Contesting Citizenship: Educational practices in an indigenous Mixtec community in Mexico

Abstract

This thesis explores the engagement of a social movement in the contestation of citizenship by means of education, in the context of broader indigenous struggles in Latin America. I examine citizenship formation as social practice in an alternative educational project in an indigenous Mixtec community in Mexico. The counter-hegemonic citizenship project aims to create citizens with communal and indigenous identities as well as with critical and democratic dispositions. This project takes on unexpected forms because of the ideological gap between activists and the local community. I show how different citizenship models interact in a dynamic process wherein aspirations of activists are actively negotiated, contested and redirected to respond to specific local realities. This ethnography of citizenship raises critical questions about theories that understand indigenous struggles over the meaning of citizenship in unequivocal ways. These tend to be incompatible with the complexities and inconsistencies of local realities and people engaged in everyday practices of social transformation.