The Making of Indigeneity, Curriculum History, and the Limits of Diversity

Ligia (Licho) López López

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315392400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Conceptually rich and grounded in cutting-edge research, this book addresses the often-overlooked roles and implications of diversity and indigeneity in curriculum. Taking a multidisciplinary approach to the development of teacher education in Guatemala, López provides a historical and transnational understanding of how "indigenous" has been negotiated as a subject/object of scientific inquiry in education. Moving beyond the generally accepted "common sense" markers of diversity such as race, gender, and ethnicity, López focuses on the often-ignored histories behind the development of these markers, and the crucial implications these histories have in education – in Guatemala and beyond – today.

1 “The Indian Problem”

Contouring the Retina and the Indian and Pre- and Post-War Educational and Social Policies Pro Diversity

This chapter is an intertwined analysis of educational policy documents and visuality. Following Deborah Poole’s line of inquiry, I meditate here on the role images have played and continue to play in the making-up of “indigenous kinds” and how such roles relate to policies concerned with “indigenous” matters.² The chapter begins with an analysis of images in order to engage with the reasoning of the problem. My analytics of the moments of intensity in “indigenous” making point to the emergence and prominence of the problematic “Indian” as a project of both projection and protection. The “Indian problem” as a way to continue making up what is “indigenous” as an educational (s)object has been in circulation from around the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although the language of the “Indian” as a problem may no longer be explicitly employed in contemporary political-educational discourses, the style of reasoning that makes it possible is ever present. This “problem” reasoning permeates even the most progressive policies, laws, and accords employed to justify respect for diversity in the name of equity and equality.

Policies in Guatemala are understood in various educational spaces as the base upon which a better education for “indigenous” peoples is to be built. A few may argue that policies have little educational impact as they are “theoretical,” and therefore far removed from what actually happens in “practice” on the ground, in schools. However, they do often serve as a warrant to put forth arguments for advancing the project of a more intercultural, peaceful, and just education that benefits “indigenous” peoples and the Guatemalan nation. They are also an accessible archive of the languages and imaginations that are at stake in the priorities for sculpting education in particular ways. The specific educational policy documents I have selected are not only relevant in matters of “indigenous” making, but are also key reference signposts for teacher educators, education advocates, activists, public officials, and lay people that I came in contact with. Some of them have been directly or indirectly involved in the drafting of the documents.

Figure 1.1 “Kaqchiquel Region—Chimaltenango or San Juan Sacatepéquez.”¹ (Photo courtesy of the Valdeavellano Collection, Academia de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala). Original caption on the back of the picture.

This chapter takes up Jacques Derrida’s analytics of problēma as projection and protection. The task is to question the reasoning of the “Indian” as a protection of all that has gone wrong in Guatemalan “modern” history and as a projection of the desirable aspirations anchored in the same violent systems of reason that were at the inception of the “Indian-Other” in the first place. Historicizing “the problem” is possible through an examination of Guatemalan archives from the turn of the twentieth century. This archive includes photographs, policy documents, interviews, and classroom observations. The chapter follows a spiral style. In taking a point and retuning to it in a fractal fashion, it aims to show the layers of complex dynamics of border drawing that projects and ostensibly plans the future of “indigenous” youth.

The Subject-ivity of Photographs and Gestures of “Modern” Configurations

Arguably, Alberto G. Valdeavellano’s (1861–1928) and Tomás Zanotti’s (1898–1950) photography circulated widely. Their portraits gave contours to the retina in the making of lo indígena.³ Valdeavellano was Guatemalan, a fact that breaths pride into the development of Guatemalan photography.⁴ His father was from Santa María in the Iberian Peninsula and his mother from Guatemala. The work in Guatemala (and Latin America) of daguerreotypists such as the Belgian Leon de Pontelle and the German Emil Herbruger paved the technological, aesthetic, and sociological way for Valdeavellano and other photographers of his generation.⁵ Valdeavellano’s quiet introduction of images in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries visually spoke for what is called rural Guatemala today. He traveled the country extensively, documenting “rural” and “urban” life. His voluminous body of work also visually documents what is known today as pre-Hispanic Guatemala: monuments and archaeological sites such as the image of the zoomorfo in Quiriguá in the introductory chapter is one of many of his archeological photography projects. These visual re-presentations traveled as postcards, through and out of the Guatemalan borders at the same time that they participated in the constitution of such borders.

The photographing of the “Indian” and the “rural,” among other things (and other binaries, perhaps), highlighted the “Indian’s” anthropological distance from the “non-Indian.” This distance is the temporal relation created by anthropological activities to define the world of the savage, the primitive, an Other. This world is a temporal state, a stage, and a condition—of “backwardness,” “underdevelopment,” and “mental death.” Anthropological distance is marked by temporal sequences enshrined in evolutionist time, where the “Indian” lives in another time, an undesirable past: a past of misery inflicted by colonization, as opposed to a victorious past of pre-Hispanic Mayan intellectual production.⁶ This distance served as the framework upon which the project of nation was mounted as exemplified in the words of Batres Jáuregui and Asturias later.

