Qualitative Research and Indigenous People

Qualitative research in Mexico regarding social processes in general, and in particular addressing indigenous education, harkens back to a history in which disciplines such as linguistics and anthropology have had their own national development. This history is defined by a close relationship between academic life and sociopolitical activism, in such a way that the means of knowledge production have particular uses and characteristics.

This academic activism has its origins in the qualitative research carried out by researchers with university training, a process tied to the dialogue initiated in the 1970s in Mexico and Latin America. Within this dialogue, indigenous and non-indigenous academics and professionals have worked to reconfigure the conditions of colonialism at work in their “postcolonial” national societies. To this end, when we refer to postcolonial perspectives in 21st-century conversation it is necessary to recognize the different contexts that influence the production of these discourses in Mexico. Additionally, as several authors have noted, the prefix post assumes that something has already happened. However, the neocolonial structures of the nation-states have not disappeared, especially at the formal and legal level where in fact they continue to reproduce discrimination and racism against the indigenous peoples of Mexico and all of Latin America (Bartolomé, 2003).

Much of the postcolonial discourse that circulates within the academy is grounded in studies of subalternity, coming from Palestinian, African, and Indian intellectuals trained in prestigious universities within metropolitan centers. This literature has created a space to rethink critical debates by putting on the political-ethical-epistemological table the question of representation, asking: Who gets to speak for whom? (Spivak, 1988). In the case of Latin America, this conversation has been going on since the 1970s as academics, together with indigenous leaders, have challenged the research referred to as “social science”: they ask what the research is and question the audience it is produced for and why it is produced.

This article will highlight the fact that for many years there have been strong academic and political traditions of activism laying the foundation for what in the 21st century influences perspectives on decolonization and decoloniality. At the Barbados meetings I and II (1971 and 1977), in addition to explicitly criticizing anthropology as a tool of colonialism, the indigenous organizers established their position. They argued that it should be the indigenous populations that define the course of action and that nonindigenous academics and other agents should occupy secondary places.¹ In this context of political transformation and acknowledgment of indigenous peoples, demands for equality and justice and for access to university education—as well as professionalization opportunities for indigenous peoples—have been articulated with increasing strength through different organizations and communities.

The beginning of the 1990s saw indigenous movements throughout the region as well as protests against the celebration of the 500-year anniversary of the “meeting of two worlds.” In 1994 in Mexico, with the indigenous uprising of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in the state of Chiapas, many faces referred to as “indigenous” appeared on the national political scene and made themselves present in the public consciousness. These indigenous public figures demanded acknowledgment and the right to live as original peoples, not just in the regions considered to be indigenous but throughout the entire country.

In the international legal sphere, tools such as the Convention 169 (International Organization of Labor), and the actions imposed by The International Decade of the World's Indigenous People (1995–2004), also form part of the precedent for changes in the constitutions of several Latin American countries. Along these lines, Mexico in 2001 approved a new constitutional change endorsing the acknowledgment of cultural plurality within the Mexican nation; Article 2 now states that the nation has a pluricultural composition based on indigenous peoples who are descended from populations that prior to colonization inhabited what is now Mexico and who maintain their own socioeconomic, cultural, and political institutions, or part of them.

The plural nature of the Mexican nation was thus confirmed, along with the rights of the indigenous peoples and communities to self-determination and the right to preserve their languages, knowledge, and the specific components that form their culture and identity. At the same time, it was also indicated that it would be the responsibility of federal and state authorities to establish the necessary policies to guarantee, on behalf of indigenous peoples and communities, the protection of their rights and access to civic participation.

The 21st century began with a debate within the social sciences and other communities about what kinds of research should be undertaken by both non-indigenous and indigenous researchers. This debate has led to the adoption of several strategies that employ diverse qualitative methodological approaches such as ethnography, research action, narratives, and testimonials. These approaches are the ones most frequently utilized by indigenous researchers; and in Mexico, they often form the groundwork for planning projects looking to intervene in the scholastic and community educational fields, as well as in the search for social and cultural justice within emancipatory processes.

