“The Infinite Injustice Committed Against Our Class Brothers”

ucation Minister Jaime Torres Bodet protesting his transfer from Saucillo, Chihuahua, to Atequiza, Jalisco. Chihuahua’s governor, Práxedes Giner, had long sought Gómez’s removal, accusing him of taking students to campesino land invasions. Students took action of their own accord, protested Gómez. They, like youth around the globe, were conscious of the world’s prob lems and sought practical solutions. Teachers may have had an influence, but that was only in “accordance with the social implications specified by Article 3.” What right, continued Gómez, did state politicians, “enemies of normal education, and of President Adolfo López Mateos’s great free textbook program,” have to remove him? So hostile had these same authorities been to federal education policy that Saucillo’s municipal president had suggested storming public schools to burn the governmentissued textbooks.1 As Gómez pointed out, those now objecting to the free textbooks were the same groups long hostile to public schoolteachers and demeaning of the institutions that trained them. Not only had Article 3 of the Mexican Constitution undermined the church’s historic dominion over schooling, but in its expansive definition of the educator’s role—to aid in land distribution, or ga nize unions, and publicize agrarian rights— the revolutionary state had 5