Local resignifications of transnational discourses in intercultural higher education: The case of the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural in Mexico

Introduction: The emergence of intercultural higher education

In Mexico, the creation of intercultural education institutions has a background in social movements that demand the rights of the indigenous groups. Children and youth from rural areas or from indigenous groups remained excluded from educative spaces, because the Mexican education project had operated intending to build up a national identity which was aimed at homogenizing the existing cultures, eradicating practices, languages and traditions of the indigenous peoples. However, when Mexico was recognized as a multicultural country (1992), some important changes which impact particularly on the educational policy were made, promoting an institutional and pedagogical innovation.

One of the new tasks of education consists in “strengthening the languages and cultures that make Mexico a multicultural country” (Schmelkes, 2006: 75), seeking to correct inequality aspects that date back to the Conquest. The first changes were applied in primary education, because in 1997 the indigenous educational system shifted from “bicultural and bilingual education” to “intercultural and bilingual education.” In 2001, the General Coordination for Intercultural and Bilingual Education (CGEIB) is created with the aim of implementing an education appropriate to the indigenous context and to the population in general, through intercultural education. In 2005, this Coordination launches the intercultural universities project with the purpose that young indigenous from marginalized social spheres gain access to higher education. This project obeys to the demand of groups and organizations related to indigenous communities in respect to the existence of universities geographically and culturally situated near indigenous towns (CGEIB, n.d.); this is an aspect that the traditional university model does not accomplish. In regard to this demand, the intercultural approach is introduced as a counter-response to assimilationist strategies adopted by the educative policies that functioned in previous years.

The intercultural approach pursues “to change the direction of the universities’ tasks, to work with local knowledge and to recover traditions and values, besides offering alternative educational areas” (Secretariat of Public Education (SEP), 2006: 36). These new institutions enable the professional development of young people from indigenous or marginalized areas, but also the recognition and development of their own communities and collective identities. Through such universities, the national education system aims to eradicate the segregation that young indigenous face in conventional universities. Thus, an innovative, yet still precarious and incipient intercultural higher education subsystem emerged (Mateos Cortés and Dietz, 2013).

In the following, we analyze through ethnographic research how a key actor from these new institutions, i.e. teachers of the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI), in its Selvas campus located to the south of Veracruz, appropriate and resignify some models and discourses about this emerging intercultural higher education, discourses which mostly come from intergovernmental agencies and/or multilateral cooperation agencies.

Approaches in intercultural education and their discursive migration

Nowadays, in the Anglo-Saxon sphere the need of “multiculturalizing” education systems by means mainly of “affirmative action” and “positive discrimination” is recognized in the theoretical debate. That would allow for the “empowerment” of certain ethnic minorities—both autochthonous (e.g. indigenous peoples) and allochthonous (e.g. immigrant communities)—during their processes of self-identification, ethnogenesis and “emancipation” (Giroux, 1994, McLaren, 1997). On the contrary, in Europe, an urgency to develop an intercultural education is perceived as well, but not based on the minorities’ identity needs, but on the apparent inability of the majority society to meet the new challenges posed by the heterogeneity of students, by the growing socio-cultural complexity and, in general, by diversity as a main feature of European societies (cf. Dietz, 2009).

In this sense, whereas in the United States and in the United Kingdom, there is a tendency toward an empowerment education focused on the minorities, continental Europe is shifting toward an education which promotes the increased acquisition of intercultural competences both in marginalized minorities and in marginalizing majorities. In Latin America and specifically in Mexico, intercultural education appears in the aftermath of indigenismo, as a particular discourse which claims to go beyond the assimilatory and paternalist legacy of these specific development policies directed by the nation-states’ postcolonial elites toward their countries indigenous peoples in order to “integrate” them inside a homogeneous and monolingual nation to be (Dietz, 2004). The resulting, new “intercultural and bilingual education” (Schmelkes, 2003) was created to overcome political constraints as well as pedagogical limitations of the previous, often assimilationist bilingual and bicultural indigenous education, but it keeps a bias toward the preferential treatment of ethnic-indigenous issues as “problems.” Thus, and even more under the impact of new indigenous movements and their demands for autonomy, the century-old “problem of the Indian” stills remains the core of identity concerns inside Latin American nation-states (Pérez Ruiz, 2009, Dietz and Mateos Cortés, 2011b, 2013, Antolínez Domínguez, 2013). Table 1 summarizes these three different approaches.