The image of the “Indian” child, barefoot and scruffily dressed, came to epitomize what the nation needed to surpass if it were to progress and modernize. While working with Mayan youth and teachers in the photo archive at the Center for Mesoamerican Research (CIRMA) in 2016, a young man noted that the people featured in one of Valdeavellano’s photos were not indígena because they were not dirty and were wearing shoes. “That’s not how it was,” he explained. Valdeavellano’s photographs have traveled to museums, made their way to personal collections, and relate to Miguel Ángel Asturias’ literary production. In Asturias, the “Indian” is innocent, dirty, barefoot, rural, in need, and a problem.⁷

How far does this difference go? The Indian represents a past civilization and the mestizo, or ladino as we call him, a civilization that is to come. The Indian comprises the majority of our population, lost his strength in the time of slavery to which he was subjected, he is not interested in anything … he represents the mental, moral, and material poverty of the country: he is humble, dirty, dresses differently and suffers without batting an eye. The ladino makes up the third part, lives in a distinct historical moment, with desires of ambition and romanticism, aspires, wishes, and is, in the end, the living part of the Guatemalan nation. What a brave nation that has two-thirds of its population dead to intelligent life!⁸

It is important to underline that Miguel Ángel Asturias has been very influential in the field of education. Among other things, he founded and directed the Universidad del Popular in 1922, an institution whose aim was to “eradicate” illiteracy. Asturia’s literary work is widely respected especially when it comes to its value for national pride. He received the first Nobel Prize for Guatemala in 1967 (the second one is Rigoberta Menchú in 1992). His books Hombres de Maíz, Mulata de Tal, and others can be found in teacher preparation schools today and are read by Mayan youth, for instance those who attend the Jóvenes Institute (see Appendix 3), who come to Guatemala City to receive an education and are expected to return to their communities to teach in elementary schools where most of the children are considered “indigenous.”⁹

Whereas Valdeavellano photographed “Indians” in rural life, Zanotti photographed “Maya-K’iches’ ” from Quetzaltenango and its surroundings in a studio. This is the most prominent theme of the Zanotti collection housed in the CIRMA. Zanotti was born in Mexico to an Italian father and a Mexican mother and came to Guatemala in 1898. There appears to be a popular sentiment that Zanotti’s portraits—in contrast to nineteenth-century European imperialistic practices such as anthropology and travel writing—give the viewer a sense of dignified “Maya-K’iche’ ” “men, women and children,” who “looking at the camera project a lovely, dignified sense of self.”¹⁰ According to Greg Grandin, it was the “Maya-K’iches’ ” themselves who “sought and consumed the images shot by Zanotti.”¹¹ To enter the photography studio and consume photography in this way would speak of the market freedom of the “Mayas” to choose and participate in a local practice previously consecrated to the few.

Portrait in a First Communion is a rich entanglement of elements that invite the participant viewer to venture into questions of religiosity and a vision of modernity.¹² The First Communion is an occasion to be commemorated in Roman Catholic cultures. It is a life cycle event that arguably serves as a checkpoint in the progressive development of one’s own Christianity and for the enactment of civil control by Catholic cultures.¹³ The choice of props and the use of Victorian furniture imbues the images with a sense of elegance, sophistication, and stability. These Victorian references also suggest the influence of social Darwinism, notably the practices of observation and of classification, which are important relations to photography of this kind, especially in terms of their role in making up people and “Indigenous” kinds.

Figure 1.2 “Portrait in a First Communion.” (Photo courtesy of the Tomás Zanotti Collection, CIRMA).

The pearl necklace, the rosary, the veil, the candle, and the Renaissance-like painting of St. Peter and Jesus in the background all relate to a particular material and visual sophistication via “Europe,” summoned here as a construct, a temporal and spatial location of aspiration. They are discursive elements of integration, transition, enlightenment, and modernization in which the “Indian” is allowed to participate via her presence both in the photographic studio and in schools.¹⁴ The bare feet are a question, a statement of comfort or, perhaps, resistance.¹⁵

The textures of religion and science are the backdrop of educational texts emerging at the time Zanotti (and Valdeavellano) were shooting. This backdrop is an intertwining of (true) science not in opposition to Christianity, where the choice is not between social Darwinism or Christianity, but for a choice for liberal ideology, for the advancement of the nation, abandoning dogmas and addressing social problems by “thinking and acting in a scientific and modern way and, at the same time in a Christian way.”¹⁶ In Los indios, su historia y su civilización, Batres Jáuregui writes:

In September 1797, [the Economic Society of Friends of the Country] offer[ed] a gold medal and meritorious membership to whoever wrote the best essay on the following subject: “Demonstrate solidly and clearly the advantages that would result for the State if all Indians and ladinos of this kingdom put on shoes and dressed in Spanish styles, and they experienced for themselves the physical, moral and political benefits; proposing the most smooth, simple and practicable means to reduce them to the use of these things, without violence, coercion or mandate”

… one of the most important social problems was about, as you can see, no other than to propose the means to make the aboriginal class and the other large portion of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• List of Figures
• List of Appendices
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 0 Zero = Nothing = Everything: Recasting the “Indigenous” Subject in the Making
• 1 “The Indian Problem”: Contouring the Retina and the Indian and Pre- and Post-War Educational and Social Policies Pro Diversity
• 2 Language Heritage(s) and the Role of “Indigenous” and “Non-Indigenous” Missionaries and Experts in Curricular Foundations
• 3 Anthropological Borders and the Performance of Diversity in Teacher Preparation Classrooms
• 4 Authoritarian Regimes in Reform and Fractal Curricular Possibilities in Protests
• 5 No Closure
• Appendices
• Index