Mexican Rural Normalism and the 1970s "Communist Conspiracy": The Student Experience of Cañada Honda, Aguascalientes

Abstract

The history of the Mexican rural teacher training colleges has been usually associated to a history of political struggles and protests against the government, but the student movement has not been homogeneous. One of the key splits in the rural teacher training colleges occurred in 1959; nevertheless five years later, in the college Justo Sierra Méndez in Cañada Honda, Aguascalientes, teacher trainees met at the United Rural Teacher Training College Congress with the purpose of strengthening their presence across the country. The aim of this article is to analyze the dynamics between teacher trainees and the Mexican authorities during the first half of the 1970s. We shed light, on the one hand, on the strategies used by the students seeking to make themselves visible and achieve their demands; on the other, on the measures taken by the government to temper the students’ prominence. This confrontation was part of the worker and teacher movements against a government that used force and an anti-communist narrative to suppress inconformity and opposition from the citizenry.