On August 31, 1534, Spanish evangelist, writer and revered Franciscan leader in New Spain, Father Martin de Valencia, collapsed on the wharf at Ayatzingo, and died. August 9, 2013, Mexican students here returned to school. There’s a gnarled connection between the two.
Valencia was the leader of “The Twelve” — friars who were chosen to answer Hernan Cortes‘ petition to Spanish religious authorities to send missionaries to begin the conversion and education of “los indios.” By this he had in mind the spiritual conquest of New Spain.
The Twelve arrived in Veracruz, May 13, 1524. Characteristic of Franciscans of that era, they walked barefoot — obeying their their vow of poverty — the rough trail from Veracruz to Mexico City.
But The Twelve weren’t the first friars to arrive in New Spain in response to Cortes’ request. The first three Franciscans, arriving in 1522, were Flemish. But Cortez was not fond of Flemish Catholics, especially King Charles V’s “cast off bastard” relative, Pedro de Gante. Cortez sent them to the ruined fringes of Tenochtitlan. Gante, however, was just what Cortez — and New Spain — needed.
The Mexica after their downfall, lived in a spiritual and cultural vacuum. They tended to shun the teachings of, even contact with, Spanish friars. Gante hurriedly learned Nahuatl — getting to other dialects later. By 1524 he was busy conducting classes of catechism and dogma to young boys. Soon he founded the famous school of San Pedro de los Naturales, said to be New Spain’s first school. There, the Franciscans eventually gave hundreds of Mexica youths a primary education, as well as teaching Latin, music and other academic subjects. The boys’ elders, usually attending night school, were turned into the colony’s painters, sculptors, carpenters, blacksmiths, builders.
It was said that Gante personally supervised the building of some one hundred churches and chapels. When Friar Martin asked what he had accomplished in the new world, Gante said: “I never learned the theology of Saint Augustin, but the theology of the Indian languages.”
The next dramatic educational occurrence sprang from what many believed was the end of the 1910 Revolution, during the presidency of General Alvaro Obregon (1920-’24), who appointed Jose Vasconcelos, one of Mexico’s “most illustrious men of letters” as secretary of education. Vasconcelos became the “patron” of the rural school. Obregon gave education a lush budget, and Vasconcelos began sending dedicated, freshly minted teachers into hundreds pueblos to teach a basic curriculum: reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, Mexican history.
These teachers had be to both dedicated and brave. The remote pueblos where they taught were three or more days ride by horseback from the nearest railroad. It was “rural exile” for city-bred young men, living very much alone without electricity, often with little water in the dry season. Often they were not welcomed by rural people unprepared to change their ways, nor by local priests who, despite the reforms of the new Constitution, believed education the purview of the Church. Some teachers were killed, others run out of town. They were to give children as much education as quickly as possible; the economic realities of the campo meant that youngsters would get only a few years of school.
Vasconcelos wanted to incorporate indios also into what he called the Raza Cosmica. And he closely followed many of the methods of the Catholic missionaries. This vast effort was supported by almost 2,000 public libraries, and stocked with government-printed primary books. Vansconcelos persuaded artist friends — Diego River, Jalisco’s Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, among others — to paint murals everywhere. They weren’t for the critics, he said, they were for people who could not read easily. Yet they became world famous.
Obregon was followed into the presidency by a friend, General Plutarco Calles (1924-’28). Calles was politically cunning, but not politically astute. He became an anti-Catholic dictator, a circumstance that tore apart Obregon’s educational revolution. When Obregon was assassinated July 17, 1928, Calles resigned, declaring that the era of generals as presidents was over. But Calles personally choose his four successors, making a huge mistake with his last choice.
Former Revolutionary general Lazaro Cardenas had been governor of Michoacan, where he listened more than he talked when citizens came to him with problems. As Calles and his puppets shirked national educational needs, Cardenas opened some one hundred new rural schools, and later returned to inspect the function of many classrooms.
But as improved medical care gradually reached into the campo, the Republic experienced a population boom. Though most, but not all, of Cardenas’ successors tried to make education a priority, by 1960, as the government extolled the success of its war against illiteracy, the real numbers undermined such a claim. One historian noted in 1960 there were more illiterates in Mexico (13,200,000) than at the time of Francisco Madero’s Plan de San Luis Potosi. When the 1910 Revolution broke out there were only 11,658,000 illterates. Yet during the presidency of Manuel Avila Comacho, 1940-’46, pages of most books and particularly of cheap magazines, and funny books were stamped with the slogan “Each one teach one.” This could still be found on 1960’s reading material.
In 1973, my wife and I moved from Ajijic to Nextipac, a Jocotepec barrio where the local run-down six-year school was crowded, and many children didn’t attend. Children were still being taken out of school by parents to help with the planting and cultivation of milpas (corn fields), and other productive seasonal tasks.
The school was a disaster. The “profe” (teacher) struggled against underfunding and the tradition that declared that girls, who worked the fields with the rest of the family, needed only four years of education. It was believed, even by educators, that eight years was more than enough for rural males, because they were needed as farm or ranch workers, or to earn wages by working for someone else, or from pick-up jobs.
The Nextipac school was typical, it needed desks, chairs, toilets, and books. A friend was an active member of the Lakeside American Legion. With the Legion’s help the most expensive problem, toilets, was quickly solved. Then came trestle tables for desks, benches for seats. After that came a solution for the glassless, screenless windows.
I and couple of friends came on the “hidden” problem that everyone knew about. The mild mannered profe, attentively concentrated on his student’s education, seldom got his salary in any prompt way. He often had to make several bus trips to Guadalajara to fence with bureaucrats to get it at all. We set up an “emergency fund” to ease that problem. Since that time, both schools and teachers have changed greatly, but....
Now, as news reports tell us daily, mask-wearing, stick-welding teachers are striking, marching aggressively through Mexico City in response to president Enrique Peña Nieto’s educational reforms. Though the teacher’s union is well known to be “infinitely” corrupt, many teachers from states such as Guerrero and Oaxaca make one clearly sound argument. Any new reform measure should recognize the disparities between the poorest schools in the south and wealthier ones elsewhere, one teacher told an American reporter. “A lot of schools don’t have (electric) power or technology, or even books,” she said. “The people who come up with these reforms, their kids go to Harvard. They don’t know what it’s like for us.”
This is the first of a two-part series.