Cultural Politics In Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, And Schools In Mexico, 1930-1940

by Mary Kay Vaughan

When Indian communities of Chiapas, Mexico, rose in armed rebellion in 1994, they spoke boldly of values, rights, identities, and expectations. Their language struck a chord for most Mexicans, for it was the cultural legacy of the Revolution of 1910. Of all the accomplishments of the Mexican Revolution, its cultural achievements were among its most important. The Revolution's cultural politics accounts in part for the relative political stability Mexico enjoyed from 1940 through 1993 and underlies much of the discourse accompanying the tumultuous transitions in that country today. To show the significance of this facet of the Revolution, Mary Kay Vaughan here analyzes the educational effort of the state during the 1930s, locating it within the broader sweep of Mexican history to illustrate how the government sought to nationalize and modernize rural society. Vaughan focuses on activities in rural schools, where central state policy makers, teachers, and people of the countryside came together to forge a national culture. She examines the cultural politics of schooling in four rural societies in the states of Sonora and Puebla that are representative of the peasant societies in revolutionary Mexico, and she shows how the state's program of socialist education became an arena for intense negotiations over power, culture, knowledge, rights, and gender practices. The real cultural revolution, Vaughan observes, lay not in the state's efforts at socialist education but in the dialogue between state and society that took place around this program. In the 1930s, rural communities carved out a space to preserve their local identities while the state succeeded in nurturing a multi-ethnic nationalism based on its promise of social justice and development. Vaughan brings to her analysis a comparative understanding of peasant politics and educational history, extensive interviews, and a detailed examination of national, regional, and local archives to create an evocative and informative study of Mexican politics and society during modern Mexico's formative years. Cultural Politics in Revolution clearly shows that only by expanding the social arena in which culture was constructed and contested can we understand the Mexican Revolution's real achievements.

Genres: Latin American History, History

262 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1997

About the author

Mary Kay Vaughan is Professor of History Emerita at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zúñiga and Mexico City’s Rebel Generation; Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–40, winner of both the Conference on Latin American History's Bolton Prize and the Latin American Studies Association's Bryce Wood Award, and a coeditor of Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico and The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940.

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Kay Vaughan seeks to analyze the negotiations of culture and policy between the socialist state, teachers, and peasants in Mexico between 1930 and 1940. However, Vaughan consistently ties the decade into the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the consequences of the 1917 Constitution. Through a post revisionist lens, Vaughn questions the state's strength, as demonstrated through negotiations at the local and regional levels and the homogeneity of the rural peasantry. To explore this question, Vaughan uses rural schools as an example where negotiations played out and multiculturalism challenged homogeneity.
Vaughan limits her study to four cases in Puebla and Sonora's states, which she claims are broadly representative of peasant communities during the Mexican Revolution. Each area’s social, ethnic, and previous revolution participation worked to shape education policies’ implementation. For example, the Yaquis Indians of the right bank in Sonora, who fought the Mexican state in the nineteenth century, remained tied to their own hierarchies and culture, rejecting the Ministry of Education’s (SEP) schooling policies. In contrast, in societies on the Yaqui river's left bank, the mestizo population negotiated schools as inclusive and multicultural, representing a continuation of their nineteenth-century exposure to a promising change. For these groups, schools represented a path to modernity and a better future. Vaughan demonstrates the successful school policy through increased literacy rates and the construction of community and identity.
Vaughan’s focus on peasants and negotiations is key to her argument. If she pulled salient anecdotes and quotes from peasant teachers and students, her argument could be strengthened. Although she discusses in detail the process of stitching together peasant scripts, more direct evidence, if available, would allow peasant voices to speak for themselves. However, there is no doubt that Vaughan does an expert job in demonstrating peasant agency through negotiations of policy and culture.