Abstract

PLA, Sebastián. Mixed Blood and Unfinished: High School Interpretations of Mexican History. RMIE [online]. 2014, vol.19, n.61, pp.483-509. ISSN 1405-6666.

Schools interpret the past in diverse forms. Overlapping within those forms are various discourses from historiography, from the social ends given to history, from the proposals of national identity, from didactic strategies, and from the interpretations formulated by the students themselves. The result, in spite of variations, is to link the past directly to the present. The current article studies the interpretations of the Conquest of Mexico, the War of Independence, and the Mexican Revolution. Although student interpretations of mestizo identities and unfinished history, for example, are relatively homogeneous, significant divergence is also found. This paper describes how students in three high schools in southern Mexico City attach meaning to the past and how they explain their unique forms of doing so from the present.

Keywords : teaching history; high school education; young people; history of Mexico.

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