In the 1920s, Mexico established normales rurales-boarding schools that trained teachers in a new nation-building project. Drawn from campesino ranks and meant to cultivate state allegiance, their graduates would facilitate land distribution, organize civic festivals, and promote hygiene campaigns. In Unintended Lessons of Revolution, Tanalâis Padilla traces the history of the normales rurales, showing how they became sites of radical politics. As Padilla demonstrates, the popular longings that drove the Mexican Revolution permeated these schools. By the 1930s, ideas about land reform, education for the poor, community leadership, and socialism shaped their institutional logic. Over the coming decades, the tensions between state consolidation and revolutionary justice produced a telling contradiction: the very schools meant to constitute a loyal citizenry became hubs of radicalization against a government that increasingly abandoned its commitment to social justice. Crafting a story of struggle and state repression, Padilla illuminates education's radical possibilities and the nature of political consciousness for youths whose changing identity-from campesinos, to students, to teachers-speaks to Mexico's twentieth-century transformations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tanalís Padilla is Professor of History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also the author of Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax-Priísta, 1940-1962, also published by Duke University Press.

This event is free and open to the public. We will be on hand to sell copies of both books, which you can get signed by the author following the event.