We Are All Equal: Student Culture and Identity at a Mexican Secondary School, 1988 to 1998

Abstract

Introduction - questions and methods for a study of student culture a short introduction to the methods and fieldsite historical contexts - the adolescent, the Nation, and the secundaria, 1923-1993 educating adolescence - the Mexican secundaria politics, ideology, curriculum - a brief history of the Mexican secundaria escuela secundaria federal in regional and local context beginnings - an anthropologist, a city, a school San Pablo - class, culture, and economy in regional and historical perspective social class and secondary schooling setting the ethnographic stage - the summer of 1990 and the new school year institutional contexts - the school students encountered entered ESF - the students' view the grupo escolar - competition, solidarity, equality by day, week, and year - school spaces, rituals, and routines curriculum, pedagogy, and teachers' practice gender regimes "Somos Muy Unidos" - the production of student culture in the grupo escolar my way into the grupos histories and cycles of the grupo escolar grupos and focal students the play of culture - student appropriations of equality and solidarity sites of social difference and the production of schooled identity sites of difference and subjectivity - San Pablo and environs school identification and schooled identity friendship groups, youth culture, and the limits of solidarity music, media, and the "cultural centre" at ESF friendship groups and social distinctions within and across the grupo escolar the play of gender in the configuration of difference political economic change, life trajectories, and identity formation - 1988-1998 Mexico, San Pablo, and ESF - the intervening years how focal students fared what young lives can tell games are serious - final reflections on Mexican secondary student culture the institution and the playful practice of student culture the fields beyond school - identity and aspiration unfolding. Appendices: structure, culture, and subjectivity - a way of feeling and thinking theoretical and ethnographic precursors concepts for a critical analysis of student culture focal student profiles.