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We are all equal
Student culture and identity at a Mexican secondary school, 1988-1998
By Bradley A. Levinson Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-2699-X
Chapter One
Historical Contexts: The Adolescent, the Nation, and the Secundaria, 1923-1993
How does history inform the way persons and institutions act in the present? Ethnographers have become increasingly sensitive to this question, and have tried to develop theories, methods, and styles of writing to answer it. In the field of Latin American studies, there has been an especially vital exchange between anthropologists and historians in recent years (Joseph and Nugent 1994; Levine 1993). Perhaps this is so in part because Latin American societies typically maintain such a keen historical awareness of themselves. After all, it is one thing to arm the analytic importance of recognizing historical patterns and discourses in the structuring of everyday life; such affirmation should apply even to those most amnesiac of societies-like the United States-that fancy themselves reinvented on a regular basis. It is another thing, and perhaps therefore doubly significant, to recognize and theorize history in Latin America, where the past asserts itself vigorously and people frequently articulate everyday practice in terms of the past.
The field of Mexican education provides a rich case. Schools in Mexico are imbued with a strong sense of history. Civic ceremonies often invoke events and persons of thepast, textbooks and teachers highlight the knowledge of history, and the federal State continues to articulate educational policy in terms of a revolutionary legacy that now covers nearly a century. The themes of equality and solidarity that are of concern in this book figure prominently in such historical trends. Conquests, revolutions, population movements, community cultures, economic shifts, and presidential regimes supply the broadest contexts for such themes. My aim in this chapter is to provide an account of those historical contexts that bear most forcefully on the concerns that animated student life at ESF in 1990, especially those involving equality and solidarity.
I must also explore the interconnected meanings of adolescence as they touch on themes of equality. From the outset of my research, I was struck by the frequent use of the word adolescence (adolescencia). Teachers and parents wielded the term in 1990 to explain the behavior of their charges or exhort students to a certain standard of conduct. A few brief examples will suffice to illustrate: A parent at one meeting referred to what the "doctors" say about the hormonally driven caprice of adolescence, while in another discussion, a parent expressed an oft-heard adult sentiment when she characterized adolescence as una etapa siempre dificil (always a difficult phase), because her daughter had become obsessively attuned to peer-based interaction and correspondingly truculent at home. Then, during one of our chats, the school's principal admitted he did not have sufficient resources (doctors, social workers, or vocational counselors) to deal with the "special problems" of adolescents, even though the secundaria had been specifically designed for such duty. Another teacher lamented the decrease in kids' respect for elders, saying:
It's obvious, they're adolescents.... They show one side of themselves with you as teacher, another with you as friend, and another with you as parent. They utilize and wield their hypocrisy a lot.... The adolescent is waking up now but only for his [sic] own purposes (para su propia conveniencia). He doesn't respect the teacher or parent anymore, he only has his own goals and attitudes in mind.
Other teachers and parents often expressed a similar concern about adolescents' selfish impulses, wondering if they would continue to cooperate (jalar) with the best interests of the family or school group.
These meanings of adolescencia highlighted the problematic and contentious nature of the transition to adulthood, its emotional volatility and heightened sensitivity to generational difference. Such notions would probably be familiar to most U.S. or European parents and teachers (Finders 1997; Lesko 1996, 454; White 1993, 31). Not all was storm and stress, however. Coexisting with this rather dire portrait of adolescence was a praiseful one. Many teachers portrayed the adolescent years as the happiest and most carefree the students were likely to encounter, generally identifying this period exclusively with the secundaria. In one classroom session toward the end of the year, a teacher told his group of soon-to-graduate students:
So I have seen how you all have changed, from childhood to adolescence, a very beautiful change.... [B]ut kids, when you enter the preparatoria [high school-level college preparatory] you're going to see that the secundaria was unique ... because over there in the preparatoria things are very different; there's no longer the same togetherness (convivencia) in the group, and the students don't get to know each other as well.
