Educating the Children of Malinche: Identity and Modernity in Octavio Paz

Abstract

This article offers a pedagogical investigation about the educational role that emerges from the effort, both cultural and political, of Octavio Paz, one of the Latin American most famous intellectual of the Twentieth century (Nobel Prize for the Literature in 1990). Our work was focused, in particular, on his young teaching experience in Merida (1927) and on his famous 1950 essay El labirinto de la soledad. The leitmotiv is represented by the complex topics of the Mexican identity in the modernity and, above all, on its educational implicit beliefs (De Giuseppe, Fabian Mestas, 2015), but it extends towards a problematic universality, that problematizes the sense of the history, the value of the poetry, the essential presence of the alterity, the weight of the loneliness and the solidarity research of the other. The ‘sons of Malinche’, that are the result of the meeting between really different words, have to be educated to freedom and to responsibility. The aim is to offer a contribution to the pedagogical debate around the topics of the mestizaje and the interculture, starting from an unexplored source in the pedagogical environments.