Unintended Lessons of Revolution

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In the 1920s, Mexico established rural normales—boarding schools that trained teachers in a new nation-building project. Drawn from campesino ranks and meant to cultivate state allegiance, their graduates would facilitate land distribution, organize civic festivals, and promote hygiene campaigns. In Unintended Lessons of Revolution, Tanalís Padilla traces the history of the rural normales, showing how they became sites of radical politics. As Padilla demonstrates, the popular longings that drove the Mexican Revolution permeated these schools. By the 1930s, ideas about land reform, education for the poor, community leadership, and socialism shaped their institutional logic. Over the coming decades, the tensions between state consolidation and revolutionary justice produced a telling contradiction: the very schools meant to constitute a loyal citizenry became hubs of radicalization against a government that increasingly abandoned its commitment to social justice. Crafting a story of struggle and state repression, Padilla illuminates education's radical possibilities and the nature of political consciousness for youths whose changing identity—from campesinos, to students, to teachers—speaks to Mexico’s twentieth-century transformations. Tanalís Padilla traces the history of the normales rurales—rural schools in Mexico that trained campesino teachers—and outlines how despite being intended to foster a modern, patriotic citizenry, they became sites of radical politics. Tanalís Padilla is Professor of History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax-Priísta, 1940–1962, also published by Duke University Press. Acknowledgments  ix
List of Abbreviations  xv
Introduction: Ayotzinapa and the Legacy of Revolution  1
1. Normales, Education, and National Projects  23
2. A New Kind of School, a New Kind of Teacher  43
3. "And That's When the Main Blow Came"  68
4. Education at a Crossroads  99
5. "The Infinite Injustice Committed against Our Class Brothers  133
6. Learning in the Barricades  165
7. "A Crisis of Authority"  189
8. "That's How We'd Meet . . . Clandestinely with the Lights Off"  212
Epilogue: Education, Neoliberalism and Violence  241
Appendix: Sample Rural Normal Class Schedules  255
Notes  269
Bibliography  323
Index  343

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