Espionage and Education: Reporting on Student Protest in Mexico's Normales Rurales, 1960–1980

Abstract

Mexico's normales rurales, training schools for rural teachers, have long had a reputation for political radicalism. Their students, themselves from campesino households, consistently participated in, and often led, popular protests. This article examines the way in which Gobernación agents reported on the various forms of normalista mobilisation and interrogates the official narrative such documents constructed about these schools. It discusses various methodological uses and shows how, in conjunction with other source-bodies, a researcher may deal with inconsistences, dominant frameworks, and the agents' use of language. Thus analysed, the rural teachers' protest and the government's tactics for combatting it, enhance our understanding of the mechanisms by which the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) ruled Mexico for most of the twentieth century.

Keywords:

• normas rurales
• teachers
• land invasions
• Chihuahua
• political repression

Notes

 1. Gómez and Gámiz, both rural schoolteachers (Gómez was also a medical doctor) had long histories of agrarian organising and close ties with Chihuahua's normales rurales. On 23 September 1965 a small group of teachers and campesinos led by Gómez and Gámiz mounted an assault on the military barrack of Ciudad Madera, Chihuahua. While the attack was a complete failure resulting in the death of eight of the participants including Gómez and Gámiz, it acquired great symbolic significance and is often compared to Fidel Castro's attack on the Moncada barracks in Cuba.

Cabañas was a schoolteacher in Atoyac, Guerrero who graduated from the normal rural of Ayotzinapa. In 1967, when his long history of lawful organising culminated in an army massacre of a peaceful civilian protest, he took up arms against the government and formed a guerrilla group in the sierra of Guerrero. The state mounted a bloody counterinsurgency campaign against his group known as the Party of the Poor. In 1974 the army ambushed and killed Cabañas.

 2. The number of normales rurales in Mexico has fluctuated. At their height during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) these institutions numbered 32. In 1941 they had decreased to 26 and by the end of Manuel Ávila Camacho's (1940–1946) term only 18 remained. In the 1950s the number of normales rurales increased but would suffer a drastic reduction in 1969 when President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–1970) closed 14 of the 29 institutions.

 3. Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Dirección Federal de Seguridad (hereafter AGN, DFS) 100-5-3-64, leg. 1, hs. 413–416. Translation of this document is in Tanalís Padilla and Louise E. Walker (eds), ‘English Translations of Documents from Mexico's Secret Police Archive’, working paper 2013, available online at the Dartmouth College library website and Northeastern University digital repository: http://www.dartmouth.edu/ ∼ library/digital/publishing/padilla2013/ and http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20002992.

 4. Ibid.

 5. Sergio Aguayo Quezada, La Charola: Una historia de los servicios de inteligencia en México. Mexico: Grijalbo and Raya en al Agua, 2001, p. 14.

 6. AGN, DFS 100-5-1-65, leg. 14, hs. 246–247. ‘Estado de Chihuahua’. Notably, this is after the assault on Madera so state repression may have hardened.

 7. See, for example, AGN, DFS 63-19-969, leg. 8, hojas 227–233, ‘Escuelas Normales Rurales’, 8 September 1969; AGN, DFS 63-19-67, leg. 2, h. 159; ‘Normales Rurales’, 24 July 1967; AGN, DFS, 100-5-1-64, leg. 8, hs. 52–54; ‘Memorandum’, 15 April 1964; AGN, DFS 63-19-74, leg. 12, hs. 147–148, ‘Estado de Jalisco’, 7 Mayo 1974; and AGN, DFS 63-19-969, leg. 8, hs. 298–301, ‘Escuelas Normales Rurales’, 10 September 1969.

 8. For example, Alexander Aviña, ‘“We have returned to Porfirian times”: Neopopulism, Counterinsurgency, and the Dirty War in Guerrero, Mexico, 1969–1976’ in Amelia M. Kiddle and María L.O. Muñoz (eds), Populism in Twentieth Century Mexico: The Presidencies of Lázaro Cárdenas and Luis Echeverría, Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 2010.

 9. Robert Alegre, Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming; Alexander Aviña, Spectres of Revolution: Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside, Oxford: Oxford UP, forthcoming; Fernando Herrera Calderón and Adela Cedillo, Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico: Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964–1982, New York, Routledge, 2012; Wil G. Pansters, ed., Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico: The Other Half of the Centaur, Stanford, Stanford UP, 2012; Gladys McCormick, ‘The Political Economy of Desire in Rural Mexico: Revolutionary Change and the Making of the State, 1935–1965’, Ph.D. Diss, University of Wisconsin, 2009; Benjamin Smith, Pistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009; Thomas Rath, ‘Army, State and Nation in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920–1958’, Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, 2009; Tanalís Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: the Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940–1962, Durham: Duke UP, 2008; Jaime Pensado, ‘Political Violence and Student Culture in Mexico: The Consolidation of Porrismo during the 1950s and 1960s’, Ph.D. Diss., University of Chicago, 2008; Paul Gillingham, ‘Force and Consent in Mexican Provincial Politics: Guerrero and Veracruz, 1945–1953’, Ph.D. Diss., Oxford University, 2005.