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Table 1.

Comparison between North American, European and Latin American approaches to intercultural education (Antolínez Domínguez, 2013).

North American approach	European approach	Latin American approach
Context	Context	Context
Since the 70s and 80s	Grows stronger in the 80s	First projects in the mid 70s
Important antecedent in the 60s	Result of migration movements Independence of the former colonies	Historically plurinational reality
Result of migration movements: European, Mexican, African descendants, etc.
Background	Background	Background
The 20s: Intercultural education	Second World War	Education in the colonial era
The 50s: Intergroup education movement	Creation of the EEC and EU Migrant workers	Indigenous education
The 60s: Ethnic studies and ethnic revitalization	Council of Europe: attention to member states	Acculturation and linguistic assimilation
		Bilingual education
Fostered by the Civil Rights Movement and post 68 social movements	Fostered by the post 68 movements derived from multiculturalism	Fostered by the indigenous and liberation movements of the 70s
Claim the right to be different inside the nation-state	Claim the right to be different inside the nation-state	Claim decolonization and idea of a new plurinational State
No societal transformation ideology	No societal transformation ideology	With societal transformation ideology
Independent from political parties and institutionalized organizations	Independent from political parties and institutionalized organizations	Independent from political parties and institutionalized organizations. Seeking alliances
Not essentialized individual de-centered subject	Not essentialized individual de-centered subject	Essentialized collectivities
Postmodernist influence	Postmodernist influence	Decolonial influence
Compensatory approach	Compensatory approach	Compensatory approach
Paradigms: cultural deprivation/cultural difference	Paradigms: cultural deprivation/cultural difference/language	Paradigms: cultural deprivation/ ethnicity/self-concept/language

In view of the coexistence of these inter- and multicultural discourse approaches and their increasing interrelation and hybridization of concepts, models and programs, the transnational migration of these discourses becomes an object of study (Mateos Cortés, 2011): How do significances, translations, adaptations and/or misrepresentations of knowledge, of educational models and of programs change when they leave an originally migration-related context to enter an indigenous and post-indigenista policy framework? What identity policies respond to the adoption of a multiculturalist discourse through the recognition of ethnic differences? What identity implications does the incorporation of an interactionist, anti-essentializing and mainstreaming discourse of diversity have? We emphasize the usefulness of studying the transnational discursive migration due to the role discourse plays in the construction of reality and to its according potential to transform such reality, from practices which end up being more consciously hybrid and potentially dialogic.

The theoretical perspective proposed to study the transnational discursive migration combines elements and contributions from post-Fordist and post-modern theories of migration (Arango, 2003; Massey et al., 1993; Ribas Mateos, 2004), from transnationalism and cultural transfer theories (Charle et al., 2006) as well as from network analysis (Lomnitz, 1988). We endeavor to translate the main contemporary migration theories into a discursive level in order to explain how actors acquire and transfer knowledge, lore, concepts and discursive elements. Contrary to modern and “Fordist” migration theories, which would identify push and pull factors of migrants (and of discourses, in this case), a critical and comparative analysis of discourses about interculturality reveals that it is not a matter of uni-directional “exportations” and “importations” of discourses, but a matter of new transnational and intercultural patterns whereby the discourses and related knowledge are built (García Canclini, 2004).

Nevertheless, to create a theoretical–methodological proposal viable for the analysis of the university teachers’ intercultural discourses, these concepts from migration studies need to be “translated” from the transnational movements of people to the transnational movements of discourses and educational models. To this end, we start from recent contributions by cultural history and especially the so-called “social history of knowledge” (Burke, 2000). As in migration studies, particularly European and American contemporary historiography has taken a “transnational turn” (Kocka, 2007) that reflects the increasingly interconnected character of contemporary societies and cultures (Berger and Lambert, 2003).

