BILINGUAL EDUCATION FOR INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES IN MEXICO

In Mexico as in the rest of Latin America, discussion about indigenous bilingual education centres around two central questions. The first relates to the macro-political and anthropological dimension: Will it be possible to build a plurilingual and pluricultural nation state that will be able and willing to reconcile the forging of a national identity and unity with the preservation of linguistic and cultural diversity? The second, of a rather micro nature in the field of psycholinguistics and pedagogy, refers to the modalities of bilingual education, more precisely to the relation between language use and academic achievement in education, in the context of an asymmetric relationship between Spanish as the dominant and the indigenous as the subordinate languages (Hamel, 1988, 2000). The socio-political dimension emerges in the debates about the policies that the dominant Mestizo society and the state they control design for the nation’s autochthonous peoples: Should their members be assimilated and forced to give up their ethnic identity and languages in order to become accepted citizens of the nation? Conversely, could they integrate and acquire full membership while at the same time preserve and foster their own identity and diversity? Ever since the beginning of Colonization through Spain in 1519, and even earlier in the Aztec Empire, the state has assigned a central role to education in this process (Heath, 1972). The pedagogical and psycholinguistic dimension comes into sight when the question arises how the global socio-political goals could best be achieved through education. How might a given school population of indigenous children who have practically no command of Spanish, the national language, best acquire the knowledge they are supposed to obtain? And, what understandings, orientations and ideologies do those in power cultivate about the role of languages in education: Would those children have to abandon their native language in order to learn the national language properly and become useful citizens? Or, on the contrary, could their first language be a fundamental instrument to acquire literacy, other academic skills, second order discourses