"Wild Indians," "Mexican Gentlemen," and the Lessons Learned in the Casa del Estudiante Indigena, 1926-1932

Introduction

In their zeal to transform rural society during the 1920s, Mexican educators undertook a number of projects that in retrospect seem unusual. Fancying themselves as the intellectual heirs of the earliest Catholic friars, they sent "missionaries" into the countryside to preach the gospel of progress, developed rigid definitions of the appropriate forms of rural living, and even taught school children in Mexico City to paint according to pre-Colombian styles in order to build a harmonious nation. ¹ These were indeed creative ideas, but none was more imaginative than the decision to establish a Rural Normal School in the midst of the largest urban center in the country. Established in the Anáhuac neighborhood of Mexico City in 1926, the Casa del Estudiante Indígena was hailed as the centerpiece of the government's commitment to Indian education. Inside the Casa a culturally diverse student population, speaking mutually unintelligible languages, would be transformed into models of the national culture. They would adopt modern dress and practices, learn perfect Spanish, and in turn bring the benefits of modernity to their home communities.

During its seven-year life span, 838 students, mostly indigenous youths from the furthest reaches of the country, participated in this experiment in Indian education. Like many experiments though, it provided a number of unforeseen results. Planners envisioned a school where students would undergo a simple unidirectional process of assimilation, but as time passed the Casa proved to be a much more ambiguous project. It was entrusted with disproving the racial alterity of the Indian, but simultaneously fixed the racial differences between Indians, whites, and mestizos. The school also had the dual purpose of turning Indians into sophisticated urban gentlemen, while training them as rural teachers who would have lives typified by the absence of all those comforts they came to know in the city. Though these apparent contradictions would eventually contribute to the school's demise, they also created a unique context in which teachers, administrators, outside observers, and students would contribute to the process of race-making and state formation in post-revolutionary Mexico.

By 1932 a new Indian subject had emerged within the Casa. While not completely invested with the full political rights of citizenship, these individuals offered a stark contrast to the racial stereotypes that generally circulated in Mexico. They excelled in their studies, succeeded in promoting their own professional interests, and provided striking examples of the capacity of the Indian for assimilation. Moreover, through their participation, protests, and responses to the demands placed upon them by their superiors, these Indian subjects also played a significant role (if unequal to that of administrators) in determining the future direction of indigenous education.

The men who founded the Casa were the intellectual heirs of a particularly violent era of Indian-state relations. Educated in the positivism of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, and the theories of Cornelius Depauw, Arthur de Gobineau, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, most nineteenth century liberals believed that many of Mexico's problems lay in the racial inferiority of the Indian. While homogenous European states prospered, Indian-dominated Mexico was mired in barbarity and political instability, and Indian blood thus needed to be eliminated, or at the very least diluted. Following these beliefs, nineteenth-century federal policies ranged from simple abandonment to genocide, the most notorious case being the expulsion of the Yaqui from Sonora and their enslavement on the henequen estates of the Yucatán during the Porfiriato (1876-1911). ² Those who denied the Indian's racial inferiority, like Justo Sierra, lacked the confidence and authority have much impact, and as a result the period saw few efforts to educate or emancipate indigenous peoples. Most simply rationalized abuses by claiming that the inert and declining Indian population was not really worthy of aid. ³

Nearly...