The following presents a panorama of anthropological and linguistic research indicative of the knowledge qualitative research produced about indigenous communities up until the 20th century: such as the training processes and policies initiated in universities and research centers in the field of indigenous professionalization, particularly those that have influenced the formulation of qualitative methodologies in the socio-educational field. Addressing the question of qualitative research conducted by indigenous researchers points to a seldom-recognized sphere but one that offers several important interventions. Rather than present definitions of what indigenous researchers do under the broad category of qualitative methodologies, this article addresses the patterns and goals that this methodological approach appears to lend to the community projects in one area of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, specifically in the field of education. In the conclusions the article presents some of the challenges confronting native and non-native scholars, faced with diverse modes of producing and presenting knowledge, as well as challenges facing higher education institutions regarding the dialogue around and recognition of other languages, procedures, and attitudes in the processes of knowledge production.

Mexican Research on Indigenous Peoples During the 20th Century

Research with qualitative methodologies in the field of education in Mexico began as part of a large and rich national tradition of anthropological studies. During the 20th century, there was a strong push to create and strengthen research and teaching institutions dedicated to the development of ethnographies, linguistic studies, archaeology, and anthropology. They were founded as part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the Center for Anthropological Studies (CEA), and the Institute for Anthropological Research (IIA). The National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) (originally a department in the National Polytechnical Institute (IPN) and later integrated into the National Institute for Anthropology and History and the Center for Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) (a public, decentralized organization) were also founded. Additionally, in other public and private universities such as the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM), the National Pedagogical University (UPN), and the Ibero-American University (UI), the development of anthropology departments and faculties dedicated to teaching and to research was strengthened. In time, all of these academic environments were matriculating indigenous students who sought a place in higher education.

In the 21st century in these institutions there are groups of researchers that use qualitative methodologies to research varied and distinct aspects of indigenous education, although this only began toward the end of the 20th century. The earliest works produced were highly focused and had one clear objective: to promote basic education within indigenous schools through bilingual teaching. In the 1930s, institutions and programs with a linguistic and cultural emphasis were created, based mainly on applied linguistic anthropology but without a research approach grounded in any kind of qualitative methodology. In the early stages, there were projects that worked to help rural schools develop student literacy in native indigenous languages in order to ensure “development”; however, Hispanicization was still the ultimate goal. The objectives of the research carried out during those years and up until the 1960s were clearly defined in accordance with the Mexican state’s goal of developing pedagogies and materials that would facilitate the assimilation of the indigenous population into the broader national society, referred to as mestiza.

During much of the 20th century, Spanish literacy was of central importance to educational research focused on indigenous communities. Almost all of the research carried out by anthropologists in this field aimed to identify the most effective processes for teaching Spanish and developed programs and materials that would serve this goal. Several projects and efforts stand out. For example, the Tarasco Project, established in the state of Michoacán in 1939, was directed by the linguist Mauricio Swadesh in order to complete a literacy project with the Purépecha language. Swadesh counted on the advice of renowned North American anthropologists (Rebolledo, 2015, pp. 364–365). The research focused on methodologies for teaching Spanish as a second language. Additionally, “the formation of literacy missions led by Swadesh, was another forward step for regional educational planning” (Rebolledo, 2015, p. 366). The Summer Linguistic Institute, led by Kenneth Pike, also supported this goal with the creation of the “Literacy Manual for Indigenous Peoples,” a manual taken up by the Research Institute for the Social Integration of the State of Oaxaca (IIISEO) to develop their “Audiovisual Method for Teaching Spanish to Speakers of Indigenous Languages.” As a part of this intense focus on achieving Spanish literacy within indigenous communities, there were also projects that favored “direct hispanicization and an education packed with strong national content” (Rebolledo, 2015, p. 369).

The assumption that learning to read and write in Spanish would lead to assimilation into the so-called mestiza national culture—an indigenist policy clearly derived from a colonialist vision of the state—was the motivating factor behind these efforts.²

Thus, in the context of the indigents policy in place until the 1960s, indigenous communities were considered to be recipients (or “beneficiaries”) without any efforts to promote their participation in society and without asking whether they agreed with the goals of these programs. In this context, school was used as an instrument of assimilation and change. And anthropology, in particular research in applied linguistics, was the discipline that coordinated these processes. However, as Rebolledo (2015) describes, “This wave of hispanicization was finally confronted by a nascent movement of (indigenous) bilingual teachers during the first half of the 70s, which challenged the kind education they had received from the state, describing it as an ethnocide that reproduced the dynamics of colonization” (p. 372). It was in this political context of vindication and revaluation of indigenous values and knowledge that qualitative methodologies, ethnography in particular, began to appear and become known as valid and legitimate methodologies.

