Deconstructing Indians, Reconstructing the Nation: Indigenous education in southeastern Mexico, 1880-1940

Paul Eiss

I propose to investigate the history of indigenous education in southeastern Mexico, from 1880 to 1940. From before the Spanish conquest to the present, Mexican society has been characterized by enduring ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity. At present, more than sixty indigenous languages are spoken in addition to Spanish, and a striking degree of variation in custom, cuisine, dress and cultural and political institutions is characteristic of states with large indigenous populations, like Yucatán, Chiapas and Oaxaca. In the colonial period such diversity represented a challenge for missionaries and Spanish officials, for whom partial assimilation to Hispanic social, political and cultural forms came to be critical for the conversion, control and exploitation of indigenous populations. Following Mexico’s independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century the issue grew in importance for leaders of the new nation. Mexican leaders in the decades following independence—particularly during and after the Revolution of 1910-1917—perceived the purported cultural “backwardness” and political “isolation” of rural indigenous populations as an impediment not only to economic progress, but to the very existence of Mexico as a nation. For proponents of the modern Mexican state a single patria, or fatherland, could not be said to exist as long as substantial sectors of the populace did not share a common language or culture. In order to forge that patria, they argued, a comprehensive educational program would be necessary to instill in indigenous children the shared language, ideals, skills, and sentiments that would fuse diverse “Indian” populations into a single, mestizo (mixed race) nation. In this project I will study indigenous education in Yucatán, from the nineteenth century to the present. I will begin by exploring the intellectual and cultural foundations of the indigenous educational reform movement among Mexican liberal reformers of the late nineteenth century. Then I will examine various attempts at putting such ideas into practice among Mayan populations in Yucatán, including: schools run by local planters for the children of their workers beginning in 1911; rural schools operated by the revolutionary government from 1915 onward; a combination boarding and vocational school for Mayan children established in 1917; “rationalist” schools established under Socialist rule in the late 1910s and early 1920s; and indigenista (indigenist) schools of the late 1920s and 1930s. Finally, I will investigate the impact of indigenous educational reform on other arena of indigenous policy—notably land, labor and political reforms—that came to be centered on programs of popular instruction that aimed at the “redemption” of indigenous populations through instruction. Yucatecan and Mexican revolutionary leaders explicitly referred to those new laws and policies as “teachings”, and enjoined government agents to become “teachers” and “missionaries” in the countryside. Land and labor reforms were structured around explicitly pedagogical goals, in which indigenous populations would be taught to abandon “primitive” customs for modern ways. A long-term understanding of indigenous education in Yucatán, I would argue, may serve both as a lens through which to understand the relationship between indigenous populations and the Mexican state, and as a suggestive point of comparison with other indigenous educational programs in the Americas.

About Paul Eiss

My current project has grown out of long-term ethnographic and archival research in Yucatán, Mexico. Trained as an anthropologist and historian at the University of Michigan, I used my dissertation as an opportunity to delve into a wide range of issues from the revolutionary period to the present, including: land, labor and cultural reforms among indigenous working populations in Yucatán’s hacienda zone; memory, archives, and historical narrative; and popular religion, communal identity and labor conflict in contemporary Yucatán. As an assistant professor of anthropology and history in the Department of History of Carnegie Mellon University, I have continued these lines of inquiry in further research and publications, and have made those topics central to my course offerings as well. In a period of research and writing supported by the Spencer postdoctoral fellowship—part of it to be spent in Yucatán and Mexico City—I aim to use the topic of indigenous education as a unifying theme that can bring together many of the issues that have interested me in the past, while illuminating them with a different and deeper historical and cultural perspective.