Day 1
Title: Schooling and Indigenismo in Mexico; the contrasting vision of Moisés Sáenz, Rafael Ramirez, and Elena Torres
1:00pm-2:20pm
Panelists
Elsie Rockwell, Marco Calderón, Edmund Hamann
Panel Description
With LASA returning to New York, it is appropriate to consider the continuing legacies of three key architects of Mexico’s education system, all of whom had ties to Teachers College at Columbia University. Not only does this enables an exploration of how schooling for, with, by or to Mexico’s indigenous populations was conceptualized, but also offers an early example of the international circulation of education policy ideas. Moisés Sáenz earned his M.A. under John Dewey at Teachers College, Rafael Ramirez took a short course and later offered a lecture there, and Elena Torres Cuellar specialized in rural education there, all in the early 1920s. The central purpose of this panel is to consider these three educators’ varying understanding of the purposes and means of rural and indigenous education in Mexico as viewed through the policies they helped develop and the implementation strategies they pursued. The panelists pay particular attention to the discourse on nationalism and indigenous education of all three and the theories they used as part of that discourse. Representing the desired international inclusivity of LASA, this panel, including discussant, will include two Mexico-based scholars and two based in the United States.
Elsie Rockwell
Biography
Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional.
Elsie Rockwell is researcher and professor at the Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas del Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados (Cinvestav) of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional. She received her Master’s degree in History from the University of Chicago and her Doctoral degree in Education Research Science from Cinvestav. Elsie’s academic publications focus on the teaching profession, school cultures, and writing in indigenous and rural communities. Some of her books are: La escuela cotidiana (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995) Hacer escuela, hacer estado. La educación posrevolucionaria vista desde Tlaxcala (El Colegio de Michoacán, 2007) and La experiencia etnográfica: Historia y cultura en los procesos educativos (Paidós, 2009). She has co-edited special issues of Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Paedagogica Historica e Histoire de l’Education. In 2008, Elsie received INAH’s Premio Francisco Javier Clavijero in the area of History and Ethnohistory. In 2013, she received the American Anthropological Association’s Spindler Award.
Panel Description
Divergent policies from a common source? Mexican educators trained at Teachers College and the issue of “adapted education”
In this paper I consider how Mexican educators trained at Teachers College, notably Moisés Sáenz and Rafael Ramírez, were influenced by the doctrine of "adapted education", which educators from African colonial administrations strongly embraced during the 1920s and 1930s. Through the Carnegie Foundation and the Phelps-Stokes Foundation, the doctrine of “adaptation” spread throughout Colonial Africa, in both British and French Empires. Basically it proposed that metropolitan education had to be "adapted" to the cultures of the indigenous people in the colonies. America’s Tuskegee Institute was an exemplar for guiding separate school systems for African indigenous populations in British colonies. The French version while also seeking “adaptation” of metropolitan schooling to the native populations, aimed at eventual “assimilation”, as amply discussed during the 1931 Congrès intercolonial de l’enseignement dans les colonies in Paris. Anthropology (or ethnology) was an important reference in both cases (as in the case of Mexican rural educational policies), especially the work of Malinowski, Boas, and Mauss. There are many convergences of these policies with actual reforms and practices in México in the 1920s and 1930s, and similar debates concerning the “civilizing mission”, the use of indigenous languages, rural community development, assimilation or separate school systems. However the term "adaptation" as a central pedagogical doctrine does not seem to be salient in the Mexican documents. I examine this divergence and suggest some of the reasons that Mexican post-revolutionary schooling took a different path from African colonial education, despite the common influence of the New York educators.
Marco Calderón
Biography
Marco A. Calderón Mólgora is a research professor at the Centro de Estudios Antropológicos from El Colegio de Michoacán. He specializes in political anthropology, and has published articles on the topic of regional political processes, and the “cardenismo” during the XX century. He currently researches the history of rural education, cultural change and the construction of the Mexican state in the 1920s and 1930. Financed by the Secretary of Public Education, his current research project explores the history of rural education, cultural change, and the construction of the Mexican State in the 1920s and 1930s.
Panel Description
Elena Torres Cuellar and Rural Education in Mexico
In spite of her being viewed as one of the significant figures in Mexico’s development of federal rural education under the auspices of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), Elena Torres Cuellar is little studied. In 1923 she worked on a substantial ‘social experiment’ in education and cultural change funded by the Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento in the town of San José, Morelos. Because of that experience Elena initiated contact with Teachers College and quickly thereafter enrolled, building a specialty in rural education studying under Mabel Carney (who is better known for her work in Africa). Torres Cuellar then returned to México and became the first director of the SEP’s Department of Cultural Missions only to leave that post to go into exile in St. Louis Missouri when the assassination of other opponents of powerful union leader Luis N. Morones led her to fear for her safety. She returned to México and SEP in the 1930s and played a significant role in the creation of boarding schools for indigenous students, and showed special interest in domestic arts and the role(s) of women in cultural change. The paper’s central point is to describe Torres Cuellar’s biography during the 20s and 30s.
