The indigenous actors to the "interculturalisation" of higher education in Mexico: ¿empowerment or neoindigenism?

Abstract

In Latin America, innovative multi- and/or intercultural education programs, which highlight the often claimed “end of indigenism”, are characterized by an urgent need to combine long-standing traditions of primary school level “indigenous education” projects with a “multicultural turn” which would comprise higher educational levels, as well. Starting from an ethnographic and collaborative research Project, on the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI) in Mexico, this article analyzes how the participation of indigenous intellectuals and non-indigenous academics shapes the transition towards the social, political and legal recognition of diversity inside mainstream public universities. The resulting, still rather recent “dialogue of knowledge”, which implies inter-cultural, inter-lingual and inter-actor dimensions, will also challenge the social and educational sciences to rethink and redesign their still all too monocultural and monolingual theoretical concepts and methodological practices.