Reclaiming the Rural moves beyond typical arguments for the preservation, abandonment, or modernization of rural communities, analyzing how communities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico sustain themselves--economically, environmentally, intellectually, and politically--through literate action.
Focused on the appropriation of John Dewey’s ideas on progressive education in revolutionary Mexico, this book reconsiders the interpretation and application of Dewey’s ideas in the world. Rodriguez examines the use of Dewey in Mexico’s state-building projects as a vantage point to assess the global impact of Dewey’s pedagogy. As these projects converged with Dewey’s desire to employ education as a tool for effective social change, Rodriguez understands Dewey not just as a philosopher but as an integral part of the Americas’ progressive movement and era.
In the 1920s, Mexico established rural normales—boarding schools that trained teachers in a new nation-building project. Drawn from campesino ranks and meant to cultivate state allegiance, their graduates would facilitate land distribution, organize civic festivals, and promote hygiene campaigns. In Unintended Lessons of Revolution, Tanalís Padilla traces the history of the rural normales, showing how they became sites of radical politics. As Padilla demonstrates, the popular longings that drove the Mexican Revolution permeated these schools. By the 1930s, ideas about land reform, education for the poor, community leadership, and socialism shaped their institutional logic. Over the coming decades, the tensions between state consolidation and revolutionary justice produced a telling contradiction: the very schools meant to constitute a loyal citizenry became hubs of radicalization against a government that increasingly abandoned its commitment to social justice. Crafting a story of struggle and state repression, Padilla illuminates education's radical possibilities and the nature of political consciousness for youths whose changing identity—from campesinos, to students, to teachers—speaks to Mexico’s twentieth-century transformations.
This is a book with an interest in the materiality of schooling. It is focused on objects in schooling, which, taken individually and together, constitute the sites of schooling. It does not assume a fixed dichotomy between objects and people, in other words, that there is a life of imagination and action, and there are collections of inanimate objects. Nor does it assume that the technologies and objects of schooling, chained together by routines and action, should remain invisible from inquiry into schools as sites of learning and work. Instead, by drawing attention to the materiality of schooling, that is, the ways that objects are given meaning, how they are used, and how they are linked into heterogeneous active networks, in which people, objects and routines are closely connected, it is hoped that a richer historical account can be created about the ways that schools work.
Bringing into dialogue the fields of social history, Andean ethnography, and postcolonial theory, The Lettered Indian maps the moral dilemmas and political stakes involved in the protracted struggle over Indian literacy and schooling in the Bolivian Andes. Brooke Larson traces Bolivia’s major state efforts to educate its unruly Indigenous masses at key junctures in the twentieth century. While much scholarship has focused on “the Indian boarding school” and other Western schemes of racial assimilation, Larson interweaves state-centered and imperial episodes of Indigenous education reform with vivid ethnographies of Aymara peasant protagonists and their extraordinary pro-school initiatives. Exploring the field of vernacular literacy practices and peasant political activism, she examines the transformation of the rural “alphabet school” from an instrument of the civilizing state into a tool of Aymara cultural power, collective representation, and rebel activism. From the metaphorical threshold of the rural school, Larson rethinks the politics of race and indigeneity, nation and empire, in postcolonial Bolivia and beyond.
In this case study of a recent peasant uprising in an ethnically diverse region of Mexico, Frans Schryer addresses an important issue in the cultural history of Latin America: what is the relationship of class to ethnicity, and how do these two elements of cultural perception and social hierarchy reinforce or contradict each other? Examining the interaction between commercial cattle raisers and subsistence agricultural workers in both Nahua and Mestizo villages, Schryer focuses on how ethnic identities and administrative structures affect the form and outcome of agrarian struggles. He shows that class, culture, and social organization are interconnected but vary independently and demonstrates that communal land tenure and corporate structures are compatible with class differentiation and even overt class conflict within peasant communities. Schryer's data is based on archival research, direct observation, and extensive interviews with key actors involved in the conflict. His book traces the origins of local variations in legal status and ethnic relations back to the development of Indian republics, haciendas, and ranchos. By considering competing interpretations of more recent history, especially the CNBrdenas era, the author also provides insights into the mentality of protagonists involved in both ideological confrontations and armed encounters. What emerges is a detailed, comprehensive study that places as much emphasis on culture and discourse as on economic structures and political forces. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
El milagro del comienzo son las reflexiones de un estudiante normalista, las inquietudes y cuestionamientos de un adolescente que despierta a la vida, y las experiencias de un maestro rural que convierte sus primeros años de servicio en testimonios que buscan contrastar la teoría que recibió en las aulas que lo formaron con los hechos reales en el ejercicio de su profesión. En este relato cuenta lo que sufrió y gozó, lo que vio, lo que interpretó en un momento determinado de su existencia, durante la transición de ser estudiante a trabajador con responsabilidades, sin hacer de lado la interpretación que dejan los hechos presenciados, la historia que se vive, las primeras dudas éticas que forman el carácter y abren el camino por el cual se piensa transitar el resto de la vida. Sus notas fueron su conciencia, su mejor confidente y el mejor inquisidor de sus errores. Por eso no trató de afirmar su verdad, sino de comentar su experiencia.
En esta obra póstuma, Carlos Monsiváis, con su estilo y erudición únicos, recorre un siglo de la vida cultural de México, si bien, como él mismo confiesa, ésta es una tarea inacabable a la que además se suma la brevedad de la obra, que le obliga a cerrar su crónica en la década de 1980, dejando fuera los movimientos y creadores de los dos últimos decenios del siglo XX. Su recorrido parte de la época del modernismo y pasa por todas las manifestaciones culturales que se desarrollan a lo largo de las siguientes décadas, como la narrativa de la Revolución, el muralismo, la cultura en los años veinte, los Contemporáneos, la poesía de la generación del 50 hasta llegar al año de la ruptura que representa 1968 y las manifestaciones culturales que de él se desprenden.