From an innovative and emerging field such as intercultural studies, our approach benefits from its key concepts (interculturality, multiculturality, diversity, dialogue of knowledge, etc.) as textual networks which are sustained by author–actor networks; its mutual inter-textual relations and its own semiotic networks are characterized by a transnational articulation which turns them inherently intercultural (Camarero, 2008). The historiographical study of “cultural transfers” (Adam, 2007)—a notion originally coined in the 80s and 90s by Espagne and Werner to analyze historical intercultural contacts between France and Germany (Espagne, 1999; Espagne and Werner, 1988; Werner and Zimmermann, 2003)—both empirically and methodologically distinguishes between the transfer of objects (i.e. of discourse, in this case), the factors that enable and guide such transfer (i.e. actor networks) and the carrier of the “discursive objects” (i.e. the actors).

Making use of these pioneer studies, the notion of “intercultural transfer” is developed first in American historiography (cf. Belgum, 2005) and then, as histoire croisée, in French historiography (Werner and Zimmermann, 2003). In his analysis, Adam (2007) identifies a number of features of this type of intercultural transfer: there are movements of objects, people and ideas that take place not within, but between two different cultures and societies. According to him, such movements presuppose that (1) something is transferred, (2) there is a departure point of the transfer and (3) a point of arrival, which implies a selection, transportation and inclusion process. Empirically, this historiographical school focuses on the diachronic study of “intellectual transfers” (Charle et al., 2007) that are situated “underneath” and “beyond” the nation-state level. In the analysis of British and French intellectuals that oscillate between their respective cultures and countries, Charle et al. (2007) identify processes of adapting and assimilating exogenous ideas, which are later incorporated into the target culture.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned authors usually concentrate on European and Eurocentric historiographical examples that emerge from transfers between typically European “national cultures” such as the French, British and German ones. It therefore suggests a risky confusion between “culture” and “nationality,” a bias which is common in intercultural studies and education (Dietz, 2009; García Castaño and Granados Martínez, 1999). Adam (2007) is another early critic to this respect; on the basis of several historiographical case studies, this author underlines that it is difficult to distinguish between what is exogenous and endogenous in a process of intercultural transfer: it is possible that a discourse—or any other conceptual innovation—migrates successfully between two cultures because in the transfer process the intercultural relation has become “intracultural” (Dietz, 2009).

As Adam (2007) emphasizes, as a result of some first unidirectional intercultural transfers, itineraries and intellectual networks are created and subsequently they themselves become departure points of transfers which end up being more circular and reciprocal. This is only possible if the personal and discursive mobility of policy-makers, bureaucrats and/or academics, which has spatial, social, informative and political implications, generates what Kuhn (2012) calls an “epistemic commensurability” between transmitters and receptors of the transfer. This approach is ultimately being developed in Latin American contexts; a new Latin American “history of ideas” (Klengel, 1997) studies the process of scientific knowledge transmission in Latin America (Priego and Lozano, 2007) and its relation with discourses from Spain (Simson, 2007) or from other European countries (Beneyto and Argerey, 2006). Meanwhile, O’Phelan Godoy and Salazar-Soler (2005) highlight the role of “cultural mediators” that Spanish and Creole elites played in the “first globalization” during the Hispanic empire era in the Americas.

As this brief review of the intercultural transfers study field ¹ reveals, due to the closeness with contemporary migratory diasporas, the notions used here are perfectly compatible with those proposed by current migration studies. The (academic or non-academic) knowledge transnationalization is producing new sets of migrations that Meyer and Wattiaux (2006: 4) call “diaspora knowledge networks.” The migrants as well as their respective knowledge and lore travel between states, nations and cultures that are increasingly interlinked. While observing these migratory processes, “marginal” intellectuals (Lemonik and Mariel, 2009) are usually the first to generate contentious collective actions in relation to the academic status quo, triggering new fields and academic disciplines and, above all, new interdisciplinary attitudes.

The increasing “transnationalization” of the educational policies and their technocratic tools (PISA y TIMSS tests, competencies-based approaches, curriculum mainstreaming, etc.) conducted by multilateral agencies such as the OECD or the WTO (Moutsios, 2009), challenges the local and regional educational actors to grab and resignify the hegemonic pedagogical discourses. This “vertical” tension between local–national–global levels, of the intercultural transfers turns more complex due to the “horizontal” transfer of concepts, discourses and knowledge between sciences (in this case, the social science) and their related public policies (Boswell, 2009; Faist, 2009). Far from being reduced to direct transfers and/or instrumental “applications,” in its collective and institutionally guided appropriation, the academic notions are heavily mediated by the meanings and ideologies by which each academic and educational actors as well as politicians involved define them (Mateos Cortés, 2009, 2011).

