The educational system sent teachers out to bring indigenous and rural communities into the 20th century, and many of these teachers became advocates and organizers for the people they lived among. They grew to understand and respect these people.

Graduates in both medical and teachers schools did two years of service in under-served areas. In fact, that’s still the rule.

Did the unions of these activist teachers also promote social justice?

The Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, the SNTE, formed in 1949, but the union became more and more corrupt as the ruling PRI party — after the Cárdenas years — become more and more conservative.

In 1979, teachers in the poorer rural states founded a breakaway union, the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, the CNTE. These CNTE teachers maintained the earlier radical traditions. Beginning in 2013, they organized massive protests against the neoliberal education reforms under President Peña Nieto.

Nieto’s reforms mimicked the US model and linked teachers’ jobs to how well their students performed on standardized tests. The tests didn’t fit the needs of students and turned teachers into widgets. And the Eurocentric content of this approach to schooling demeaned indigenous peoples. Between 2013 and 2018, the government fired thousands of teachers. Others were injured and killed in clashes with government forces.

The CNTE today is still mounting demonstrations to improve conditions for teachers and students.

Did similar neoliberal policies affect teachers at the university level?

During the neoliberal period, we had a premeditated abandonment of public universities. Government policy opened the door to making higher education a private for-profit business, contrary to the 1917 Constitution Article 3 that states that all levels of education should be free and public. But university faculty did not protest the changes, neither for higher ed nor for education in the lower grades. And the faculty unions and the progressive CNTE have no connections.

Students and workers in and near the University of Guanajuato have staged several important protests. Did the faculty union support them?

We don’t have one national faculty union. Each university has its own. At the University of Guanajuato in 2019, students staged a strike against rampant patriarchy, including the harassment of women students by faculty members. Our union did not take a stand.

Next door in Silao, GM workers protested in front of the plant against the fraudulent election held there that ratified a charro union contract. These workers had just formed their own independent union, SINTTIA, that sent messages of support to the feminist demonstrators. But did the faculty union do anything to support SINTTIA in its struggle? No!

AMLO recently criticized Mexican universities for being elitist, and that ruffled lots of feathers. Your reaction to his charge?

Top university officials — including even the rectors of public universities like UNAM — earn more than the president of México. These “golden bureaucracies” don’t want to lose their offensive privileges.

Public universities don’t have dorms or cafeterias, scholarships or transportation for students from distant rural communities. That tells you what class the universities expect students to come from. And they’ve designed the content of their curriculum to justify the neoliberal system.

Morena promises “transformation.” What would this look like in higher education?

AMLO has already begun creating a system of new universities to satisfy the demand for higher education from low-income families. That’s a good step, but these new universities still haven’t become completely “free.” Students have costs: room and board, textbooks,  computers, internet access. New stipends are helping somewhat to alleviate those costs.

Even more important: the content of education. The right-wing National Action Party — the PAN — is today openly celebrating fascism. The PAN formed in 1939, specifically to oppose the Cárdenas socialist education program. That shows you how important the question of education has been in México. In the 2000s, the PAN government promoted a Eurocentric curriculum designed to create popular support for foreign business interests coming into México. This curriculum belittled the communal land system of the indigenous populations in México’s southern states and touted capitalism as the only way to run the world.

We should base our education instead in a philosophy of liberation. We need to lift up our own writers, thinkers, and scientists. We need to find our own ways of organizing our communities and sustaining our lands. By building on the foundation of our own resources, by learning from ordinary people, we’ll be able to transform our society, in our own particular Mexican and Latin American way. I have hope that we can do it!