The rural normals are a seed of the future

The rural schools of our country are not a burden of the past, as they want to present them to us, but rather a seed of the futuresaid journalist Luis Hernández Navarro at the presentation of his book The painting on the wall: A window to the normal schools and the rural normalistas (Fund for Economic Culture, 2023), an exercise in historical memory woven through characters and, sometimes, institutions, in whose pages the life of the normalistas intersects with the history of the schools where they were trained.

painting on the wall was born from a tragedy, of rage, of not only seeing firsthand what was the forced disappearance of the 43 boys from the Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, in what constitutes a crime of the State and against humanity, but of the courage of the campaign of stigmatization that accompanied this crime. It was tremendous what was said about them, as well as what continues to be said from all political sides, 10 years after their disappearance..

For the coordinator of the Opinion section of The Day, this couldn’t be because I knew teachers committed to their students, to teaching, to the processes of democratization and struggle. Telling what these teachers and these schools are like was the starting point for writing the book.

Before the public gathered at the Antonieta Rivas Mercado Multipurpose Forum of the México Library, mostly retired teachers, Hernández Navarro explained that the title of his work alludes to an event that occurred in Chiapas: the teacher Isidro Castillo, founder of the first rural normal In 1922, in Tacámbaro, Michoacán, he was later sent to Chiapas to build what is the predecessor of the Mactumactzá Normal School, called Cerro Hueco at that time.

“Castillo, together with the community, the farmers, the teachers themselves and the boys, built a very modest school with adobe walls, palm roofs and dirt floors. Since there were not many resources, the school cafeteria was left inside the building, with practically no windows to the outside. The boys found no better way to brighten up the place than, where there was a wall, to paint a mural that reproduced the lavish Chiapas vegetation.

Then, where they could not see outside, they, with their imagination, their art, their talent, managed to open a window to look beyond the place where they were. In the book I try to explain how rural normalism is for a very large sector of the population of Mexico a window that opens in the wall to allow many people, who otherwise would not have the possibility of getting ahead, to have another horizon. promising what the resignation of staying to work in the plot or the furrow is.

Hernández Navarro added: It is a story that has ended up turning rural normal schools into living museums. Wherever you go, you will find literally dozens of murals, in which dreams, fantasies, roots, the identity that explains the reason for normalism are captured. One of the central figures who has something to do with this process of expansion of modern normal muralism is José Hernández Delgadillo.

For Teodoro Palomino Gutiérrez, former teacher leader, Social struggles never existed as a way of building a different society. This book fills us with great satisfaction because in an agile, profound way, but above all without lacking the truth, it incorporates in its pages processes that otherwise would have remained in social oblivion..

Galdino Morán López, former rector of the Autonomous University of Mexico City, assured that he counted 761 characters, converted into a polyphony of voices. Of them, “81 are repeated in some chapters, although there are others that make up the text: they are rural normalistas. Luis builds a substrate on which he erects this mural, with its expertisewith his pen passed through a forge of investigative journalism. But not only that: there is an ethnographic study, in-depth interviews, bibliographic, newspaper and videographic research.”