In connection with these teaching movements, the first widespread federal program offering preschool and primary education to indigenous communities throughout the country was developed. The General Directorate of Indigenous Education (DGEI) was created in 1978, representing the configuration of a subsystem within the Ministry of Public Education (SEP). Linked to the indigenist policies of those years, this subsystem expanded in schools located in different regions, both rural and semi-rural. In order to attend to the specific cultural and linguistic contexts of the indigenous boys and girls, they incorporated different educational foci, first during the 1970s under the name Bilingual Bicultural Education (EBB), to the 1990s with Bilingual Intercultural Education (EBI), to the most recent incarnation: Intercultural Bilingual Education (EIB). However, indigenous populations have also entered into urban schools at the primary and secondary levels in numbers that have not been acknowledged: these are educational contexts that do not necessarily focus on intercultural education (Czarny, 2017).

Alongside these changes in indigenous education policies, there has been a growing awareness among indigenous people and educational researchers of the rights of indigenous communities to a culturally and linguistically relevant education. Nonetheless, the legacies of the first attempts to design the aforementioned programs, which found their inspiration and reason in applied anthropology, ethnology, and descriptive linguistics, are still present in the different levels and conceptions of what we currently understand to be indigenous education. There have also been significant changes in the intentions of the projects, the inclusion of qualitative research methods, and in the incorporation of the active participation of indigenous peoples in the research process and the practical applications of the results. This first point is mainly a product of the growth of indigenous teaching organizations who demanded equality for and recognition of their languages and cultures, as well as involvement in the fieldwork of ethnographic educational research in Mexico and in other parts of the world. By the 1980s, scholars were beginning to produce ethnographic studies of rural and indigenous education, both in and out of the classroom (e.g., Maurer, 1977; Paradise, 1991; Rockwell, 1995).

With this acceptance of qualitative, interpretive methodologies and the use of ethnographic approaches, scholars also began to incorporate theoretical perspectives about sociocultural and historical processes, enriching (or in some cases replacing) theoretical approaches derived from psychology, sociology, and linguistics: fields that had traditionally dominated educational research. Researchers and their students began to focus on new issues, working to understand other educational processes. Ethnography provided the kind of empirical data that allowed researchers to broaden their focus and analyze the practices of teachers and students beyond what educational psychology or linguistic theories regarding learning a second language would allow. By the 1990s, this focus on sociocultural, historical, and political aspects, together with the use of qualitative research methods, expanded significantly. At the same time, the number of academics and teachers, both indigenous and non-indigenous—those dedicated to researching the field of indigenous education at all levels and its relationship to the community—grew significantly. They began to produce research from different disciplinary perspectives (e.g., sociocultural, historical, sociolinguistic, psychological) documenting these communities and thus fostering a conversation about multifaceted educational processes impacted by marginalization and inequality.

In the 21st-century context of national policy on indigenous education, emphasis on intercultural education, bilingual education, and qualitative methodologies has proved to be particularly relevant. These represent a new toolbox of research approaches, such as carrying out intensive fieldwork in schools and communities, research-action projects, an emphasis on descriptive ethnographers, the use of narratives and testimonies, and acknowledgment of the locally based knowledges of people directly involved in educational processes. These qualitative approaches are closely associated wih theoretical-analytical approaches (e.g., Paulo Freire, Pierre Bourdieu, Guillermo Bonfil) that indigenous teachers and other university-trained indigenous professionals have used in different ways as important tools in their fight for recognition and appreciation of their rights and cultures. In this sense, research on indigenous education is gradually being transformed: it is no longer simply about indigenous communities but rather research produced (or co-produced) by indigenous communities.

Indigenous Professionalization and Educational Research Practice

In an inventory of the higher education training programs oriented toward indigenous communities, Bartolomé (2003) observed that until the 1960s, the recruitment of indigenous sectors to join programs at this level functioned under what was known in Mexico as Bilingual Cultural Promoters, a project implemented within the fields of education, health, and other social projects. This project was, from the perspective of the indigenist policy of the time, understood to be community development.

