Mexico: Culture and Public Education

The article translated below calls for some historical and cultural context. My insightful Spanish teacher once commented, "First you have to learn how to read the Spanish, then how to read between the lines." These introductory remarks are intended to help you read between the lines of Hermann Bellinghausen's culture-rich article.

The headline itself—Culture and Education—refers to the quite recent passage of congressional legislation granting secretariat status to the National Council for Culture and Arts (Conaculta). Initially established in 1988 as a decentralized agency of the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP), Conaculta was put in charge of the nation's museums and monuments, promoting and protecting the arts (visual, plastic, theatrical, musical, dance, architectural, literary, televisual and cinematographic), and managing the national archives. The new Secretariat of Culture is the 'easy divorce' mentioned in the article.

The ongoing struggle between the government and the so-called "dissident wing of the teachers' union" alluded to in the article is yet one more example of a stubborn fracture between the country's political and cultural elite (los de arriba, those from above) and everyone else (los de abajo, those from below; most especially the rural underclass served by the 'dissident' teachers).

Next is the controversial 2013 Education Reform regarded by many observers as the government's attempt to regain control over the teaching ranks rather than as a reflection of official desire to implement a reform of teaching methods or a reform of the country's notoriously poor infrastructure in public schools, especially those in rural, often indigenous remote areas.  

The article's historical references aren't chronological, but thematic. Historical context, however, relies on chronology, so here's the short version starting from Mexico's Independence from Spain, confirmed September 16, 1821:

• Reform Era 1855-1876: Attempting to recover from the more than a decade-long struggle (1810-1821) for independence, the fledgling country was nonetheless strongly divided between two broad groups: Liberals and Conservatives. 

Conservatives favored a strong centralized government, with many wanting a European-style monarchy. They also favored protecting many institutions inherited from the colonial period, including tax and legal exemptions for the Catholic Church and the military. 

Liberals favored establishment of a federalist republic based on ideas coming out of the European Enlightenment, with limits put on Church and military privileges. Until the end of the Reform period (1876, when Porfirio Díaz was elected President), Mexico’s history was dominated by these two factions vying for control and fighting against foreign incursions at the same time; i.e., Mexican-American War, 1846-47; French Intervention (aka Maximillian Affair), 1861-67.

• Maximilian: Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph (born 1832, Vienna, Austria; died 1867, near Querétaro, Mexico), archduke of Austria and emperor of Mexico from 1864 to 1867, when he was executed. Maximilian's naive liberalism proved unequal to the international intrigues that had put him on the throne and to the brutal struggles within Mexico that led to his execution.

• Benito Juárez (born 1806, in a Zapotec pueblo in Oaxaca; died 1872, Mexico City), national hero, President of Mexico (1861–72) and the country's only indigenous (Zapotec) President. For three years (1864–67), Juárez fought against foreign [French] occupation under the emperor Maximilian and sought constitutional reforms to create a democratic federal republic. Juárez's followers are known as Juaristas.

• Porfirio Díaz (1830-1915), President of Mexico (1876-1911). The thirty-year period of Díaz's reign is known as the Porfiriato. A controversial figure in Mexican history, Díaz commands villain status among the revolutionaries who overthrew him, but he is something of a capitalist hero in the business community. The Porfiriato was marked by significant internal stability (known as the "paz porfiriana"), modernization and national economic growth—due in part to heavy investment in mining and railways by U.S. and British business. Porfiriano refers to features that resemble Porfirio.

Díaz's regime, however, grew unpopular due to civil repression and political stagnation. His economic policies helped a few wealthy estate-owners acquire huge areas of land, but they left rural campesinos (small, indigenous and mestizo farmers) unable to make a living. The resulting job shortage and depressingly low wages for the Mexican peasantry was a direct, precipitating cause of the Mexican Revolution.

• Bola, (lit. ball) was a popular 19th century term used to evoke popular, unorganized uprisings; hence, 'la Bola de 1910' is an indirect reference to the rabble-rousing 1910 outbreak of the Mexican Revolution that would convulse Mexico until 1917, with scattered uprisings continuing into the 1930s.

