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Bilingual Education for Indigenous Communities in Mexico

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Encyclopedia of Language and Education

Introduction

In Mexico as in the rest of Latin America, discussion about indigenous bilingual education centres around two central questions. The first relates to the macro‐political and anthropological dimension: Will it be possible to build a plurilingual and pluricultural nation state that will be able and willing to reconcile the forging of a national identity and unity with the preservation of linguistic and cultural diversity? The second, of a rather micro nature in the field of psycholinguistics and pedagogy, refers to the modalities of bilingual education, more precisely to the relation between language use and academic achievement in education, in the context of an asymmetric relationship between Spanish as the dominant and the indigenous as the subordinate languages (Hamel, 1988, 2000).

The socio‐political dimension emerges in the debates about the policies that the dominant Mestizo society and the state they control design for the nation's autochthonous peoples: Should their...

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Hamel, R.E. (2008). Bilingual Education for Indigenous Communities in Mexico. In: Hornberger, N.H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30424-3_133

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30424-3_133

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