The state responded “with a strategy of manipulation that followed the rules of indirect rule developed by British colonialism” (Bartolomé, 2003, p. 28), through which they sought to mediate these indigenous techniques within indigenous communities in order to also incorporate the elements of modernity that nation-states require for their projects, defined in accordance with predetermined notions of development and progress.

However, many of the leaders of communities who had joined these programs, in agreement with Bartolomé (2003),

agreed on the need for a better understanding of the inclusion of their people within asymmetrical regional and national inter-ethnic contexts. This ethnic and political consciousness prompted many to oppose the policies demanded of them. This paradoxical process contributed to the formation of the first professional indigenous organizations, in the 1970s, tied to state institutions, but which represented a constituency opposed to integrationist proposals. (p. 28)

Some analysts of the subject point out that during this process of formation, primarily throughout the 1970s, the cultural promoters became involved in research contexts in order to reconstruct historical memory and local knowledge, to recover their territories and natural resources, and also to strengthen their cultural identity and ability to develop autonomous cultural projects (Pérez & Argueta, 2015). These formative processes highlighted reflexive, descriptive, and analytical work. There was collective discussion among indigenous youths, anthropologists, and social scientists who accompanied them on this journey, a factor that indicated the participation of these promoters in subsequent community and ethno-political organizations. Diverse projects, in many cases, were developed within and by the communities themselves (Pérez & Argueta, 2015).

Throughout the 1970s, within an environment of discourses and movements oriented toward decolonization, there was a state-sponsored push to create programs in public universities to train indigenous professionals, primarily in areas such as pedagogy, linguistics, and education. Recognizing these training programs is an acknowledgment that such programs in the field of qualitative research continued to develop. These programs had different levels and perspectives but were highly influenced by the aforementioned disciplines.

We offer a brief account of these programs. At the baccalaureate level, the programs are as follows: ethnolinguistic training at the Center for Higher Research–The National Institute of Anthropology and History (CIS–INAH) in 1978, which was in operation for only a few years, comprising youths from different communities fluent in indigenous languages; a bachelor’s degree in indigenous education, at the National Pedagogical University (UPN), in Mexico City, a program created in 1982 (which to date is still training mostly indigenous professionals in the field of indigenous education and organizes different projects for multilingual and multiethnic contexts); and a bachelor’s degree in primary and preschool education for indigenous communities (LEP and LEPMI). This latter program was created at the UPN in 1990, which is still in operation around the country in the institution’s various branches, supporting the professionalization of indigenous teachers: that is to say, they are credentialing indigenous teachers who have begun work in indigenous schools but who have not been trained for this work (Gigante, 1994; Czarny & Salinas, 2015). Additionally, in the 1990s, at the postgraduate level, the Ministry of Indoamerican Linguistics was created, and recently the doctorate in linguistics, both operating within the CIESAS, was directed at speakers of indigenous languages throughout the continent (Martínez, 2011). Both programs offer specialized training in the field of linguistics and the description of native languages.

By the beginning of the 21st century, through the General Coordination of Intercultural Bilingual Education (CGEIB) and the Secretary of Public Education (SEP), programs for Normal Schools with intercultural and bilingual foci were being promoted.³ These institutions were tasked with training teachers to work in indigenous preschool and primary education, and the proposal operated within several federal organizations. Through these agencies, the Intercultural Universities were also created, and there are currently 11 located in regions in close geographical proximity to indigenous communities throughout the country that offer programs in language and culture, intercultural organization and advocacy, sustainable development, alternative tourism, and intercultural communication, among others (CGEIB, 2014).

More recently, since the 2010s, there have been initiatives financed and/or funded specifically by foundations and civil organizations or universities that work to support the academic development of indigenous youths in diverse baccalaureate or postgraduate programs that are not specifically oriented toward indigenous communities. One way this is being accomplished in Mexico is through affirmative action programs in higher education, via scholarships and academic support encouraging indigenous youths to enter and remain at this educational level. Other proposals such as the University Program for the Study of Cultural Diversity and Interculturality (PUIC), which has been in operation for more than a decade at the UNAM, offers scholarships and workshops for indigenous students pursuing different careers.

