Modern Missionaries and the Rise of Indigenous Education in Mexico. Reinventing Catholicism in the Post-Revolutionary Secular School (Poster 23)

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Friday 11:45am
  In Invited Poster Session: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research Poster Session

Abstract

This paper examines a central paradox of Mexico’s post-revolutionary educational project: even as the state sought to secularize society and diminish the Catholic Church’s institutional power, it resurrected the sixteenth-century missionary as the model for its new secular teacher. Rather than rejecting Catholic history, educational reformers performed a selective archival operation, elevating figures such as Motolinia, Pedro de Gante, and Vasco de Quiroga as “modern missionaries.” They were praised for devotion, cultural integration, and pedagogical methods—qualities deemed essential for rural teachers charged with integrating Indigenous communities. The chapter argues that this strategic appropriation offered a legitimizing national narrative for a top-down civilizing mission. The missionary, as a malleable symbol, became a contested vessel across Marxist, pragmatist, and nationalist thought.

Author

• Marino Miranda Noriega, University of Wisconsin - Madison