Between Community and University: A Collaborative Ethnography with Young Graduates from a Mexican Intercultural University

Abstract

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.