‘Civilising the Savage’: State-Building, Education and Huichol Autonomy in Revolutionary Mexico, 1920–40

Abstract

Attempts to use schools to assimilate the Huichols into the Revolutionary nation-state prompted the development of divergent partnerships and conflicts in theirpatria chica, involving rival Huichol communities and factions, local mestizos, government officials and Cristero rebels. The provocations of teachers, the cupidity of mestizo caciques, rebel violence and Huichol commitment to preserving communal autonomy undermined alliances between Huichol leaders and federal officials, and led to the ultimate failure of the government's project. If anything, the short-lived Revolutionary education programme equipped a new generation of Huichol leaders with the tools to better resist external assimilatory pressures into the 1940s and beyond.

The messy coloniality of gender and development in Indigenous Wixárika communities

“…Nathaniel Morris ( 2017 ) analyses SEP’s ‘civilising’ programme that took place from 1920 to 1940 in the Wixárika highlands and highlights its failure as a programme that aimed to assimilate Indigenous people, through education, into the Mexican nation, linking this to discrepancies between official government policies and their local-level implementation. The ideologues of the SEP proposed a mestizo ethnocentric curriculum and the eradication of indigenous identity, language, and culture.…”

“…As Fausto Bautista explained, people would say ‘with what you are doing [setting up schools] you are going to sell us to the teiwarixi (mestizos)’ (interview, Tuapurie, November 2021). However, according to Morris ( 2017 ), the educational project of the SEP failed. Teachers left en masse , not returning until the launch of the Plan HUICOT (Huichol-Cora-Tepehuan), a federal development policy in the late 1960s.…”