Abstract

SANTANA COLIN, Yasmani. Intercultural Higher Education for Latin American Indigenous Peoples: Experiences, Tensions and Challenges. Rev. colomb. educ. [online]. 2015, n.69, pp.97-119. ISSN 0120-3916.

This work emerges as a reflection aimed to understand the meaning of intercultural programs and policies and their implementation in higher education for indigenous peoples. For this purpose, some tensions emerging as a consequence of the creation of "special" programs for the indigenous peoples-although not openly recognized-are shown, some of them created by the State, others by the indigenous organizations themselves. A space is opened for discussing the construction and implementation of affirmative action programs as "compensatory" policies meant to pave the way for indigenous groups' access to higher education. It is noteworthy that, for some indigenous groups, access to higher education institutions represents a political strategy of appropriation and empowerment, and how their passage through the university has given place to processes of identity resignification. These are some results of my own research projects, one of them carried out during my Bachelor's Degree Studies on Indigenous Education at the National University for Teachers (in Spanish, UPN), México, and the other with students from the Mazateco people enrolled in different conventional universities in Mexico City. It is concluded that there are different ways of understanding and thinking about college in both the collective and the personal areas, thus recognizing that a few people's voice is not everybody's voice when it comes to demanding access to higher education.

Keywords : Interculturality; higher education; indigenous peoples; educational policies; college.

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