Indigenous Language Policy and Education in Mexico
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INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE POLICY AND EDUCATION IN MEXICO
INTRODUCTION
The policies which nation-states, and their societal majorities, apply to their ethnic and linguistic minorities have become a touchstone to evaluate the quality of democracy, pluricultural commitment and the construction of modern states in almost any part of the world. Therefore, educational and language policies for the minorities can no longer be dismissed as marginal components of state policy that may be dealt with outside the domains of mainstream power relations and the state. Mexico is a paradigmatic case in point. At least in America it represents the probably most-centralized, all-embracing and vertical case of nation-state building. It did not, however, achieve its historical goals of creating a homogeneous nation (cf. May, Language Education, Pluralism and Citizenship, Volume 1) and fully assimilating the indigenous peoples in the 500 years since the beginning of Spanish colonization. On the contrary, the Mexican indigenous population is the largest in the continent, although language shift advances in many language groups. During the twentieth century the indigenous population, measured as speakers of the 62 surviving languages by the Mexican national census, has grown steadily in absolute numbers, but declined as a percentage of the total population from 2.2 million in 1930 (¼16%) to 7.2 million (¼7.2%) in 2000 (INEGI, 2000). To understand the apparent paradox in Mexico between present overt policies that support diversity and indigenous language maintenance on the one hand, and covert pressure for assimilation on the other, we have to revise historical and present-day ideological orientations in language policy. In the following section, I briefly outline the history of language policy for indigenous peoples from colonial times to the present day in Mexico. Next, I consider the central problems of general language and culture orientations and the use of the languages in indigenous education. I then refer to recent changes in legislation and discuss to what extent a linguistic rights perspective developed over time. In this chapter, the focus is on general language policy and linguistic rights issues, which relate to indigenous education in Mexico. I deal S. May and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 1: Language Policy and Political Issues in Education, 301–313. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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RAINER ENRIQUE HAMEL
with concrete programmes of bilingual education and their outcomes in the corresponding chapter on ‘Bilingual Education for Indigenous Communities in Mexico’ in Volume 5. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S : L A N G U A G E P O L I C Y F R O M C O L O N I Z AT I O N T O T H E T W E N T Y- F I R S T C E N T U R Y
Education and language as instruments of state building and control have played a major role ever since complex states emerged on Mexican territory. The Aztecs developed their own educational system, an Academy of Science and a selective language policy
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