An ethnography of intercultural discourses

The present case study is based on an interpretative–qualitative approach, mainly by applying a so-called “doubly reflexive ethnography” (Dietz, 2009) through which explorative ethnographic methods (interviews, observations) are combined with collaborative and participatory methods (participatory diagnosis, evaluation workshops). This methodological strategy ensured working with the diversity of asymmetries inherent to the object of study; at the same time, it enabled a systematical fluctuation between an emic point of view (focused on the actor or the “native” perspective) and an etic point of view (focused on the structures and/or the observer’s perspective; cf. Aguirre Baztán, 1995), which were then contrasted and discussed through collaborative workshops in which emic/etic dissonances were jointly discussed and analyzed between researchers and participating UVI teachers.

The data analyzed in the following are part of a research project (cf. Dietz, 2009; Mateos Cortés, 2011) in which 14 biographical interviews to full-time and part-time teachers from the UVI Selvas campus (7 women and 7 men) were conducted, which were complemented and contrasted by observations of numerous classroom and community activities, carried out between the years 2007 and 2010. In order to collect discourses and other data, slightly pre-structured ethnographic interviews (Hammersley and Atkison, 2007) were used because this kind of interview enabled a direct access to the discourses; furthermore, it turned out to be very useful to systematize the reality of the actors by freely narrating issues which would be difficult to collect ² by other types of interview.

From the very beginning of the project, we used a cyclical process of data construction and analysis, of consciously choosing the sample and gathering actor-related documents; the backbone of the research process thus lied in “describing, translating, explaining and interpreting” (Velasco and Díaz de Rada, 1997) the resulting ethnographic material. The data analysis process is inspired in methods and techniques developed by critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 2001) that are applied to an “ethnography of the discourse” (Olmos Alcaraz, 2009). We complement the aforementioned theorization on transnational migrations with some categories from the study of knowledge and lore transfer, in order to link together the analysis of intercultural discourse with a comparative typology of the respective actors and institutional frameworks. As basic categories to analyze intellectual international networks, Charle et al. (2006) distinguish between (a) the “initial cultural divergences” from the implied contexts of dissemination, (b) the “internal cultural model” of the subject who adopts and appropriates an exogenous discourse, (c) the “intermediaries” involved in the process of intercultural discursive transfer and translation and finally (d) the “linguistic screen” from which the discourse is incorporated, transferred, translated and appropriated.

Whilst in other publications (Mateos Cortés, 2011, 2013) we have developed in detail the categories (a) and (c), in this work our analysis is focused on the category “linguistic screen”: it enables a more profound understanding of the relations between the transfer made by certain intermediaries and the resignification and re-appropriation made by teachers, either because they are exposed to an approach which is different from their tradition of knowledge or because they need to explore and reformulate this transfer relation from inside the same approach or tradition of knowledge.

The Selvas campus of the UVI

In order to analyze the UVI-Selvas teachers’ profile, their discourse appropriations and discursive resignifications, a short contextualization of this institution is needed (Dietz, 2009, 2012; Dietz and Mateos Cortés, 2011a; Mateos Cortés, 2011). The UVI was created through an agreement signed by the Federal Ministry of Education SEP through its CGEIB coordination and the Universidad Veracruzana, through its Seminar on Multicultural Education in Veracruz (SEMV). Through several regional participatory diagnosis, four “intercultural regions” in the state of Veracruz were identified, in each of which a small university campus was created: Huasteca (campus located in its Ixhuatlán de Madero municipality), Totonacapan (in Espinal municipality), Grandes Montañas (in Tequila municipality) and Selvas (in Mecayapan municipality), apart from its central offices located in Xalapa, the capital of the state of Veracruz.

In 2005, the UVI begins its teaching activities, and since 2007, a single BA program in Intercultural Management for Development (LGID) is offered, which splits up into of five so-called “orientations,” i.e. fields of professionalization: communication, sustainability, languages, rights and health (UVI, 2007).

