Abstract
The social, economic, and political changes accompanying the independence of Mexico from Spain in 1821 profoundly affected schooling in the far northern colonies. Most significantly, Mexican independence ended the close relationship between education and religion that largely defined the colonial era. The end of state-sponsored religious missions, a new spirit of egalitarianism, and constitutional requirements for schooling combined to bring new importance to public schooling. Unlike before, public schools became a critical component of the creation of an educated citizenry. In this regard, the link between education and the republic echoed Jeffersonian principles articulated in the early Republican Era of the United States.2 However, decades of political upheaval in the fledgling Mexican state and the unintended negative consequences of the closure of the missions prevented the widespread establishment of public schools.
The education of youth has always been one of the most important bases for the felicity of Peoples, and the prosperity of their Government. The Mexican, who, unfortunately, groaned under the despotic and savage sway of the ambitious sons of Iberia, has never occupied himself in perfecting this most important institution, which would already have placed him on a level with the most cultured nations. The corrupt Government at Madrid only cared to suck up, by whatever means within its reach, the precious resources of the Americas, and studiously and craftily to retard the growth of enlightenment.
—1821 School Ordinance, San Fernando de Bexar, Texas1
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Notes
Gordon Lee, ed., Crusade against Ignorance: Thomas Jefferson on Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1961).
David N. Plank and Rick Ginsberg, eds., Southern Cities, Southern Schools: Public Education in the Urban South (New York, Greenwood Press, 1990);
Victoria-María MacDonald, The Persistence of Segregation: Race, Class, and Public Education in Columbus, Georgia, 1828–1998, unpublished book manuscript, 2003;
Edgar Knight, ed., A Documentary History of Education in the South Before 1860, vol. 2 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949–1953).
Manuel G. Gonzales, Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
Michael C. Meyer and William L. Sherman, The Course of Mexican History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821 to 1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982).
Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), p. 167.
Raymond S. Brandes, trans. and annotator, “Times Gone By in Alta California: Recollections of Señora Dona Juana Machada Alipaz de Ridington (Wrightington),” The Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly 41 (September 1959): 195–240. Provides a first-person account of the constant fear (and reality) of Indians kidnapping women and assaulting Mexican settlers.
Fr. Zephyyrin Engelhardt, O. F. M., The Missions and Missionaries of California, vol. 20 (San Francisco: The James H. Barry Company, 1908), p. 549.
Irving Berdine Richman, California under Spain and Mexico, 1535–1847 (Boston: Houghton Miffling Co., 1911), p. 222.
Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Ribera, Mexican Americans—American Mexicans: From Conquistadores to Chicanos (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), pp. 32–33; and Weber, The Mexican Frontier, p. 44.
George Harwood Phillips, “Indians and the Breakdown of the Spanish Mission System in California,” in David J. Weber, ed., New Spain’s Far Northern Frontier: Essays on Spain in the American West, 1540–1821 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1979), p. 264.
Fr. Zephyrin Engelhardt, O.F.M., The Missions and Missionaries of California, vol. 1 (San Francisco: The James H. Barry Company, 1908), p. 88.
Paul Farnsworth and Robert H. Jackson, “Cultural, Economic, and Demographic Change in the Missions of Alta California: the Case of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad,” in The New Latin American Mission History, ed. Erick Langer and Robert H. Jackson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 124–5.
Francis J. Weber, Documents of California Catholic History, 1784–1963 (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1965), pp. 33–36.
Wayne Moquin and Charles Van Doren, eds, A Documentary History of the Mexican Americans (New York: Praeger, 1971), pp. 130–136.
Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 9–10; and Menchaca, Recovering History, p. 181.
Regulations reproduced in Daniel Tyler, “The Mexican Teacher,” Red River Valley Historical Review 1 (1974): 214.
Richard J. Altenbaugh, The American People and Their Education: A Social History (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2003), p. 45.
Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983);
Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York: Harper and Row, 1980);
David B. Tyack, Turning Points in American Educational History (University Microfilms International, 1967);
and Joel Perlmann and Robert A. Margo, Women’s Work?: American Schoolteachers, 1650–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 171.
For more discussion of this educational plan see Rodney Hessinger, “Lancaster System,” in Richard J. Altenbaugh, ed., Historical Dictionary of American Education (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), pp. 208–9.
Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, vol. 19, History of California. Vol.2. 1801–1824 (Santa Barbara, CA: Wallace Hebberd, 1966), p. 680.
Tyler, “The Mexican Teacher,” pp. 209–210; Lynn Marie Getz, Schools of Their Own: The Education of Hispanos in New Mexico, 1850–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), p. 5.
Weber, The Mexican Frontier, pp. 232–3; and Doyce B. Nunis, Jr. Books in Their Sea Chests: Reading along the Early California Coast (California Library Association, 1964), pp. 6–7.
Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769–1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 80.
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© 2004 Victoria-María MacDonald
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MacDonald, VM. (2004). Education during the Mexican Era, 1821–1848. In: Latino Education in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982803_3
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