency of the normalistas over the decade of the 1960s, a theme drawn out poignantly in the chapter on the ill-fated attack on the Madera military barracks in Chihuahua led by a normalista-campesino guerrilla coalition.If the political zeitgeist of the 1960s politicized youth on the margins, it also prompted a tightening of the authoritarian state. Padilla demonstrates how state officials did not hesitate to wield their military power at the least provocation, but she dedicates even more space to the finer points of bureaucratic violence, chronicling the reforms to the rural normal system that normalistas saw as punitive in the wake of Tlatelolco. Padilla deftly evades a causational argument that would link the student strike of 1968 to the suite of reforms in 1969–71 that effectively disenfranchised the rural normal system, but the legislation enshrined the state's official adversarial position toward rural educators. By the 1970s, the animosity had become so entrenched that an increasingly aggrieved cohort of normalistas resorted to more public, violent, and transgressive ways of calling attention to their historical frustrations and present demands. The book's epilogue hurtles through the neoliberal period, demonstrating how the rural normal system has continued to suffer a slow death by a thousand technocratic cuts.The Mexican Federation of Socialist Campesino Students (FECSM) persisted as an organizing presence that Padilla argues maintained the revolutionary mandate at the time of its foundation (1934) over the course of the twentieth century. The FECSM became the engine of political consciousness-raising for the rural student teachers, often very young and naive, in the dining halls and dormitories. The student condition and national politics became synonymous for those living and studying in these rural outposts, and in the agrarian roots of the students' family histories the FECSM found fertile ground. Through the FECSM's efforts, the spirit of Lázaro Cárdenas stayed alive in the rural normales and allowed the young students to take the state to task for abandoning the revolution's stated aims. Meanwhile, Padilla shows that even when material conditions and official commitment to the revolution deteriorated, the state expected rural schoolteachers to maintain the self-abnegating spirit vaunted by Vasconcelos's generation of cultural missionaries.Unintended Lessons of Revolution does much more than contextualize Ayotzinapa. It shows the profound power that the disenfranchised have, even from a position of dispossession, in occupying the imaginary of the state.