This was only one of many occasions when I witnessed a teacher prompting this kind of future nostalgia. Teachers tended to extol the virtues of group solidarity and convivencia, suggesting that the adolescent years were relatively carefree. Adolescence was conceived of as a safe and insulated training ground for adult roles and responsibilities. Kids could still feel free to be kids, to have fun with abandon, and postpone the more serious decisions about life and career. All this would presumably end when they graduated from the secundaria. Of course, teachers spoke implicitly to those students, around 70 percent of the student body, who would probably continue some formal studies. According to their cultural logic, it was as if a summer of inevitable fate would suddenly transform these adolescents into youth (jovenes).
Most striking of all were the ways the students took up the term adolescencia themselves. Familiar with U.S. adolescents' use of kids or teenagers to describe themselves (Danesi 1994), I expected Mexican students to employ some homologue, conceding adolescente to adult use only. Yet they frequently used it as a label for themselves, as a way to explain or justify their own behavior. The greater contact and permeability between youth and adult cultures in Mexico, and the occasional adult use of adolescente as a term of address, clearly encouraged this appropriation. My field notes record many instances: One time, Leticia and her friends, obviously bored with recess, asked me what I might do if I were an adolescente at school that day. Not long after, I discovered another girl, my introspective friend Rosita, actually reading a book on adolescentes when I stopped by her house to visit. She said she wanted to learn more from the "experts" about the emotional turmoil she was going through. Franco, a laconic boy with a seemingly permanent sheepish grin, once told me that the most important thing he had done in his short life was to serve as a Catholic altar boy and attend the priest's talks given especially for adolescentes. And students also equated adolescence with their years in the secundaria. For example, in a taped conversation toward the end of the school year, Ivan and Hector briefly suspended their jokester personae to confess that the transition they would soon make to the preparatoria was a momentous one:
IVAN: In the prepa one passes on from being an adolescent to a youth [joven] who should be responsible in his way of being, his way of doing things for himself. One has to be more responsible in studying, and to be serious with the girls, not just to be thinking about nothing but sex, but to seriously conduct a nice friendship.
HECTOR: Because in the prepa it's already about having a little more responsibility.... [T]he federal (ESF) is like a, how should I say it? like a little review, something to teach yourself, but in the prepa it really depends on you.... Here (at ESF) one is still small and over there in the prepa one gets more savvy [agarra mas mentalidad].
Frequently enough, students chatting with me would explain their laziness, indecision, or misconduct with reference to their adolescente nature. They clearly appropriated the term from parents, teachers, and the popular media, applying it to an understanding of their own educational experience. One could even say, as Linda Christian-Smith (1997, ix) comments on the subjects of Margaret Finders's study, that "students stage[d] behaviors to meet assumptions about adolescence."
The foregoing illustrations demonstrate the importance of concepts of adolescence for understanding and regulating the social life of youth in contemporary Mexico. They also hint at the active traffic in meanings between adult and youth uses of the term. The complexity of local articulations of adolescencia, and their association with the secundaria, has its roots in Mexican educational philosophy and policy as these have evolved over the course of the twentieth century.
EDUCATING ADOLESCENTS: THE MEXICAN SECUNDARIA
In Mexico, the concept of adolescence has always been a key point of reference in programs for the secundaria. Periodic reforms have often been articulated around the interrelated needs of adolescents and national development. The Mexican secundaria was created in 1923, quickly evolving to accommodate the adolescent life stage as this was variously conceived. For nearly seventy years, the secundaria served as an optional continuation of "basic" primary studies and developed a strong vocational component. For fifty of those years, the overwhelming majority of Mexican students sought merely to complete the six years of primary education. Only those who envisioned a professional career typically continued beyond primary school, using the secundaria as a stepping-stone to further studies in urban areas at a college-linked preparatoria. By the 1970s, however, secundaria enrollments had increased exponentially, and it was not uncommon to find students terminating their studies after completing this level. The increased accessibility of these schools and a labor market grown accustomed to workers with a secondary-level education, among other things, contributed to the popularity of secondary studies.
