Rural Normal school students and the Partido Comunista Mexicano in the political history of the 20th century

Abstract

During the 20th century, the Partido Comunista Mexicano (Mexican Communist Party) participated in the recruitment and political organization of members from various educational settings. It played a leading role in its political organization, in addition to having been a key factor in the creation of centrals and unions in which students and teachers unified. In the 1930s, the Mexican Communist Party promoted some of those initiatives in association with the post-revolutionary state, which changed in the 1960s, when it did so apart from it. This article aims to show the relationship that the Mexican Communist Party had in the environment of the Rural Normal Schools, a schools setting in which its legacy continues in effect through the Federación de Estudiantes Campesinos Socialistas de México (Federation of Socialist Peasant Students of Mexico), one of the longest-standing student organizations in Mexico, which was promoted by the rural normalist teaching profession that was active in that party attached to the Communist International. Rural normal school students organized in the Federation of Socialist Peasant Students of Mexico, like other university students’ organizations, were also organized in a central office and, from it, were part of the corporate structure with which the post-revolutionary governments ruled this country during several decades of the 20th century.