The intercultural program is promoted from inside the Universidad Veracruzana by a group of academics who had got their postgraduate training in two Spanish universities: at the “InterGroup” of the National University of Distance Education (Madrid, cf. www.uned.es/grupointer/) and at the “Intercultural Studies Laboratory” of the University of Granada (cf. www.ldei.ugr.es/). Both research groups have been leading in the Spanish speaking context as promoters of a constructivist and mainstreaming notion of intercultural education that distances itself from the Anglo-Saxon model of “empowerment” of specific minorities.

With these European-origin concepts in mind, the academic promoters of the UVI project seek to distance and delimitate themselves from the traditional Mexican indigenismo official discourse of assimilation and integration which has been characteristic of the country’s 20th century educational policies, and, at the same time, they try to distinguish themselves from the indigenous claims of obtaining their own, autonomous education (Dietz, 2004, 2012; Téllez Galván, 2000). Accordingly, in the founding documents of the UVI (2005), even the use of conventional terms such as “indigenous” or “indigenous region” is avoided; instead, the notion of “intercultural region,” coined by Aguirre Beltrán, is recovered. And the proposed intercultural education program is not defined in terms of affirmative actions for certain minorities which are historically sub-represented in higher education; instead, the official CGEIB discourse is taken over which emphasizes the need for an “intercultural education for everyone” (Schmelkes, 2006), not only for indigenous peoples.

However, from the very beginning, some other actors belonging to indigenous movements in Veracruz or representatives of associations and organizations of indigenous professionals started to claim the need for an indigenously, Náhuatl, Popoluca, etc. defined new higher education institution. Under the influence of indigenous activists from Oaxaca and their discourse on “communality” (Maldonado Alvarado, 2005) as well as of the emerging Latin American “indigenous universities” (Mato, 2008), these independent indigenous actors coincided with governmental institutions which inherited Mexican indigenismo traditions of developing programs and projects particularly for indigenous peoples—the General Directorate for Indigenous Education (DGEI) of the SEP and the National Committee for the Integral Development of Indigenous Communities (CDI)—who together started to conceive interculturality as an indigenous and/or ethnic feature (Dietz and Mateos Cortés, 2013).

As a result of this confluence of different actors at the origin of the UVI, this program ends up preferentially targeting indigenous youth—speakers of an indigenous language, such as “Tenek, Náhuatl, Tepehua, Ñuhú of the Huasteca region; Totonaco and Zapoteco of the Totonacapan region, the Náhuatl of the Grandes Montañas region, and Chinanteco, Náhuatl, Zapoteco Mixe and Zoque-popoluca of the Selvas region” (DUVI, 2009: 29). The UVI academics, called “teacher-researchers,” are characterized as “coming from the same regions so they share with students their academic knowledge, professional experiences and local lore” (Dietz, 2008: 362). In each region, teaching is developed as a combination of conventional face-to-face classes, virtual e-learning modalities and mixed versions of both types.

The UVI Selvas campus is located in Huazuntlán, an indigenous community that belongs to the Mecayapan municipality in southern Veracruz. It is a coastal, cattle-raising, fishing and agricultural region (cf. Map 1) which has an indigenous population that speaks Nahúatl, but in the Selvas region you can hear conversations also in Zoque-popoluca, Zapoteco, Chinanteco, Náhuatl and Mixe. OPEN IN VIEWER

It is the mobilizations of the Regional Indigenous Council of the Náhuatl and Popoluca Communities as well as those of the UVI promoters that jointly made possible the establishment of the UVI Selvas campus. Through its BA, this institution seeks to foster the training of sensitive, creative and professionals committed to the practical analysis of the local conditions, [to contribute] to the reinforcement of the national languages, the recognition and development of ancestral lore concerning health, the exercise of rights and the construction of horizontal relationships and a nature-society relationship (UVI Selvas, 2009).

To achieve these goals, the UVI Selvas campus promotes a community work which strives to be dialogic and transdisciplinary. In contrast to conventional higher education, from the very moment of their enrollment, the UVI students are involved in research projects closely linked to their communities. In their research projects, diverse ways of understanding, preserving, improving and transforming their reality are reflected, which reflects an explicit compromise the students assume with regard to their culture, language and traditions. The majority of their research initiatives are carried out “collectively,” through group work. Sessions are plenary, and teachers adapt theories and methodologies to the students’ research needs; to achieve this, they emphasize links between academic theory and community practices. The majority of the academics are highly knowledgeable of the region, and they represent rather different disciplines. As a result, teachers and students are highly committed to their region.

