The Ayotzinapa Student Massacre and the Rural Teacher Training Schools in Mexico: A Historical Perspective

On September 26 and 27, 2014, municipal police agents opened fire on students of the teacher training school Isidro Burgos of Ayotzinapa. The students were traveling in buses they commandeered in the city of Iguala, in the southern Mexican sate of Guerrero. The police assassinated six people, three of them students. One student remained in vegetative state and forty-three students were disappeared. Nearly five months later, their whereabouts are still unknown, save for one student, whose death was confirmed by the federal government and Argentinean forensic doctors. This massacre and disappearance of students, many of them indigenous youth who were beginning their studies to become teachers in one of Mexico’s most impoverished regions, stirred a strong social mobilization. The crimes exposed the links between drug trafficking and the government, the growing violence and impunity, and the increasing inequality sweeping Mexico, with 20,000 people so far reported disappeared. In this talk Professor Civera examines the history of the teacher training rural schools of Mexico, focusing particularly on Ayotzinapa. From this historical framework, she analyzes the disappearances of the students.
Rural teaching training schools, or escuelas normales rurales, were created by the federal government in the 1920s, after the Revolution. While historical and education scholarship has widely addressed their inception, scholars have overlooked their more recent trajectories. Conceived of as boarding schools for poor people in the countryside, the escuelas normales rurales have had problems coping with modernizing policies in the teaching profession including the federal state’s attempts to limit matriculations. The students of the rural teaching training schools have maintained their political organization, fighting against such polices. Starting in the 1980s, local newspapers criticized the political attitude of the students, charging them with being radical Marxists and with resorting to illegal fighting methods. One can conclude, analyzing the relationship between the government and students over time, that the disappearances and massacre of the Ayotzinapa students are, among other things, the result of years of abandonment and discrimination against rural sectors in Mexico.

Dr. ALICIA CIVERA CERECEDO is Principal Researcher at Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute, CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico City and founding member and current Vice-President of the Mexican Society for the History of Education. She is the author of La Escuela como opción de vida: la formación de maestros normalistas rurales en Mexico, 1921-1945 (2008), and editor of Culturas escolares, sujetos y comunidades en America Latina, among many other publications on the history of rural education in Mexico and Latin America. For more information see Dr. Civera’s faculty page.

More information about the massacre can be found on the Wikipedia page 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping.

This talk will be in Spanish with an English translation.

Organized by the Department of History with the co-sponsorship of the Departments of Anthropology, Spanish and Portuguese, the Programs in Latin American and Iberian Studies, and in Global and International Studies, as well as the Department of Education and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.

Free and open to the public.

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