• Lázaro Cárdenas (born 1895; died 1970), general in the Mexican Revolution and an able statesman, President of Mexico 1934-1940, Cárdenas is perhaps best known for nationalizing the oil industry in 1938 and creating the government oil monopoly, Pemex. 

Early on, Cárdenas distanced himself from his presidential predecessor, establishing legitimacy and power in his own right. His administration overhauled the agrarian reform of the agricultural sector begun by the Mexican Revolution, created ejidos—lands owned and worked collectively by peasants; and strengthened the system of Public Education. Notably, Lázaro Cárdenas surrendered complete power to his successor at the end of his presidential term in 1940.

Two cultural references complete this introduction:

• 'The' Mexican Epic Novel. Mariano Azuela, Los de Abajo (1915), The Underdogs  [available in transl.], is based on the author's experiences as an Army doctor during the Revolution. Los de Abajo is regarded by many as the quintessential Mexican epic novel or, as historian José Luis Martínez explains:

“The novel of the Revolution had its roots in the appearance at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century of such works as: La bola (1887) by Emilio Rabasa; La parcela, The [Indigenous Farmer's Tiny] Plot (1898) by José López Portillo y Rojas, and Federico Gamboa's theater piece, The Serf's Revenge (transl.), La venganza de la gleba (1905)."

• Silvestre Revueltas (born 1899, Durango; died 1940, Mexico City) was a Mexican composer of classical music, a violinist and a conductor.

La Jornada: Hermann Bellinghausen*

Invoking culture with your mouth full is an old nineteenth-century habit that, in a manner of speaking, always presents Conservative (realistic, imperial, Porfiriano[1]) and Liberal sides. From the beginning, the Liberal side encouraged the idea that the young Nation deserved to be instructed, enlightened, educated. Works of creation and thought were undertaken with that perspective in mind. Members of the nineteenth century Liberal or Juarista[2] generation took on the role of being the Nation's teachers in a broad and profound sense.

This Liberal generation sought to put knowledge into circulation through creation, chronicles and pedagogy. When Guillermo Prieto [poet, 1818-1897], Ignacio Manuel Altamirano [lawyer, teacher, journalist, essayist, politician, 1834-1893], Ignacio Ramírez [writer, poet, journalist, lawyer, atheist, and political libertarian, 1818-1879], even Vicente Riva Palacio [liberal politician and intellectual, 1832-1896], invoked knowledge—they were thinking not of the Athenians but of the Mexicans, for the benighted commoners that they were.

Battered by the disorder accompanying Independence from Spain [1810-1821], the neoclassical tradition recomposed itself in schools and private salons, directing their tastes and aspirations toward Europe, namely France, seeking acceptance in the longed for royal courts .... The Hapsburgs had settled in Austria, and good for them.

There were those who dreamed of "restoring them" here and brought Maximilian[3], the first neocolonial experiment in what the 21st century now seems to be achieving—even though petty tyrants and managers are deemed good enough for the current globalism. These "restorers"—for descriptive purposes, let's brand them Conservative (they always consider themselves "modernizers")—often have neither any clear idea of who "the pueblo" [refers both to the people and their village] are, nor do the people awaken in Conservatives any interest greater than as folkloric ornamentation.

The Liberals had a stereotyped and general, but nonetheless generous, idea. Inspired by the egalitarianism of the revolutions in France and the United States, they nurtured the ideal of making us all equal. Mid-nineteenth Mexico remained overwhelmingly indigenous. Where it wasn't, it was dominated by a mestizaje [mixed heritage, mestizo] that descended mainly from the indigenous side, either for being rural or for belonging to the nascent working class that for practical reasons Karl Marx began studying in England. It all had to do with one thing: Mexicans. Plurality, multiculturalism and diversity were not fashionable concepts.

