Mexico, Intercultural Universities in

Institutional Coverage and Intercultural Approach

As part of the CGEIB's main objective of providing culturally and linguistically pertinent education for indigenous peoples, the higher education program [Page 1481]responds to two different existing gaps in the educational coverage for Mexico's 68 indigenous peoples, who make up approximately 10% of the overall Mexican population: the institutional coverage gap, on the one hand, and the interculturality gap, on the other hand.

With regard to institutional coverage, Mexico's universities reflect the conventional bias of any Western, European-inspired university system: Colleges and universities are concentrated in urban, not rural regions, and they target mestizo (non-indigenous), not indigenous students. Only very few agricultural universities, particularly the Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, and some teacher-training institutions, led by the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, have developed and maintain decentralized campuses, which shorten geographical distance for indigenous students. Apart from these exceptions and from some macro-universities that are trying to decentralize their teaching and research activities, Mexican higher education remains strongly centralized, urban, and focused on conventional, Western notions of university careers and study programs. Because access to higher education is thus extremely difficult for indigenous students, their enrollment percentage is very low (estimations vary from 1% to 2% of all Mexican students). Even those indigenous students who due to rural–urban migration processes finally succeed in entering an urban baccalaureate program face huge academic difficulties, as they have very frequently evolved through a precarious and badly qualifying elementary and postelementary school system. After primary education, schooling is limited in many indigenous communities to so-called telesecundarias and telebachilleratos, in which a single teacher covers the whole group of students and guides a centralized, television-based distance instruction.

Second, the institutional coverage gap is closely linked to an interculturality gap that results from the Mexican traditional policy of indigenismo. As part of this long-lasting governmental policy of integrating indigenous peoples into Mexican society, a so-called bilingual indigenous education system was created at the end of the 1970s. This system responds in part to indigenous leaders' demands for a bilingual and bicultural education and partly reflects new efforts of indirect Hispanization through the use of the indigenous languages. After decades of struggle between federal indigenismo institutions and indigenous organizations, this system—currently called “intercultural and bilingual education”—provides nursery, primary, and increasingly postprimary education for rural indigenous communities through schools that are parallel to the conventional schools and that complement the national unified and centralized curriculum, with some classes in the region's indigenous language.

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