In Latin America since the turn of the 21st century, this growth in higher education oriented toward indigenous populations has come under debate and has started a broader dialogue (Mato, 2008), as other initiatives created by indigenous organizations have emerged in Mexico. These initiatives have diverse supporters, including the University of the Peoples of the South (UNISUR), which was the result of a movement of indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples in the state of Guerrero; the Ayuuk Intercultural Higher Institute in Oaxaca; the Institute of Mayan Culture in the Maya region; the University of the Land (UNITIERRA), and the Indigenous Campesino University Network (UCI-Red) in the state of Puebla, among others. All of these seek more direct engagement with their sociocommunal contexts and advocate for development initiatives understood as self-education and intercultural education with a focus on ethno-education (Santana, 2017).

Observing these programs and institutions together, all of which were created at specific political moments and with different economic supports (and with the intervention of different individual stakeholders), the common factor of ethnicity emerges. That is to say, these programs are all primarily oriented toward indigenous communities and thus reproduce what some have described as vestiges of the “old indiginism” (Díaz, 2000).

Nevertheless, what becomes clear through these processes is that the project to educate indigenous subjects is established as a field of struggle because of the fraught meaning of school as an institution for indigenous peoples. This refers to the fact that communities have the right to demand self-definition and a voice in educational projects, processes that are not generally aligned with the educational vision of the state, but for which the results of research conducted with the qualitative methods known and implemented in the aforementioned training processes begin to be useful.

Additionally, ethnographic research on the relationship between indigenous peoples and schools has advanced a debate that educational anthropology has contributed to—through ethnographers and with historical perspectives—by documenting processes of rural communities appropriating schools (Rockwell, 1996), indigenous communities entering the educational system, and what these processes represent—not just in terms of sociocultural transformations but also in how these processes redefine what school means (González, 2004; Czarny, 2008; Martínez, 2011; Paradise & Robles, 2016).

The debate over schooling and professionalization are central themes in the field of indigenous education and produce problematic historical processes. This is manifest in the many challenges youths and communities face in their search for access to higher education and a life with social, cultural, and epistemic justice. Some research conducted by indigenous and nonindigenous researchers indicated that the act of attending university and becoming an academic or researcher (or indigenous intellectual) has not resulted in the reduction and/or disappearance of racism or discrimination.⁴ As recurring accounts and auto-ethnographies of native researchers indicate, taken up by Zoque academic Domínguez (2013), for indigenous peoples, attending a university represents a complex border crossing. And the fact of being in a university erases neither anti-indigenous racism or discrimination.

Furthermore, the experience of entering higher education, and the modes in which institutions and their agents define what it is to produce scientific knowledge, confront young indigenous students with communal messages that a group of them guard: they recognize that knowledge is not a product of having attended school and that what is referred to as “universal knowledge” has different sociocultural references from the perspective of their communities and peoples (Czarny, 2008).

At the same time, this field of tensions, present with different intensities within the experience of indigenous training and professionalization, results in an important space in which interaction and experimentation with different modalities of teaching, learning, and knowledge production can generate new frameworks for academic and investigative work.

Evidently, access to higher education is loaded with various meanings for indigenous youth and for their families and communities. For some, school maintains the late-19th-century ideals that are committed to the “improvement of economic and social conditions.” Likewise, other perspectives in the field of indigenous professionalization point out that these higher education processes are a weapon for the recovery of political community projects with different implications and ramifications (Prada & López, 2009, Rea, 2013).

Qualitative Methodologies in Indigenous Hands

The existing theoretical and methodological tools used in training processes in higher education have been appropriated in different ways by indigenous professionals and researchers. In their hands, these tools have had implications for the development and implementation of projects coming from within their communities but also in the search for other ways of interacting with objects of knowledge and research production. Some uses of qualitative methodologies include ethnographic foci, research action, participant research, collaborative research, and the production of narratives.

Some of these research projects, developed within indigenous collectives of basic education teachers and professionals from various disciplines, within the framework of state policies working to promote intercultural, bilingual education, have been creating schooling and educational proposals for different community contexts. Jointly constructed by indigenous and non-indigenous stakeholders, and many times from indigenous organizations, these projects make an intervention into the field of education. They document: processes of communal socialization and learning, the recovery of local knowledge through oral histories and the use of native languages, documentation of myths, community calendars and concepts, as well as proposals seeking educational autonomy (Bertely, 2004; Meyer & Maldonado, 2004; Comboni, 2009; Bautista, 2013; Cardoso, 2015).

