“Hacer el hombre más hombre”: Fundamental Education, Deficit Perspectives, Gender, and Indigenous Survivance in Central Mexico

Abstract

Under UNESCOs global mission, fundamental education became an essential tool for development that was praised for promoting peace and improving the human condition. The Centro de Cooperación Regional para la Educación de Adultos en América Latina y el Caribe (CREFAL) hosted educators from throughout the Americas in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, to study and intervene through fundamental education programs in local Indigenous communities to implement agricultural, hygienic, arts, civic, and adult literacy projects. In this article, we rethink how fundamental education projects in the 1960s often viewed Indigenous communities in deficit and were implemented as “experimental” interventions with mixed goals. We situate this work within a decolonizing healing framework (Smith 2001) to re-write and re-right the: (1) generalized success of the fundamental education project documented in the CREFAL archives about Nocutzepo and (2) highlight the voices and counter-stories of Indigenous women in Nocutzepo who were minimally present in the CREFAL archival data.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.