With the positivists, "scientists" and generals influenced by the Porfiriato, education and culture were concentrated in the male minority that could choose to attend Preparatory [High] School. Although by the end of the 19th century, the Catholic Church was at a low point, what it or the State didn't teach wasn't taught by anyone. The ideals of the Reforma[4] became accustomed to academicism, modernist manners and decadent bohemianism.

La Bola de 1910[5] disrupted the prolonged siesta. Moreover, to the dismay of the (more rancid than ever) aristocracy, it brought to the forefront the ignorant, the uneducated, the rabble.

But they [the people] were noticed by a new generation of painters, writers, thinkers, lawyers, composers and educators who not only noticed them, they joined or led them. Guided by the steady, intelligent hand of José Vasconcelos [Secretary of Public Education, 1921-24], they threw out the culture in order to educate the nation. This time the people came: their history was The History. 

The murals of Diego Rivera [Mexican Muralists[6]] and the epic fiction[7] coincided with [post-Revolution] labor laws and land reform. Education and culture, together, became a crusade that during the Cárdenas[8] era would be heroic, with background music by Revueltas[9]. And what did the Right do with the teachers? It turned a deaf ear to them.

Independent of the progressive corruption, decadence and institutionalization that hollowed out and emptied this "popular" discourse of any meaning, government rhetoric was nonetheless nourished by this Mexico of the redeemable masses and, in fact, held on to it well into the 1970s.

Beyond the inertia, however, education was culture, and culture, didactic or not, was education—at least in the regulations. Free textbooks were an established fact. From the office [Secretary of Public Education] occupied by José Vasconcelos [1921-24] and, later, by Jaime Torres Bodet [1943-46], they continued administering not just bilingual elementary education and literacy, but the fine arts as well with publishing projects, historical and archaeological conservation, museums, ethnological research. The two faces of Janus that the country was not able to separate.

There followed a deviant period (today's so-called neoliberal cycle, still underway) where the elite cultural sphere obtained niches of power and well-being, guaranteed their creative freedoms and economic solvency, with passports necessary for the market of prestige. Meanwhile, education itself—in the minds of its administrators, public education—is thrown in the garbage heap. The education priority passed into private hands, extremely conservative and wealthy. (It is appropriate to recognize the role of public universities in resisting full dismantlement.)

The easy divorce that the neoliberal State has finally imposed between education and culture[9] rounds off the distance from high culture, corporatized by the soft path, with what relates to the eternally educable masses who [they say] are better off with a new TV [Mexico is currently switching to digital TV and the government is providing free TVs to those on welfare programs] and a bag of cookies than with a book.

When the bottom falls out of the long, but fragile dream of fairs, festivals, awards, scholarships, complete works and retrospective exhibits, the Culture will come around to bumping up once again against the stubborn people, those dark-skinned and bedraggled hicks.

What do they think? Sometimes the people think, believe, organize and educate themselves in autonomy. It comes from below, the same as their original roots. This is less likely to evaporate into the air. Spanish original

*Hermann Bellinghausen (born Mexico City, 1953) obtained his medical degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He has been a contributor to the Mexican weekly magazines En Solidaridad [In Solidarity] and Mundo Médico [Medical World]. As editorialist and correspondent, he covers the state of Chiapas and the activities of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) for La Jornada.

Footnotes:

[1] Porfiriano: Reference to Porfirio Díaz (1830-1915), President of Mexico (1876-1911). The thirty-year period of Díaz's reign is known as the Porfiriato. A controversial figure in Mexican history, Díaz holds villain status among the revolutionaries who overthrew him, but he is something of a capitalist hero in the business community. The Porfiriato was marked by significant internal stability (known as the "paz porfiriana"), modernization and national economic growth—due in part to heavy investment in mining and railways by U.S. and British business.

The Díaz regime grew unpopular, however, due to civil repression and political stagnation. His economic policies helped a few wealthy estate-owning hacendados acquire huge areas of land, but they left rural campesinos (small, indigenous and mestizo farmers) unable to make a living. The resulting shortage of jobs and depressingly low wages for the Mexican peasantry was a direct, precipitating cause of the Mexican Revolution. 

