Following the violent decade of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the new government attempted what new regimes do: to refashion the educational system to its ideological tenets. This included a nationwide effort to develop escuelas normales rurales, whose goal was to incorporate the populace into the postrevolutionary state, while recognizing the particular needs of campesinos. This thorough and exhaustively documented study by Alicia Civera Cerecedo is a welcome addition to the excellent texts that exist on this subject.
Civera approaches the task in a threefold structure presented chronologically and developmentally. Her work explores the formative years from 1921, “the year that the first regional normal school opened its doors,” to 1945, when the government “abandoned its effort to develop a teacher [corps] specifically for the rural schools” (p. 17). Civera defines the years 1921 – 30 as innovative and experimental. The second period, from the early 1930s to 1937,...
