Hegemonic discourses of the History of Mexico and parallel resistances. An autoethnography in dialogue with an indigenous teacher

Abstract

Autoethnography is an evocative text that allows the researcher’s experience to be placed in a broader social, cultural and political context. One of its purposes is to understand the situated reality of the researcher between his past and his present to transform it into multiple scenarios of possibility. In this sense, writing the experience allows us to activate seemingly disjointed recesses of personal history that give rise to a new reading of reality. This is what Norman Denzin calls “investigating with the heart.” The present work emanates from a broader investigation with the purpose of obtaining the degree of Doctor in Critical Pedagogy. It is a narrative of my personal history in the attempt to understand the links of History as a discipline and the epistemological domination of indigenous communities. To achieve the goal, I resort to autoethnography to reveal the ways in which the epistemological domination of the past passes through the body and subjectivity of the subjects in their concrete reality. In this case, the conflict generated by the discourse of Mexico’s official past and the imaginary constructed about the indigenous led me to dialogue with my father, a person belonging to a Nahua community from the Huasteca of Veracruz and a retired professor of the indigenous system. One of the reflections I come to is understanding that the process of epistemological domination is not alien to the training of teachers with indigenous roots, since the messianic discourse of the official past challenges their present. However, I was also able to visualize that resistance to the official discourse is carried out in extracurricular practices, whose indigenous conception is revealed for the resolution of conflicts and making agreements.