Lessons to Be Learned from Ayotzinapa: Chicana/o Latina/o Studies and the Normalista Tradition

In “The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies,” Immanuel Wallerstein suggests that the 1943 Committee on World Regions of the Social Science Research Council “laid the groundwork for” the emergence of Ethnic... [ view full abstract ]

In “The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies,” Immanuel Wallerstein suggests that the 1943 Committee on World Regions of the Social Science Research Council “laid the groundwork for” the emergence of Ethnic Studies, “first of all by undermining the plausibility of traditional ethnography and Oriental Studies, then by forcing the ‘Western’ disciplines to take into account a larger range of data, and finally by questioning the sacrosanct divisions of the disciplines.” While Wallerstein rightfully distinguishes between Cold War area studies as a “top down enterprise” concerned with postcolonialism abroad, and Ethnic studies as bottom-up “revolt of those whom the university had forgotten,” he neglects the ways in which Ethnic Studies, and, in particular, the Chicana/o Movement, operated within K-12 Education and established alternative two-year and four-year colleges known as Escuelitas. This paper will offer a brief history Escuelitas—DQ University (Davis), La Universidad Aztlan and El Colegio de la Tierra (Fresno), and Escuela del Barrio (San Diego)—as a way to document an alternative site of Ethnic Studies pedagogy. Moreover, I contextualize the critical indigenous vision of Escuelitas within the Normalista tradition that emerged as a consequence of the Mexican Revolution, a community based pedagogy that has recently gained worldwide attention given the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa. Rather than simply offer a corrective to Wallerstein, I suggest a return to this essay is useful for theorizing the ways in which Ethnic Studies offers a decolonial option for Latina/o Studies.