Edmund Hamann
Biography
Edmund (Ted) Hamann is Professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education, University of Nebraska, Lincoln and has been an Associated Researcher and Visiting Professor, Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios de Educación y Superación de Pobreza (CIESESP), Universidad de Monterrey, San Pedro, NL, Mexico. He has published books, book chapters, and articles widely in the fields of education and transnationalism, anthropology of education, education policy and policy implementation, and school reform, with twin emphases on the US and Mexico. In 2015, primarily for his work with students who are transnationally mobile between the U.S. and Mexico, he was the co-winner of the Anthropology in Public Policy Award from the American Anthropological Association.
Panel Description
Competing Agendas: Sáenz as Indigenist, Nationalist, and/or Modernist
Just before his untimely death in 1941, Sáenz (then Mexico’s ambassador to Peru) returned to Patzcuaro México to help convene the first-ever bilingual education conference in the Western hemisphere that argued for the formal teaching of indigenous languages as part of public education. A decade earlier he had attempted to coordinate a multi-faceted social development intervention in Carapan Michoacán that had sought to improve the opportunity horizons of that community’s largely indigenous inhabitants. Fifteen years before the Patzcuaro conference he championed the large-scale extension of Mexico’s previously rudimentary elementary education system into all corners of the countryside, including indigenous areas. Yet it is not straightforward to see these efforts as proof that Sáenz was an indigenist, as that term has more recently been understood. Was extending the reach of the state into rural autochthonous communities truly an expansion or validation of their autonomy? This paper considers Sáenz’ conceptualizations of Mexico’s indigenous populations, of the needs of the modernizing nation state, and of the role of schooling to weigh Sáenz’ legacy, and it suggests that identifying him as an indigenist or not as one, are both simplifications of his more complex and sometimes contradictory legacy. The contradictions in Sáenz biography are contradictions that remain today. Does the champion of national development and investment undermine, at least partially, the expansion of local autonomy and self-determination?
Regina Cortina, Discussant
Title: Schooling and Indigenismo in Mexico; the contrasting vision of Moisés Sáenz, Rafael Ramirez, and Elena Torres
1:00pm-2:20pm
Panelists
Elsie Rockwell, Marco Calderón, Edmund Hamann
Panel Description
With LASA returning to New York, it is appropriate to consider the continuing legacies of three key architects of Mexico’s education system, all of whom had ties to Teachers College at Columbia University. Not only does this enables an exploration of how schooling for, with, by or to Mexico’s indigenous populations was conceptualized, but also offers an early example of the international circulation of education policy ideas. Moisés Sáenz earned his M.A. under John Dewey at Teachers College, Rafael Ramirez took a short course and later offered a lecture there, and Elena Torres Cuellar specialized in rural education there, all in the early 1920s. The central purpose of this panel is to consider these three educators’ varying understanding of the purposes and means of rural and indigenous education in Mexico as viewed through the policies they helped develop and the implementation strategies they pursued. The panelists pay particular attention to the discourse on nationalism and indigenous education of all three and the theories they used as part of that discourse. Representing the desired international inclusivity of LASA, this panel, including discussant, will include two Mexico-based scholars and two based in the United States.
Elsie Rockwell
Biography
Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional.
Elsie Rockwell is researcher and professor at the Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas del Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados (Cinvestav) of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional. She received her Master’s degree in History from the University of Chicago and her Doctoral degree in Education Research Science from Cinvestav. Elsie’s academic publications focus on the teaching profession, school cultures, and writing in indigenous and rural communities. Some of her books are: La escuela cotidiana (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995) Hacer escuela, hacer estado. La educación posrevolucionaria vista desde Tlaxcala (El Colegio de Michoacán, 2007) and La experiencia etnográfica: Historia y cultura en los procesos educativos (Paidós, 2009). She has co-edited special issues of Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Paedagogica Historica e Histoire de l’Education. In 2008, Elsie received INAH’s Premio Francisco Javier Clavijero in the area of History and Ethnohistory. In 2013, she received the American Anthropological Association’s Spindler Award.
