Trusting the State and Becoming Citizens: Literacy and Land Reform in Mexico

• In Event: Nation-Building, State-Making, and Mass Schooling

Abstract

Contrary to the literature on state-building and the political economy of development, public services, such as basic education, were not always demanded by the population. In periods of nation-state expansion when rural communities encountered national state authority for the first time, there was strong resistance to compulsory education. Departing from the conventional focus on elite and middle class interactions with the state, this paper instead looks at the understudied expansion of state institutions in the peripheral rural regions, where most of the population lived in isolated, traditional communities. Why did peasants enroll their children in public schools, in spite of the opportunity cost of child agricultural labor, at a time when basic education was not a channel of social mobility (in the way we understand it today); and, most importantly, when they were deeply distrustful of the state? Focusing on the case of Mexico in the wake of the revolution in the 1930s and 1940s, I argue that peasants enrolled in public schools when they perceived that gaining literacy skills would provide access to other benefits from the state. Mandatory schooling was less a form of redistribution than a form of cultural ‘conscription,’ and its success depended on the responses of a distrustful rural population, in line with Eugene Weber’s (1976) seminal study of the French Third Republic. My analysis shows that peasants complied with mandatory-schooling laws when they trusted the state, and were ready to integrate into ‘mainstream society’ as full citizens. Specifically, parents enrolled their children in school only after peasant communities received land, were incorporated into agricultural organizations, participated in civic rituals, spoke the language of ‘patriotism,’ and needed to submit written requests to the state. Using historical microdata, I find a positive relationship between rates of land reform and improvements in literacy rates in the most impoverished and indigenous municipalities of Southern Mexico, in the decades of the first massive expansion of primary education.

Author

• Manuel Cabal, The University of Chicago