Still, it was not until 1993, in the context of broad administrative reforms, that the Mexican Constitution was amended to mandate compulsory secondary schooling. This was an unprecedented political move. Compulsory secondary education had long been the dream of some reformers, and by 1990, the Secretariat of Public Education had made great strides in providing communities with various options for secondary schooling. Few thought the provision of secondary schooling could be extended to the entire population of school-age youth though. Indeed, many primary schools were still overcrowded or, in some remote rural communities, nonexistent. Moreover, few resources could be dedicated to the enforcement of the compulsory rule, and after ten years of economic crisis, many families were in no condition to support their children's ongoing studies. Most observers agreed, then, that the constitutional amendment was primarily a symbolic measure, meant to signal Mexico's commitment to an advanced, so-called "modern" education for the further economic development of the country. Ironically, the amendment coincided with the ongoing stagnation of teacher salaries and an increasingly combative movement for political change in relations between teachers and the State. Many educational actors had become critical of the State's efforts at educational modernization, seeing in them a neoliberal program to dismantle the progressive social reforms of prior epochs. The year 1993 thus marked a watershed in Mexican educational policy and statecraft.
My primary fieldwork period, from 1990 to 1991, witnessed the rumblings of such change, but they did not fundamentally alter the historical patterns in place at ESF. I concentrate, then, on the pre-1993 historical contexts, postponing a discussion of more recent transformations to the final chapters of the book.
DILEMMAS OF EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND POLICY IN MEXICO
Carlos Ornelas (1995, 49) echoes the observations many contemporary educational scholars make of other nations in describing the fundamentally "paradoxical" character of the Mexican educational system: its two primary mandates are to form citizens and human capital. These mandates imply rather different kinds of educational priorities that have not been easily melded into a coherent educational policy. Annette Santos del Real (1996a, 1) and Yolanda Navarro (1996) have noted, moreover, that the Mexican secundaria, adamantly opposed to differentiated academic tracking, still attempts to reconcile two related yet distinct goals: preparing youth for the immediate demands of the labor market and for professional studies. Insofar as secondary education is thus conceived of as both formative and vocational, both preparatory and terminal, it attempts to navigate a difficult middle course.
The dilemmas of Mexican education at its present level of development and differentiation are not unlike those encountered in many other parts of the world. Secondary structures and curricula around the globe attempt to address diverse educational goals. In former colonial nations, especially, the postprimary years are often utilized to accomplish both work training and advanced academic preparation. What makes Mexico different, perhaps unique? In Mexico, three distinct cultural formations, which have tugged and pulled at one another throughout the modern period, can be identified. Following Larissa Adler Lomnitz, Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, and Ilya Adler (1993), I would call one the "hierarchical holism" of the Mexican political body, traceable to the Spanish colonial state, but perhaps best represented by the "Conservative" political tradition of the early nineteenth century. Hierarchical holism describes a social system in which proper relations of authority, rooted ultimately in ecclesiastical and patriarchal imperatives, sustain the organic hierarchy of the "body" of God and his earthly appointments. While this formation typifies the Spanish colonial structure, it also draws from the hierarchical model of the largest indigenous pre-Hispanic polities. Another cultural formation would be that which emerged from the "Liberal" political tradition, with its principles of private property, individual initiative, rational progress, and formal equality before the law (Hale 1972; Mallon 1995). The third, in effect a kind of uneasy synthesis of the other two, would be the tradition of revolutionary nationalism forged in the early part of the twentieth century, with its emphasis on collective solidarity and substantive equality. Revolutionary nationalism, itself the product of ongoing negotiations between the postrevolutionary State and local forces (Joseph and Nugent 1994; Mallon 1995; Vaughan 1997), has in turn undergone numerous permutations. One place that the evolving expression of revolutionary nationalism can be charted is in the structure and philosophy of the national school system.
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