Laura Selene Mateos Cortés

The discourse of interculturality and its transnational migration: towards a comparative analysis of its appropriation by academic and political actors in the state of Veracruz

This paper analyses the ways in which social and educational networks are being configured around the actors participating in the increasingly transnational field of intercultural education both at the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural and the Veracruz State Ministry of Education. It starts by defining the notion of discursive migration as conceptual transformations that occur when particular discourses cross certain national as well as disciplinary frontiers, such as the constant exchange of the heterogeneous notions of multi‐ and interculturality in the case of the field of ‘intercultural studies’, which stem from different Anglo‐Saxon as well as continental European and Latin American origins, but which are currently applied to the post‐indigenista situation of ‘indigenous education’ in Mexico. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two different institutions in the state of Veracruz, the appropriation and reinterpretation of, as well as the resistance against, the discourse of interculturality are studied by comparing the training of ‘intercultural and bilingual’ teachers through the state educational authorities and the notion of intercultural education, as applied within the so‐called ‘Intercultural University of Veracruz’. En este trabajo se analiza la forma en que se compone y transforma la noción de interculturalidad, lo cual es analizado a través del trabajo etnográfico realizado en dos instituciones educativas del estado mexicano de Veracruz: en la Secretaría de Educación estatal, por un lado, y en la Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural, por otro. El estudio cobra importancia debido a que en la actualidad la interculturalidad se ha convertido en el eje central de diversos procesos formativos. Las interrogantes que guían el trabajo son: ¿Cuál es el significado que adquiere en los diferentes contextos la interculturalidad? ¿Cómo se significa o resignifica la interculturalidad en los actores académicos y políticos? ¿Y qué sucede con el discurso sobre la interculturalidad cuando ‘migra’? Para responder a lo anterior, en un primer momento mostramos la problemática a estudiar, la forma en la que los discursos cambian de sentido. Posteriormente, presentamos la manera en que el discurso intercultural es transferido a través de la adaptación de categorías relacionadas con el análisis de transferencia de conocimientos. Finalmente, distinguimos el carácter ‘migratorio’ de este.

The Need for Comparison in Intercultural Education.

Intercultural education has arisen in the last two decades as an intersectional field of academic knowledge and professional development, located at the borders and in the confluence of the multicultural paradigm in the social sciences, the anthropology of education, and other interdisciplinary subfields commonly known as Intercultural Studies. As will be discussed throughout this article, the thematic range represented by the broad topos of interculturality-in-education is not limited to questions about minority groups, but is closely linked to core issues of national identity and broad societal identification processes. Therefore, in order to be able to critically engage in a fruitful, truly ‘intercultural’ dialog between multicultural theorists and activists, on the one hand, and between academic and practitioners’ knowledge on diversity, we need a particularly, and constantly, self-reflexive and mutually comparative hermeneutical approach. In this way, we can avoid the traps and bridge the biases of the underlying, but omnipresent, self-fulfilling, and self-essentializing identity discourses in broader national society as a whole.

Local resignifications of transnational discourses in intercultural higher education: The case of the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural in Mexico

Our main objective is to analyze the different ways in which people involved in the Mexican intercultural education subsystem conceive interculturality. This subsystem is still emerging and we refer to the specific case of Veracruz. We point out the discursive elements implied in the construction of definitions as well as the linguistic screens generated by actors and institutions. How are significations, translations and adaptations in intercultural education models changed when passing from a European “migrant” context to a Mexican indigenous one? Through an ethnography of intercultural discourses, we analyze the way in which Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural teachers of its campus Selvas produce alternative discourses, which are critical toward exogenous interculturality and focused on empowering local subaltern subjects.