[2] Juarista: Followers of Benito Juárez (born 1806, in a Zapotec pueblo in Oaxaca; died 1872, Mexico City), national hero, president of Mexico (1861–72) and the country's only indigenous (Zapotec) president. For three years (1864–67), Juárez fought against foreign occupation under the emperor Maximilian and sought constitutional reforms to create a democratic federal republic. 

[3] Maximilian: Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph (born 1832, Vienna, Austria; died 1867, near Querétaro), archduke of Austria and emperor of Mexico from 1864 to 1867, when he was executed. Maximilian's naive liberalism proved unequal to the international intrigues that had put him on the throne and to the brutal struggles within Mexico that led to his execution.  

[4] Reform Era 1855-1876: Attempting to recover from more than a decade (1810-1821) spent fighting for its Independence from Spain, the fledgling country was nonetheless strongly divided between two broad groups: Liberals and Conservatives. 

Conservatives favored a strong centralized government, with many wanting a European-style monarch. They also favored protecting many institutions inherited from the colonial period, including tax and legal exemptions for the Catholic Church and the military. 

Liberals favored establishment of a federalist republic based on ideas coming out of the European Enlightenment, with limits put on Church and military privileges. Until the end of the Reform period (1876; with Porfirio Díaz's election), Mexico’s history was dominated by these two factions vying for control and fighting against foreign incursions at the same time; i.e., Mexican-American War, 1846-47; French Intervention, 1861-67.

[5] Bola, (lit. ball) was a popular 19th century term used to evoke popular, unorganized uprisings; hence, 'la Bola de 1910' is an indirect reference to the rabble-rousing outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 that would convulse Mexico until 1917, with scattered uprisings continuing until 1920.

[6] Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros are the three great Mexican Muralists.

[7] 'The' Mexican Epic Novel. Mariano Azuela's Los de Abajo (1915), The Underdogs  [available in transl.], is regarded by many Mexicans as the quintessential Mexican epic novel. It is based on the author's experiences as an Army physician during the Revolution. Historian José Luis Martínez explains:

“The novel of the Revolution had its roots in the appearance at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century of such works as: La bola (1887) by Emilio Rabasa; La parcela, The [Indigenous Farmer's Tiny] Plot (1898) by José López Portillo y Rojas, and Federico Gamboa's theater piece, The Serf's Revenge (transl.), La venganza de la gleba (1905)." 

One other novel deserve mentions: Carlos Fuentes' The Death of Artemio Cruz (La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 1962), is today "widely regarded as a seminal work of modern Spanish American literature". The novel begins with the titular protagonist on his deathbed; the story of Cruz's life is then filled in by flashbacks. Cruz is a former soldier of the Mexican Revolution who has become wealthy and powerful through "violence, blackmail, bribery, and brutal exploitation of the workers". The novel explores the corrupting effects of power and criticizes the distortion of the revolutionaries' original aims through "class domination, Americanization, financial corruption, and failure of land reform".

[8] Lázaro Cárdenas (born 1895; died 1970), general in the Mexican Revolution and an able statesman. President of Mexico from 1934 to 1940, Cárdenas is perhaps best known for nationalizing the oil industry in 1938 and creating the government oil monopoly, Pemex. 

Early in his presidency, Cárdenas distanced himself from his predecessor (forcing him into exile) and establishing legitimacy and power in his own right. Overhauling the agrarian reform of the agricultural sector begun by the Mexican Revolution, the Cárdenas administration created ejidos—lands owned and worked collectively by peasants; and strengthened the Public Education system. Notably, Lázaro Cárdenas surrendered complete power to his successor at the end of his presidential term in 1940.

[9] Silvestre Revueltas (born 1899, Durango; died 1940, Mexico City) was a Mexican composer of classical music, a violinist and a conductor.

For more on Bellinghausen's last point—"Sometimes the people think, believe, organize and educate themselves in autonomy"—see Green Shoots.