Laura Poy Solano
Sent
La Jornada Newspaper
Thursday, November 13, 2025, p. 19
Monterrey, NL., Intercultural education in Mexico, despite the most recent reform to the General Education Law, is conceived “only for the indigenous population. That is, they are the ones who have to learn interculturality, when in reality the ones who have to recognize that there is diversity in the country are all of us,” said Dr. Cecilia Navia Antezana, researcher at the National Pedagogical University (UPN) and coordinator of the Training Seminar for Indigenous Education Professionals and the Laboratory for the eradication of racism in higher education.
During the 18th National Congress of Educational Research (CNIE), he highlighted that “there is a vision in which the presence of the indigenous population is hidden and denied, despite the approaches of vindicating the indigenous world and anti-racism.”
In the seminar Ethical-political Challenges of the New Mexican School, at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, he pointed out that although with this educational model “the indigenous world and anti-racism are vindicated, it is not easy for the entire population to recognize their presence.”
Despite the incorporation of new concepts and perspectives, a vision of “educating to mestize, to Castilianize them, because they are considered a population that subsists in backwardness” still prevails.
Navia Antezana emphasizes that teachers, including indigenous ones, were educated in a Castilianizing model, under the concept of ethnophagy, “that is, that many indigenous teachers have been trained in a perspective of homogenizing, integration education, in Castilian, and when they return to their communities they generate very profound transformations (…) sometimes in the sense of integrating that population and their culture disappearing.”
In Mexico, the expert considered, “there is an essentialist vision in the educational process of indigenous peoples, and despite this overload in the discourse level of their demand, changes are not occurring in their minimum living conditions. We have very nice speeches, but deep down the real conditions are not being generated to guarantee them a dignified life.”
For this reason, he highlighted the formative perspective in the degree in indigenous education at the UPN, where we propose a historical reflection of what they have experienced, their identity processes, the inequality and racism suffered in schooling, and the importance of recovering experiences for their communities.
