Limited by decree. The normative restrictions of the official intercultural universities in Mexico

Abstract

In the beginning of the 21st century, the Mexican government carried out institutional changes in the public policies directed at the indigenous peoples in the country. Among those changes was the creation of the General Coordination of Intercultural and Bilingual Education (Coordinación General de Educación Intercultural y Bilingüe, CGEIB) in 2001 with the aim of making education in the country intercultural. The CGEIB was the basis for the conception of a model of Intercultural Universities (Universidades Interculturales, UIs), of which 12 establishments have opened in the country so far. Although these universities represent a progress in the transformation of the colonial logics of Higher Education, most of them face scenarios of political co-optation and control by the governments of the States, a situation resulting from the centralised normativity that regulates them. In this paper, I argue that the UIs were born “limited by decree”, for the same decrees creating them established a decision-making structure that lends all the power to the governmental bodies and excludes community and academic actors, contravening national and international legislation with respect to indigenous rights, and reproducing the clientelistic and corporatist political culture of the Mexican State, embodied in the neo-indigenism.