In this UVI campus, there are five full-time teachers who are responsible for each of the five BA orientations. Apart from teaching classes, they work on their own research projects. There are also part-time teachers who collaborate closely with their colleagues responsible for each orientation and support him/her in teaching, tutorials and students’ research projects.

Academics are hired as UVI teachers by means of invitations, by networking in the region and/or by public calls for applications. They sympathize with the project thanks to their academic profile, because of “the fact [that the] project is designed for the most vulnerable population” (E-D-H-1), as it targets “marginalized areas.” They realize that the proposal generates development opportunities in the region, particularly through learning and training opportunities, as it links young students with the actors from nearby communities. What caught their specific attention, however, is the non-conventional nature of the offered BA One UVI academic remembers

What caught my attention is the BA, the educational, pedagogical and political proposal, it seemed very coherent, unlike other types of education systems (E-D-H-2).

Intercultural teaching profiles?

With the opening of institutions such as the UVI “new” educational actors emerge, committed to the lore and cultures of the communities and regions. These “new teachers” are not specifically trained to work in cultural and ethnic diversity contexts, but through their experiences and contact with communities they have developed certain strategies that enable them “to educate toward” and “work on” interculturality. This reflects an “initial cultural divergence” (Charle et al., 2006). The process of discourse migration does not generate an immediate transposition of certain discourses into new contexts, which often generate uneven and/or contradictory connections or disconnections with regard to former contexts. The disagreements concerning the migrated and adopted discourse are mainly due to the cultural divergence of the receptors of that discourse. The cultural divergence shows that in the moment that the “new” discourse is coined, variations and/or asymmetries are created both in the contexts as well as in the receptive subjects.

The UVI Selvas teachers are an example of this. They come from adjacent areas to the regions (Chinameca, Mecayapan, etc.), from different Mexican states or even from foreign countries. Some of them speak indigenous languages (Náhuatl and Popoluca) and have worked with social organizations as well as with federal, state and municipal government agencies. They have formerly been linked with other public and/or private educational centers, civil partnerships and peasant organizations, NGOs and/or government agencies. When they started working at UVI Selvas, these teachers did not know the concept of interculturality

When I saw the term, I didn’t know what was going on. I just said ‘I am going to work [in the UVI] and I’ll learn […]’ (E-D-H-3).

This is due to the remoteness of their previous training itineraries in relation to the educational field, to anthropology or to the theoretical debates linked to intercultural studies. These new academics have been originally trained as agronomists, agricultural production systems engineers, computer systems engineers, experts in communication, veterinarians, linguists, etc. Nevertheless, they meet the new task to train “intercultural managers” by teaching them beyond disciplinary boarders and by opening up toward other disciplinary points of view.

Facing the new intercultural discourse, and parallel to its migration process, the “internal cultural model” (Charle et al., 2006) creates resistance reactions, defense strategies and re-interpretations, i.e. a group of thoughts, beliefs and practices that consciously and unconsciously integrate people’s identity. With regard to the discourse of interculturality as a diversity mainstreaming resource for everybody and not only for indigenous peoples, the analyzed actors resume and enforce their experiences and local knowledge and lore. In their function as teacher–researchers, they “teach toward” interculturality by re-interpreting and correlating its theoretical aspects with rural knowledge, with regional actors’ contributions or with local knowledge and lore. One teacher explains

I work around dialogue, debates […] according to the students’ knowledge, whether it is personal or has been acquired through their research projects […] with experiences from other regions and with actors [from the region] who come to share their experiences (E-D-M-1).

