How to stage and compose these rituals was a critical matter for national, regional, and local actors as they redefined themselves and their relations to one another in the course of the 1930s. In this decade, federal teachers became explicit political actors. They were instructed to organize peasants and workers to press for the implementation of federal agrarian and labor laws that would effect a redistribution of wealth and power. Teachers shaped and directed the policy of civic ritual designed to consolidate party and state. In the short run, teachers contributed to the formation of a single state party, which was neither socialist nor left.
Opinions abound as to the impact of socialist education.
For leftists, it was the quintessential moment of mass mobilization and teacher heroism, diminished only by the fact that its product was a state party rather than subaltern organizational autonomy. The proof, conservatives claim, lay in the massive protests that forced the government to curtail its campaign against religion in 1936. A recent, well-informed academic assessment acknowledges that portions of the socialist education project echoed favorably in specific settings, but argues that, overall, it was unsuccessful because it did not alter behavior. In this study I compare negotiation around socialist education in two major Mexican states, Puebla in central Mexico and Sonora in the north. I examine the cultural politics of schooling in four rural societies within these states.