The knowledge developed within these studies and projects is central to the recovery of the self and its impact on the fields of academic and non-academic education. Likewise, a part of this research effort is expressed through work proposals for the classroom, as well as through theoretical discussions and approaches, based on an approach that frames original languages as social practices. This is a perspective that differs from the descriptive linguistics studies mentioned previously (see, e.g., Muñoz, 2002; Hamel et al., 2004).

The majority of these projects try to define and put into practice an academic education that within several contexts is seen as intercultural and bilingual, based on the sociocultural practices and values of indigenous communities. This education is achieved through close working relationships with the communities themselves and has involved expanding methodological strategies allowing both indigenous and non-indigenous researchers to recover education and linguistic community practices and also to establish strong ties between school and community. These works highlight teaching and learning practices in indigenous primary schools, intercultural universities, and in some Normal Schools where indigenous teachers are trained. These educational processes define themselves as intercultural dialogue and dialogue of knowledge (e.g., Meyer & Soberanes, 2009; Dietz & Mateos, 2010; Bertely, 2011). These terms underline the need not only to acknowledge self-determined indigenous educational and linguistic practices but also to promote an exchange that situates these practices at the same level as the non-indigenous, traditional academic practices. These terms also challenge the intercultural perspectives promoted by state policies that arise from a logic of accommodation rather than equality. To some extent, these studies become experiences that work to promote the curricula and educational initiatives that come from the indigenous communities studies, linked (in some ways) to the official national curriculum.

These initiatives and projects work to implement an academic education based on the specific sociocultural practices and values of their communities—together with the research that sustains them—usually encompassing the native languages of these communities as the matrices from which meaning is recognized and produced and that also make other ways of naming and living visible. However, the use of these languages (considered national languages in Mexico) to develop an investigative text, or to communicate the results of a study, is still not recognized as a legitimate format in academic practice.

Although these initiatives can be found throughout different parts of the country, perhaps their richest and most novel manifestation is in the state of Oaxaca. For example, since the 1970s the Mixe community of Santa María Tlahuitoltepec has continuously and in different ways worked to create schools with teaching and learning content and practices that reflect local interests and values (González, 2004). A precursor to these initiatives is the Mixe Music Education Center (CECAM), founded in 1977 and known today as the Mixe Cultural Education and Development Center (Loera & Chávez, 2007). This nationally recognized center has validated a Mixe philharmonic orchestra, therein strengthening their cultural and artistic expressions. In the state of Oaxaca, an important group of educational proposals developed in accordance with local contexts, found their inspiration in the idea of communality. This refers to the research experiences of a group of indigenous anthropologists and linguists (Rendón, 2003; Martínez, 2013; Robles & Cardoso, 2007; Maldonado, 2011), who defined communality as “a way of naming and understanding indigenous collectivism . . . the logic by which its social structure functions and the ways social life is defined and articulated” (Maldonado Alvarado, 2003, p. 14). They identify four central elements in the life of the community: land, work, power, and social gatherings.

Likewise, what stands out within several of these projects is the effort to build educational and pedagogical models that can serve as alternatives to the official educational model. The explicit intention is to replace the Western educational model with one grounded in and developed from the cultural knowledge and heritage regarding the socioeconomic and symbolic organization of indigenous communities and thus to create schools that are an integral part of each community. The reference to communal land is central within these initiatives because an underlying goal of the educational project is the defense of these territories and all of the vital reproduction that occurs around them.

Within these last education initiatives, state interference takes a secondary place. These initiatives are developed by indigenous teacher organizations and within indigenous communities themselves and in which learning is developed from locally rooted indigenous knowledge. An example of this is a project that approaches education through a process of ethnographic research from an anthropological perspective. This project was developed in the normal bilingual intercultural school in the state of Oaxaca, an official institution where indigenous teachers are trained in primary education and students were involved in the process of ethnographic research, which was “understood as the study of symbolic geography” (Bautista, 2013, p. 17). One of the goals for students’ professional development was that future teachers will have research experience allowing them to provide their elementary school students with an education aligned with their educational values and processes of their community. Thus, this project works to go beyond the objectives of the so-called intercultural bilingual projects in which the intention is to include teaching in indigenous languages together with education in Spanish, or that recognize some local knowledge in order to incorporate it into the curriculum together with Western knowledge. From the perspective of the research that uses this project, its objectives are different and require an educational reorientation:

Each strategy carried out with students aims to reunite them with the worldview of their culture, and to recover and validate the philosophical principles and the way of life that has prevailed in their communities of origin. Therefore, it is their responsibility to continue searching for more information about the processes of the rituals, times, offerings, prayers, natural and supernatural beings, their deities, gods and religions, and dialogues with nature that manifest in different sacred spaces. They also identify their own concepts and develop them through indigenous education with the boys and girls of the indigenous peoples.

