Women graduates of intercultural higher education in rural Mexico

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Breaking Barriers: Formal and Community Education Efforts to Support the Rights of Women and Girls in Latin America

Proposal

Intercultural bilingual education policy in Mexico aims to address and help deconstruct the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000)—the racialized social and cultural hierarchies ushered in by European colonialism and capitalism—by providing geographically, culturally, and linguistically relevant and sustaining teaching and learning, especially for rural, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant students. But feminist theorists remind us that as modernity/coloniality both perpetuates and is perpetuated by gendered violences, de-/un-colonial work also necessitates “depatriarcalization” (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 99). In other words, a critical, decolonial intercultural education must attend not only to cultural and epistemic justice, but also to gender justice.

For example, in Mexico, gender equity and equality in and through education continue to prove elusive: school completion rates for Indigenous girls and women lag behind those of their non-indigenous counterparts, and more than 20% of women with a higher education degree do not participate in the labor market in Mexico, compared with around 7% of men (OECD, 2019). Thus, it is crucial to examine intercultural education at the higher education level and its outcomes for Indigenous girls and women in particular. This paper asks: What are the experiences, including both achievements and challenges, of Indigenous women who have completed a bachelor’s degree at an Intercultural University in Mexico? How do these experiences compare with their peers, both men and non-indigenous women graduates?

The authors of this study, one of whom is a white, female professor at a U.S. university and the other of whom is an Indigenous professor at a university in Mexico, employ an ethnographic case study design, gathering and analyzing life histories and educational data of graduates from one Mexican Intercultural University; methods include interviews, home visits, participation in community workshops, and examination of student work and curricular participation. To analyze the experiences of Indigenous women graduates and how they relate to gender justice, the authors draw from philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s (2003) conceptualization of the capabilities approach as well as decolonial and Indigenous theories. We argue that educational justice for women in Mexico, specifically Indigenous women, depends not only on their right and access to a higher education, but on their ability to deploy the knowledge they gain through that education in ways that are meaningful to them and that allow them to be recognized and rewarded as decision makers in their specific sociocultural contexts. We find that becoming a bachelor’s degree holder through the Intercultural University is a landmark step in women graduates’ empowerment (Murphy-Graham, 2008), often helping them become the first professionals in their families as well as facilitating their reclamation of their Indigenous languages and identities and their affiliations with female leaders in their home communities. Still, many of these graduates struggle to find formal employment in their areas of study after graduation and/or to access positions in the most respected and recognized fields, calling into question whether the feminization of the student body at Mexico’s Intercultural Universities (~65% of enrolled students are women [ANUIES, 2025]) runs the risk of reinscribing gender inequalities.

Authors

• Amanda Earl, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Jacinta Toribio Torres, Universidad Veracruzana