"Hacer el hombre mas hombre": Fundamental Education, Deficit Perspectives, Gender, and Indigenous Survivance in Mexico

• In Event: Indigenous survivance in schooling contexts
  In Paper Session: Indigenous Survivance in Schooling Contexts

Abstract

Under UNESCOs global mission, the CREFAL (Centro de Cooperación Regional para la Educación de Adultos en América Latina y el Caribe), hosted educators from throughout the Americas to study and intervene through fundamental education programs in Michoacán's Indigenous communities to implement agricultural, hygienic, arts, civic, and adult literacy projects. These projects have been praised for promoting improvement of the human condition through citizen incorporation. In this paper, we rethink how fundamental education projects often viewed Indigenous communities in deficit and were implemented as “experimental” interventions with mixed goals. Our analysis focuses on: CREFAL’s extractivist research in Nocutzepo, counternarratives about CREFAL in the pueblo, and the missing voices of women in Vasquez Rivera’s 1960 thesis about three families in Nocutzepo.

Authors

• Luis Urrieta, The University of Texas at Austin

• Judith Landeros, The University of Texas at Austin