10. For example Misael Núñez Acosta, who fought for union democratisation and was killed in 1980; Othón Salazar, head of the Revolutionary Teacher's Movement, during the 1950 was jailed and fired for organising teachers in Mexico City and, until his death in 2008, was still fighting for his pension. For a brief account of normalista activism and state repression see, Luis Hernández Navarro, Cero en Conducta. Crónicas de la resistencia magisteral, Mexico City, Fundación Rosa Luxemburgo y Para Leer en Libertad AC, 2011, pp. 406–30. See also, Laura Poy Solano, ‘Misael Núñez Acosta, un símbolo de la lucha magisterial’, El Cotidiano, 24:154, marzo-abril 2009, pp. 95–100; and Amparo Ruiz del Castillo, Othón Salazar y el movimiento revolucionario del magisterio, Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés Editores, 2008. Significantly, repression against normalistas is not a thing of the past. On 12 December 2011, state police from Guerrero shot 2 students from Ayotzinapa during a demonstration in which students sought basic school improvements such as food rations, scholarships and structural repairs. See, La Jornada (Mexico City) 13 December 2011.

11. This demonisation is very much alive today. In the last decade alone serious conflicts at the normales rurales erupted at least every two years. The conflicts follow a similar dynamic: a student demonstration demanding better food allocation, improved living facilities, job guarantees or more slots is met by an excessive use of government force. Such a response leads students to take more drastic measures usually involving strikes, school takeovers, road blockades or the sequestering of public transportation vehicles. The mainstream media decries student excesses, condemns their radicalism and presents normales rurales as relics of a distant past. As occurred with El Mexe in Hidalgo in 2006, such conflicts often provide the justification for closing down these schools. As recently as October 2012 such an episode played out in the normal rural of Tiripetio in Michoacán (among other schools in the state). For an account that outlines the dynamic of such recent struggles see Luis Hernández Navarro, ‘El asesinato de Minerva: la batalla por el normalismo rural’, in El Cotidiano, 27:176, noviembre-diciembre, 2012, pp. 19–33.

12. AGN, DFS 100-5-3-64, leg. 1, hs. 413–416, ‘Memorandum’, 20 February, 1964.

13. AGN, DFS 100-5-1-64, leg. 8, hs. 52–54. ‘Memorandum: Antecedentes sobre los distintos problemas que presentan las escuelas normales rurales en el estado’, 15 April 1964.

14. For a more thorough discussion on gender and rural social movements—including applicable frameworks by feminist scholars—see Chapter Six of Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata.

15. AG, DFS 63-19-969, leg. 5, hs. 26–33. ‘Escuelas Normales Rurales’, 29 July 1969. My emphasis.

16. AGN, DFS 9-27-50, leg. 2, h. 228–232. ‘Memorandum’, 14 April 1950.

17. AGN, DFS 63-19-67, leg. 2, h. 159. ‘Normales Rurales’, 24 July 1967. Authorities viewed the boarding school environment as contributing to student politicisation. It was here that older students worked to cultivate a sense of consciousness among younger ones. Indeed, my interviews with normalistas detail the organisational structure they would foster among incoming students to form political organisations in the normales. Significantly, it was not only at the normales rurales where authorities targeted dormitories. In 1956, the Instituto Politécnico Nacional's dormitories were closed. Students blamed this act on the state's desire to tame their activism. See Jaime Pensado, ‘The 1956 Student Protest’ in Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith (eds), La Dictablanda: Soft Authoritarianism in Mexico, 1940–1968, Durham, Duke UP, forthcoming.

18. Aguayo, pp. 50 and 92.

19. AGN, DFS 100-1-1-64, leg. 3, h. 158. ‘Asunto: Aguascalientes, Ags.’, 5 November 1964.

20. For the 1930s, for example, Paul Gillingham shows the caciquil practices of many teachers in the state of Guerrero. See ‘Ambiguous Missionaries: Rural Teachers and State Façades in Guerrero, 1930–1940’, Mexican Studies, 22, no. 2 (Summer 2006).

21. La Jornada (Mexico City) 6 August 2010; http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2010/08/06/sociedad/035n1soc, accessed 1 August 2011.