(Bautista, 2013, p. 39)

All of the searches mentioned here—and those manifested in educational projects that use qualitative research methods—demand equality and justice for indigenous communities. They introduce their own cultural knowledge and highlight diverse community contexts while simultaneously insisting on their rightful place within educational processes and national society. At the same time, they produce useful knowledge that responds to the interests of their people and that involves the construction of other ways of naming, developing, and presenting knowledge.

Also evident in some of these processes and projects—and as part of complex intercultural relationships between indigenous researchers and professionals with non-indigenous people—is reflection on and development of what the field of qualitative research has termed “collaborative and co-theorized research” (Podestá, 2007; Mora, 2011; Sartorello, 2014). These methodological proposals, suggested by non-indigenous academics, also aim to challenge inequality by identifying power dynamics that oscillate from a subject–subject relationship to a subject–object relationship. They propose new relationships within the current shifts in qualitative research, specifically, more horizontal dialogue in which the “other” participates in different parts of the research process, as both a producer and an author (Vasilachis, 2012; Corona, 2012). The former involves recognizing the ethical and political dimensions that impact qualitative research. This is a challenge for the field that requires the development of frameworks for self-reflection (Anderson-Levitt & Rockwell, 2017) in researchers that allow other conditions for listening and ethnographic writing, as well as for a recognition of limits of dialogue that constitute these processes.

Conclusions

Indigenous professionalization and the training processes that emerged within higher education and in the field of qualitative methodologies are the center of an epistemic- political debate situated between two major schools of thought.

On one hand, some argue that access to higher education has aided in so-called processes of subverting Eurocentric understanding and that in indigenous hands and in different contexts this access can be decolonizing and empowering, working to transform conditions of oppression and seek justice for indigenous peoples (Rea, 2013; Zapata, Estevao, & del Valle, 2017). On the other hand, indigenous and non-indigenous leaders and professionals questioning the so-called universal Western scientific academic production has continued as a central theme within the political and academic agenda (Bello, 2009).

There has been a significant shift in qualitative research, indicated by the intervention of indigenous subjects themselves into diverse processes of research in the fields of community and academic education in Mexico. During the first half of the 20th century the research was about indigenous communities, and by the end of the 20th century research began to document research produced by and with indigenous peoples.

Thus, the qualitative research agenda put forward at the end of the 20th century by native researchers was one in which indigenous communities, in some contexts, began to determine the themes, needs, and modes of inquiry (Smith, 1999). This event correlates to what in Mexico emerged in the field of qualitative research into education with ethnographic perspectives, research action, narratives, and testimonials. These factors cultivate fertile ground to produce other ways of naming and describing, as well as to suggest solutions to problems in the lives of communities and peoples. Without intending to oversimplify these research approaches, we can say that we are working toward the indigenization (not indigenism) of research, which opens new paths and possible relationships for dialogue and collaboration within the processes of knowledge production.

Taking the processes of indigenous schooling and professionalization and the momentum of qualitative research with diverse meanings and goals, we can begin to identify the potential of putting these methodologies in the hands of the indigenous subjects and communities themselves. At the same time, we recognize tensions and dilemmas that indigenous and non-indigenous researchers confront, which perhaps reflect a moment of transformation within the debate. For this reason, the combination of these processes and struggles has been important to reworking not only who performs the research and what they research but also how knowledge is produced in communal contexts and greatly impacted by injustice and by the disenfranchisement of indigenous territories.

Among these tensions and dilemmas, we will elaborate on four of these:

Among the rifts opened by the postcolonial conversation, the theme of positionality reappears as an axis of this process of self-reflection and asks us to research (assuming they exist) the ethics, epistemes, and politics that frame the action of knowing. This calls us to produce, in part, a space of uncertainty in order to provoke other certainties—a site that invites new questions, works, languages, and possibilities for listening.