In order to “work on” interculturality, teachers promote “listening to each other”; they carry out exercises through which students listen to others without previously holding prejudices or stereotypes. Many teachers emphasize that they are committed to interculturality in order to appraise their own culture and to identify themselves as indigenous people so they can interact, understand and dialogue with others. They furthermore discover existing differences inside their ethnic groups, but despite these differences they coexist

I come from a poor family, descendants from Náhuatl, I do not speak [the language], but it is there. My family is divided due to religion issues, my mother was a Pentecostal, I have Catholic brothers, most of them [of my family] are Evangelical now, but this difference does not prevent us from talking to each other. [All this has] transformed me, my thoughts, my point of view of my own community, it has given me a kind of more different view (E-D-M-2).

Linguistic screens of resignifying intercultural discourses

A linguistic screen is the “adequate vocabulary to transport concepts and new knowledge to a different cultural environment” (Charle et al., 2006: 177). If this vocabulary or linguistic screen did not exist in the reception process of the migrated discourse, the transferred theories or concepts would remain senseless. Thus, the intermediaries or translators of the new discourse “are obliged to invent new terms [meanings or definitions of migrated terms] by combining other previously existing terms” (Charle et al., 2006: 177), generating, in consequence, a new sense for these in the reception context. Thus, linguistic screens are produced both consciously and unconsciously, as much as in individual as in collective ways: if they are created consciously and individually, they produce an explicit identity project; on the other hand, when they are produced unconsciously and collectively, they become a habit and even a routine.

In the documents of the BA program in Intercultural Management for Development (LGID), interculturality is officially described as

A concept under construction that responds to a dynamic vision of reality, it is possible to understand it as a quality which is attributable to any relation between different cultures where diversity and pluralism are fully recognized. (UVI, 2007: 9)

This contextual, constructivist and situational notion of intercultural issues clearly differs from the appropriation of this notion made by the UVI Selvas teachers. They, on the contrary, understand interculturality in the following ways:

Interculturality as recognition of diversity

I see that interculturality is more advanced in our students than in us, the teachers […]. The respect for diversity, I see that learners are taking it seriously, like ‘nothing happens if someone is homosexual or lesbian’, it is comprehensible […]. It is comprehensible if someone belongs to a certain cultural group, if someone doesn’t agree with my ideas […]. I think that is more mature and consolidated in the young (E-D-H-1).

Inside this linguistic screen, interculturality makes us recognize ourselves as diverse, complex, reflexive, as critical and self-critical subjects, as subjects as we interact with others.

Interculturality as equity promoter

I conceive interculturality as a practical part, even more from attitudes, from how I stand facing the others. From this position, I conceive it more as an idea of equals, with differences, with wonderful differences […], it would be to take a horizontal level in which we all have very important aspects to share (E-D-M-4).

Interculturality as the existing interchange between cultures

It’s possible to exchange cultures, it is possible to interchange between Nahuas, Popoluca and other ethnicities because sometimes we close ourselves to one culture […]. Every community has its own ways of organizing, traditional parties […]. For example, the Popoluca people, well, we have our own organizational features and those features and all those features in the intercultural approach, is to form and rescue so that our children and future grandchildren have this vision and see what was done before in every ethnic group, this is the strongest part (E-D-H-6).

Through these interactions, the people involved can recognize and strengthen their identity traits, attaining to promote or reproduce them inside and outside their cultures.

Interculturality as dialogue

Interculturality is a horizontal dialogue between cultures, a dialogue is always a relation which is more or less horizontal. A vertical dialogue cannot exist, otherwise it would not be a dialogue, it would be an imposition, a monologue. Then, a dialogue is more or less horizontal (E-D-H-5).

Interculturality as the space where knowledge is dialogued and shared

Interculturality is to share your knowledge with others, to relate with other cultures. This is happening in the UVI because knowledge and lore are being shared with communities (E-D-M-6).

Interculturality as enrichment

Interculturality implies tolerance, because through it we confront our ideas, and that confrontation […] helps us to compensate what a person tells us about other cultures, like Chinanteco culture. And what I give him as a Chinanteco person, and so we complement each other (E-D-M-2).

Interculturality as empowerment

The fact that Nahua people cohabitate with foreigners or with mestizos is not intercultural if it doesn’t have equity as basis. [For example], there are no similar educational opportunities for me than for a foreigner or for a Nahua, and this involves power issues. There are other cultures which are economically stronger, that can exert power (E-D-M-5).

Interculturality as a process under construction

It is a utopia, it is an issue that we want to build […]; inside the UVI, in different spheres interculturality is not viable, it doesn’t exist now (E-D-H-1).