Panel Description
Divergent policies from a common source? Mexican educators trained at Teachers College and the issue of “adapted education”
In this paper I consider how Mexican educators trained at Teachers College, notably Moisés Sáenz and Rafael Ramírez, were influenced by the doctrine of "adapted education", which educators from African colonial administrations strongly embraced during the 1920s and 1930s. Through the Carnegie Foundation and the Phelps-Stokes Foundation, the doctrine of “adaptation” spread throughout Colonial Africa, in both British and French Empires. Basically it proposed that metropolitan education had to be "adapted" to the cultures of the indigenous people in the colonies. America’s Tuskegee Institute was an exemplar for guiding separate school systems for African indigenous populations in British colonies. The French version while also seeking “adaptation” of metropolitan schooling to the native populations, aimed at eventual “assimilation”, as amply discussed during the 1931 Congrès intercolonial de l’enseignement dans les colonies in Paris. Anthropology (or ethnology) was an important reference in both cases (as in the case of Mexican rural educational policies), especially the work of Malinowski, Boas, and Mauss. There are many convergences of these policies with actual reforms and practices in México in the 1920s and 1930s, and similar debates concerning the “civilizing mission”, the use of indigenous languages, rural community development, assimilation or separate school systems. However the term "adaptation" as a central pedagogical doctrine does not seem to be salient in the Mexican documents. I examine this divergence and suggest some of the reasons that Mexican post-revolutionary schooling took a different path from African colonial education, despite the common influence of the New York educators.
Marco Calderón
Biography
Marco A. Calderón Mólgora is a research professor at the Centro de Estudios Antropológicos from El Colegio de Michoacán. He specializes in political anthropology, and has published articles on the topic of regional political processes, and the “cardenismo” during the XX century. He currently researches the history of rural education, cultural change and the construction of the Mexican state in the 1920s and 1930. Financed by the Secretary of Public Education, his current research project explores the history of rural education, cultural change, and the construction of the Mexican State in the 1920s and 1930s.
Panel Description
Elena Torres Cuellar and Rural Education in Mexico
In spite of her being viewed as one of the significant figures in Mexico’s development of federal rural education under the auspices of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), Elena Torres Cuellar is little studied. In 1923 she worked on a substantial ‘social experiment’ in education and cultural change funded by the Secretaría de Agricultura y Fomento in the town of San José, Morelos. Because of that experience Elena initiated contact with Teachers College and quickly thereafter enrolled, building a specialty in rural education studying under Mabel Carney (who is better known for her work in Africa). Torres Cuellar then returned to México and became the first director of the SEP’s Department of Cultural Missions only to leave that post to go into exile in St. Louis Missouri when the assassination of other opponents of powerful union leader Luis N. Morones led her to fear for her safety. She returned to México and SEP in the 1930s and played a significant role in the creation of boarding schools for indigenous students, and showed special interest in domestic arts and the role(s) of women in cultural change. The paper’s central point is to describe Torres Cuellar’s biography during the 20s and 30s.
Edmund Hamann
Biography
Edmund (Ted) Hamann is Professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education, University of Nebraska, Lincoln and has been an Associated Researcher and Visiting Professor, Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios de Educación y Superación de Pobreza (CIESESP), Universidad de Monterrey, San Pedro, NL, Mexico. He has published books, book chapters, and articles widely in the fields of education and transnationalism, anthropology of education, education policy and policy implementation, and school reform, with twin emphases on the US and Mexico. In 2015, primarily for his work with students who are transnationally mobile between the U.S. and Mexico, he was the co-winner of the Anthropology in Public Policy Award from the American Anthropological Association.
Panel Description
Competing Agendas: Sáenz as Indigenist, Nationalist, and/or Modernist
Just before his untimely death in 1941, Sáenz (then Mexico’s ambassador to Peru) returned to Patzcuaro México to help convene the first-ever bilingual education conference in the Western hemisphere that argued for the formal teaching of indigenous languages as part of public education. A decade earlier he had attempted to coordinate a multi-faceted social development intervention in Carapan Michoacán that had sought to improve the opportunity horizons of that community’s largely indigenous inhabitants. Fifteen years before the Patzcuaro conference he championed the large-scale extension of Mexico’s previously rudimentary elementary education system into all corners of the countryside, including indigenous areas. Yet it is not straightforward to see these efforts as proof that Sáenz was an indigenist, as that term has more recently been understood. Was extending the reach of the state into rural autochthonous communities truly an expansion or validation of their autonomy? This paper considers Sáenz’ conceptualizations of Mexico’s indigenous populations, of the needs of the modernizing nation state, and of the role of schooling to weigh Sáenz’ legacy, and it suggests that identifying him as an indigenist or not as one, are both simplifications of his more complex and sometimes contradictory legacy. The contradictions in Sáenz biography are contradictions that remain today. Does the champion of national development and investment undermine, at least partially, the expansion of local autonomy and self-determination?
Regina Cortina, Discussant