Mission and Revolution. The Contentious Meanings of Catholicism, Secular Education, and Peasant Religiosity in Mexico's Post-revolutionary Educational Reform (1910-1940)

Marino Miranda Noriega

My dissertation examines how promoters of secular education in the Mexican Rural School project reflected, debated, and problematized Catholicism as a fundamental influence shaping the lives of peasants and Indigenous peoples. After the 1910 Revolution, the Education Ministry believed that the Rural School could integrate the populations that, according to its top officials, had been excluded from the realm of "culture" in an environment defined by isolation and religious superstition. I focus on how secularization became a discourse that emerged through the detailed observation, theorization, and objectivization of indigenous catholicism as an obstacle to educational progress. Through archival research, the project analyzes how scientific and humanistic disciplines in the early 20th Century defined and discussed the effects of Catholicism, local religion, and superstition in shaping peasant subjectivity. I take the cases of historians who reconstructed early colonial missionaries as exemplar figures of an integrationist Catholic educational philosophy to emulate; educational comparativists that thought of Catholicism as a defining feature of Mexican educational potential though its differences with other world religions; psychologists theorizing superstition as a mental state imprinted in peasants by the slowness of the rural environment; and finally, ethnomusicologists and arts educators that abstracted the religious aspects of rural life from a secularized notion of peasant culture to incorporate in the national curriculum. This studies primary contribution is showing how an essentialist notion of secularization can function as a means of othering, through its articulation with categories of race, class, or ability.

About Marino Miranda Noriega

Marino Miranda Noriega is a PhD Candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a minor in History. Drawing from historical methods, his research examines how educational reform creates populations and subjects in-need of education, focusing on the first half of the 20th century in Mexico. A central theme in this research is to examine how social scientific and psychological discourses utilize technologies such as censuses, archives, maps, or tests to create objects of educational interventions, following the historical emergence of issues like illiteracy, secular education, and rural underdevelopment. His doctoral project analyzes how the drive for a secular education in Revolutionary Mexico objectivized Catholicism as both a source of Western reason and universality and, simultaneously, as a colonial remnant antithetical to the establishment of modern schooling. His research is published in Peadagogica Historica and Written Communication, and his public scholarship has been featured in magazines such as Nexos and Revista Común. Before joining the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he worked at the Institute for Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) as a researcher in the online encyclopedia conceptos.sociales.unam.mx. He holds a Master's degree in Education Research from the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Avanzados (Cinvestav) and a Bachelor's degree in Sociology from UNAM. Outside academia, Marino has been involved in collective projects that promote Son Jarocho music from his home state of Veracruz in Wisconsin and Texas.