As a concept under construction, the actors acknowledge that they do not know the range and validity of the approach. Some people describe it as a “fallacy” or a “hoax,” due to the way in which actors and players use it

Interculturality is like a hoax […]. In Oaxaca, for example, teachers say ‘well, we are doing an intercultural work because on mother’s day festival we include a Mexican northern march, a Chinese dance and a Peruvian dance’ and that is interculturality (E-D-H-5).

According to these actors, one has to be “suspicious” of the concepts of interculturality that are generated not only inside the state but also inside institutions; because the majority of them establish definitions that have little relation with the reality or needs of the concerned groups. These teachers suppose that the intercultural discourse creators pursue a purpose which makes them limit their definitions to the indigenous sector.

Conclusions

Along this analysis of interculturality notions used by intercultural university teachers, we have seen how the intercultural discourse participants are receptors as well as producers of their own discourse. They make complex combinations of socio-cultural roles and identities in the moment of transferring and/or reproducing new “inter” meanings. Also, we have analyzed and explained that their differences involve social, economic, academic, professional and cultural aspects. Despite these differences, they identify themselves with diverse others and build meanings to work inside an intercultural framework.

We have furthermore shown through an ethnographic example how the globalized intercultural discourse migrates transnationally, focusing here on the perspective of the local actors who participate “from the bottom” in what we called the discourse migration process. Turning to a number of analytic categories which had been originally proposed by the historiography of the “intercultural transfer,” it has been possible to identify and to sketch the intercultural discourse path since its origins in different contexts—Latin American and European—until its “grounding” by the educational actors studied here. Figure 1 shows in a two-dimensional simplified way the complex, multidimensional and multi-actor mutual confluences and influences that take part in this process. OPEN IN VIEWER

We have identified a set of different “linguistic screens” which characterize the teachers of an innovative higher education institution, the UVI. By contrasting these analyzed screens, what stands out is the homogeneity of the official, institutional screens of the UVI, on the one hand, vis-à-vis the heterogeneity of the actor screens of the teachers, on the other hand; this shows that the teachers as committed social actors participate in various screens simultaneously.

Beneath the analyzed screens underlies the tension between two notions which are antagonistically opposite, “interculturality for indigenous people” vs. “interculturality for all.” This reflects the irresolute tension between the indigenista particularistic legacy of the official “intercultural and bilingual” educational system and the legacy of homogenizing universalism that permeates all Mexican educational institutions, a structural tension that is currently challenged by an ever more apparent need of finally recognizing and institutionally adapting to the life world heterogeneity which shapes contemporary Mexican society (Mateos Cortés and Dietz, 2013; Schmelkes, 2006).

The academic actors who promote the UVI project overcome this intrinsic tension by importing a de-essentialized, constructivist and mainstreaming interculturality discourse such as the one that prevails in the European academic and pedagogical context. As a synonym of the “diversity of diversities” (Dietz, 2009), its respective screens reflect an open and dynamic notion of what interculturality is; this notion is sustained as a constant dialogue, which in a reflexive and self-critical ways strives to go beyond the historically rooted indigenous-mestizo identity dichotomy. In response, the UVI Selvas local actors show closeness to the intercultural discourse coming from the academics influenced by the European models and educational debates. However, they end up producing alternative discourses which are more critical of exogenous interculturality and more focused on the empowerment of subordinate subjects of the communities with which they collaborate. This converges in an interest in the dialogue notions which start from the recognition of real existing diversity, not just as a pedagogical strategy “for everyone,” but, on the contrary, as a right of the historically excluded and discriminated collective actors.

As this summary shows, depending on the closeness or remoteness with regard to the Mexican nation-state and its mestizo-oriented, homogenizing and Jacobin nationalist legacy (Dietz and Mateos Cortés, 2013), these linguistic screens reflect a resilience of the official indigenista models, models which have already been declared obsolete, but which conform historically rooted screens that are still alive for many of the studied actors. Only gradually and at the margins of the Mexican educational system, such as inside the emerging intercultural universities, discursive alternatives emerge and overcome the paternalistic indigenista approach which persists to a great extent in the above analyzed intercultural discourse.