Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

El idioma mexicano visto desde las escuelas de pueblos tlaxcaltecas, 1900-1930

2017; Volume: 5; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês

10.29351/rmhe102017b.3

2007-7335

Daniel Gibran Castillo Molina,

Indigenous Cultures and Socio-Education

This article analyses the oral use of the nahuatl language, in the context of formal education, in the indigenous towns belonging to the municipality of Santa Ana Chiautempan, Tlaxcala, before and after the Mexican Revolution. I follow the trajectories of teachers who were from both the municipal headtown and surrounding pueblos. The main purpose is to show that they did use the indigenous language with native, monolingual children during their first years of schooling, in order to facilitate their comprehension and further acquisition of Spanish. I show that many teachers who were bilingual did in fact use the local language to enable children both to understand and acquire further knowledge of Spanish, even though this practice was a topic of strong controversy among Mexican pedagogues during the first two decades of the twentieth century and after the founding of the federal Ministry of Public Education (sep) in 1921.