Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
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teacher Catherine Vesta Sturges worked at Actopan for four years beginning in 1928 before becoming a protégé of John Collier at the BIA during the New Deal.
This premier showcase of the Mexican government won accolades from the Americans for its attempts to systematize the training of the schoolteachers to whom the Mexican state had given primary responsibility for ensuring the success of the postrevolutionary integration project. If the misiones culturales launched the postrevolutionary project out of Mexico City in the early years when local communities did not yet have federal schools, it was the role of the escuela normal rural to indoctrinate the cadre of schoolteachers into the state’s melting pot project after those rural schools had been established. Much like a normal school in the United States, the federal normal school was a teacher training college for young adults, and it received lavish resources from Mexico City. In the early years of the SEP, the escuela normal rural was absent from the educational landscape. But as the number of elementary schools grew in the years after 1921, it became the hub of teacher training. It took on the responsibility of training the teachers who went to work in the new public schools, and it provided the primary institutional footprint out of which radiated the cultural missions on the training sojourns to the rural communities of the nation. Teachers migrated from their home villages to the normal school for extended seasons of classroom instruction, after which they were certified to teach in the rural schools of the various provinces. Once they returned home to their villages, they were visited by the instructors of the cultural missions, whose duty was to reinforce the original instruction that the teachers had received from the state.
Since normal schools like Actopan were expected to operate indefinitely in remote areas of the nation, they depended almost entirely on federal outlays from the SEP budget. Education professors were assigned to the normal school, where they often remained in place for three years or more. Pupils at the normal school were adolescents and young adults, many with only rudimentary reading and writing skills, yet they were much older than the four- to ten-year-olds who attended the federal rural schools, and they were expected, as a result, to maintain much higher degrees of discipline and attention to their studies as representatives of the new state. The escuela anexa (annex school) was attached to each federal normal school and served as the laboratory school for these young teachers. The normal school and annex school are sometimes mistaken for one another, but they were distinct institutions. Much as a laboratory school served as a teacher training elementary school in schools of education in the United States, the escuela anexa was the laboratory school where normal students trained to be classroom instructors under the supervision of the normal school professors. It was in the escuela anexa where theory hit the road. Ideas in learning were transformed into the practice of learning, in preparation for the ultimate test of the new nation: instruction and social reconstruction from within the federal rural school where the new teachers would find themselves in trial-by-fire situations within a few months. If things went well, the teachers would find a happy medium with the community to which they had gone. If things went poorly, they would be killed and their bodies dumped on the outskirts of the village.7
For the Americans, the most important characteristic of the rural normal schools was the system of supervision through which the Mexican federal state attempted to indoctrinate its normal school students into the regimen prescribed by the Secretariat of Public Education. The rural normal school of Oaxtepec, Morelos, was typical. Along with Anenecuilco, both Oaxtepec and Cuautla—the first city to fall to Zapata during the Mexican Revolution—lie on the same flat plain in Morelos fifty miles south of Mexico City, bounded by mountains on all sides. When inspector Higinio Vázquez Santa Ana was tasked with preparing an inspection report for the SEP headquarters in 1933, he left a description of Oaxtepec’s training policies. Vázquez left out the exact number of students enrolled at the school, but they had come from the states of Guerrero, Puebla, and Mexico, and from Mexico City. He reported that 50 percent were men and 50 percent women. Students had to be sixteen or older to enroll, and they were subsequently arranged in classes of instruction that corresponded to the first-, third-, and fifth-grade classrooms to which they would be assigned on graduation. Some students were deficient in primary skills, including reading and writing, and required an additional year of primary school instruction before they could return to their studies at Oaxtepec. Of those found to need an extra year, two-thirds were members of Mexico’s Native American communities.8
Figures 6 and 7. Two photographs of the normal rural school at Erongícuaro, Michoacán. At bottom, a teacher in training guides his students at Erongarícuaro’s annex school. Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (AHSEP), Mexico City, Mexico, Sección Dirección de Misiones Culturales, Serie Escuelas Normales Rurales, Box 77, Folder 9 (Michoacán) and Box 40, Folder 1 (Michoacán).
The teaching corps at Oaxtepec was one of its greatest strengths, according to Vázquez. “They are all actively involved in the school, enthusiastic, and come with good training.” They were primarily responsible for giving classes in the traditional curriculum, including arithmetic and geometry, algebra, Spanish literature and language, social science, and music and singing. But they also demonstrated specializations in other domains that had been deemed central to the integration project of the state. They were expected to study the native languages of the indigenous communities of Morelos, since, as Vázquez reported, a majority of schoolchildren still spoke only their native language rather than Spanish. He was even surprised to find that Spanish was being spoken in one location in the jurisdiction of the rural normal school. “It is important to take note of the fact that in the region of Oaxtepec there is to be found one school whose students speak Spanish,” Vázquez wrote. “That village is Tetelcingo. It is for this reason that we must endeavor to teach this language not only there, but in other communities of Morelos state, where it is more common to find the languages of the native Americans.” There were classes in psychology of education, rural sociology, Native American languages, and a broad range of manual arts that included carpentry, toolmaking, introduction to the manual trades, the domestic household, and basic drawing. Normal school students were expected to attend six forty-five-minute sessions of instruction every day from Monday through Friday every month between January and June, with added sessions dedicated to physical activity and rural economic production at night.9
The state maintained its leverage through the relationship between the cultural missions and the rural normal school. Programming at the normal school was modified through the cultural missions, which functioned as the network through which instruction from Mexico City could be modified in the field. “The normal school professors put into place those programs that had been sent to the school in 1931 from the Office of the Cultural Missions [in Mexico City],” wrote Vázquez. The cultural missions continued to function as a centralizing agency whose role was to standardize pedagogy as it radiated out from Mexico City. Still, local conditions often tempered this centralizing function. “These directions from the Office of Cultural Missions are always modified by the particularities dictated by the region in question,” wrote Vázquez. “We must put them to work in the context of the cultures that our students bring to them.” Meanwhile, the normal school was open to whoever wanted to visit, including the parents of the normal school students. “Some parents of the students at the school visit Oaxtepec and even live at the school themselves,” Vázquez reported. Oaxtepec was also the subject of frequent visits by cultural missionaries from other states and dignitaries out of Mexico City. “I was also there during the visit by one of our congressmen from Mexico City and when several visitors were escorted to the school,” wrote Vázquez. Another visit was made by Alfredo Basurto. “Professor Alfredo Basurto, Chief of the Cultural Mission, also visited the school while I was there.… His visit was beneficial for both the teachers and students of the school, since Basurto was interested in the technical progress being made in the methods of instruction and spoke with them about the refinements that had to be made to their chosen methods. He finished after consulting with several of the teachers and students of the school.”10
The House of the People
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