Indigenous Normal Schools: the struggle to build an intellectual formation?

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 3:45 pm - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Storywork, Healing, and Creative Sovereignties: Indigenous Pedagogies of Resurgence Across Lands, Languages, and Generations

Abstract

The enforced disappearance of forty-three normalistas on September 26–27, 2014, remains an unresolved and painful wound in Mexico’s recent history. While media attention has raised awareness and fueled demands for justice, deeper analysis is needed to counter reductive portrayals of normalista students as simple agitators. This paper situates the Ayotzinapa tragedy within the broader history and significance of Mexico’s Indigenous Normal schools, emphasizing their role in promoting ethnic visibility and resisting essentialist representations of Indigenous identity. By adopting a non-essentialist lens, the study presents normalistas as active agents of intellectual and political formation. Rather than an isolated tragedy, Ayotzinapa reflects systemic issues tied to the marginalization of Indigenous communities and their enduring struggle to assert educational and cultural sovereignty.

Author

• Raul Olmo Fregoso Bailón, University of Nevada - Reno