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In Mexico, since 2003 an alternative university subsystem explicitly directed towards indigenous students has been emerging. In this article, we critically analyze these socalled "intercultural universities" as a new kind of higher education institution, through empirical research from different states of the art, from our own collaborative-ethnographic research project carried out in Veracruz and from annually organized, inter-institutional seminars on intercultural universities. Our analysis pinpoints shared tensions and contradictions, but also identifies different types of intercultural universities. We conclude with some recommendations for intercultural higher education policies in Mexico and Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the migration and school trajectories of young migrants in higher secondary and middle education in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico and high school in Flagstaff, Arizona, USA. Applying semistructured interviews with narrative elements to students from both countries, we show the school discontinuities that exist between the respective educational systems. We conclude that these "transnational students" are not being addressed in their cultural diversity and pose a challenge for educational institutions. Moreover, their experiences and support networks are not leveraged by educational policies nor by the monocultural and mono-national school institutions in both contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intercultural higher education in Mexico aims at creating new, culturally and linguistically adapted professional profiles in order to empower indigenous youth and their communities. For about a decade, so-called intercultural universities have been emerging in rural and indigenous contexts which offer academic courses with an intercultural approach in indigenous languages, in communication, in sustainability, in health and in law. In this contribution we reflect upon the methodology employed in a collaborative ethnography carried out with one of these new Mexican intercultural universities, the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI) and particularly with their alumni. We present findings obtained throughout ten years of collaborative-ethnographic field work that combines principles of an "activist anthropology" and of a "doubly reflexive ethnography". Our article analyzes how in the course of the process of educational interculturalization new methodological solutions appear and how these nourish, rejuvenate and decolonize classical anthropological ethnography, which remains all too monological and extractivist in its orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we analyze the so-called intercultural universities as a new kind of higher education institution which arises from the confluence of neoliberal multiculturalism policy, on the one hand, and experiments with innovative intercultural and decolonial educational approaches, on the other hand. We revise critical aspects of the educational model underlying intercultural universities, particularly focusing on their educational programs, their didactics, the role played by different languages and the features of their academic staff, students and graduates. For this purpose, we sum up research from different states of the art, from empirical research projects and from annually organized, inter-institutional seminars on intercultural universities. Our analysis pinpoints shared tensions and contradictions, but also identifies different types of intercultural universities. We conclude with some recommendations for intercultural higher education policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intercultural higher education in Mexico aims at creating new, culturally and linguistically appropriate, professional career opportunities that empower indigenous youth and their communities. In this paper, empirical results are presented from a research project which ethnographically accompanies graduates from an intercultural university, the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI), located in four indigenous regions of the South Eastern Mexican Gulf coast. After briefly describing the way this university operates by opening up alternative kinds of knowledge, the features of the new indigenous professionals who graduated from this institution are analysed. In the second half of the article, the graduates’ professional and community development related capacities to link diverse sources of academic and non-academic knowledge are empirically studied; finally their emergent political broker capabilities and community roles are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intercultural higher education in Mexico works toward the creation of new professional, cultural, and linguistically pertinent profiles that empower indigenous youth and their communities. This paper presents the empirical results of a research project that ethnographically accompanies young graduates from an intercultural Mexican university, Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural. The objective is to describe the way this institution develops knowledge/activities by opening up to other types of knowledge; an analysis is made of the characteristics of the university's recent graduates, and their academic and community knowledge is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Se presenta una introducción en la que el autor comenta sobre el tema central de este número, el cual enfoca en la universidad y la educación multicultural en México.

This article discusses the focus on intercultural education at the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico. The authors comment on the history and development of educational policies and curricula at the university and higher education in general throughout Mexico. The relationship between ethnology and university education is also examined.

Intercultural education has arisen in the last two decades as an intersectional field of academic knowledge and professional development, located at the borders and in the confluence of the multicultural paradigm in the social sciences, the anthropology of education, and other interdisciplinary subfields commonly known as Intercultural Studies. As will be discussed throughout this article, the thematic range represented by the broad topos of interculturality-in-education is not limited to questions about minority groups, but is closely linked to core issues of national identity and broad societal identification processes. Therefore, in order to be able to critically engage in a fruitful, truly ‘intercultural’ dialog between multicultural theorists and activists, on the one hand, and between academic and practitioners’ knowledge on diversity, we need a particularly, and constantly, self-reflexive and mutually comparative hermeneutical approach. In this way, we can avoid the traps and bridge the biases of the underlying, but omnipresent, self-fulfilling, and self-essentializing identity discourses in broader national society as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from a dialogical-ethnographic case study with the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI), and trying to combine the principles of "activist research" with a "doubly reflexive ethnography", this paper analyzes how through processes of educational interculturalization new methodological options arise and how they contribute to the redesigning, refreshing and decolonizing of classical ethnographic anthropological ethnography. Through its academic programmes, offered particularly to indigenous students, the UVI is creating innovative paths to diversify universal and academic "knowledge", relating it to local knowledge, subaltern "ethnosciences" and alternative forms of knowledge. As shown in this paper, this incipient "dialogue of knowledges" implies "inter-cultural", "inter-lingual" and "inter-actor", related dimensions which lead to the recast of anthropological concepts and methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]