Mexico, Multicultural Education in

Implicit Multiculturalism? The Legacy of Postrevolutionary Indigenismo

In Mexico, the persistence of ethnically differentiated populations as such expresses the contradictory continuity of processes of colonization and resistance, whose origins date back to the beginnings of European expansion in the Americas. The colonial system of “castes” of Spaniards and Indians is not challenged by the new criollo (Mexicans of Spanish origin) elites who accessed political power in the course of the independence wars. It was not until the Mexican Revolution of 1910 that for the first time the colonial ethnic hierarchies are challenged. Under the influence of the Ateneo de la Juventud—a prerevolutionary group of urban intellectuals engaged in redefining the “national project”—the exclusive and Eurocentric criollo nationalism of the postcolonial elites is replaced by an integrationist nationalist discourse. This discourse is increasingly centered around the notion of mestizaje, according to which the emerging Mexican nation of the contemporary epoch will be the product of the merging of the precolonial indigenous with the colonial European and criollo element. The resulting mestizo, who until then had been perceived only as the illegitimate result of the forbidden border crossing between the castes, is not any longer seen as a “biological bastard,” but as a new “cosmic race” (Vasconcelos), the seed and symbol of the new, postrevolutionary nation.

Paradoxically, however, the success of the Mexican Revolution in practice implied the defeat of the indigenous communities and their claims. Indigenous actors had been participating in the revolution in order to restore control of their communal lands and resources, which had been lost during the “modernizing” and “liberalizing” reforms of the late-19th-century regimes. It is precisely in these indigenous regions where participation in the Mexican Revolution was highest. Local indigenous actors engaged in the armed struggle either to regain communal land or to obtain new land from former hacienda estates. The military defeat of the zapatistas—the southern Mexican [Page 1485]indigenous communities who had struggled not only for recovering communal lands, but also for community-based, decentralized political organization of the state—also symbolizes the formal victory of the centralist, state-led model of agrarian and political reform over the community-based model.

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