In Unintended Lessons of the Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico, Tanalís Padilla examines the ‘uniquely radical genealogy’ of rural teacher-training colleges (normales) between the 1920s and 1970s, arguing that the socialist visions of Mexico post-revolution were sustained and defended in these schools over subsequent decades, despite government reforms to decimate the normal school system. Padilla skilfully weaves together a wide range of sources, including oral histories, policy documents, curricula, murals and student work in telling a unified account of rural normalista struggles in the twentieth century, particularly the ways these students addressed micro-, meso- and macro-level issues in their protests. In doing so, she provides a long view that highlights the shared dynamics across these historical movements, particularly the ongoing question of who determined the meaning of, and held the mantle of, revolution in Mexico. Her analysis demonstrates how rural normalistas refused to let officialist or national actors define the Revolution, and how they opposed reforms that would diminish their capacities as agents of social and political change.

In the early chapters, Padilla casts a compelling light on the ways students in the 1920s and 1930s learned socialism at the rural normales, through a range of activities that highlighted structural inequalities, critiqued capitalist structures and favoured secularism over Catholic dogma. She also shows how the nascent Federación de Estudiantes Campesinos Socialistas de México (Federation of Socialist Campesino Students of Mexico, FECSM) helped consolidate a national network and shared identity amongst normalistas during this period, in the context of the global economic crisis and an increasingly paternalistic Secretaría de Educación Pública (Secretariat of Public Education, SEP) that sought to minimise student activism. She also describes how rural normales concretised revolutionary ideals – especially via the socialist education models promulgated under President Lázaro Cárdenas – and makes the case that the notion of ‘socialism’ took on divergent and complex meanings as the normales moved through the post-war decades. Padilla illustrates how the political culture of the normales syncretised national models of struggle with the images of Soviet leaders and Latin American revolutionaries, moves that allowed normales to maintain a local/regional focus while locating themselves within broader movements.

Padilla highlights a contradiction wherein the Mexican government initially mobilised rural teachers in the 1920s and 1930s to expand the state and consolidate a new national identity, but then turned on those teachers and villainised them for refusing to cede that power back. In other words, teachers were cast as central to nation-building, but then demonised when their mobilisations ran counter to the institutionalist, national mandates of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI). As Padilla writes, teachers’ ‘self-conscious participation in a larger transformative project’ in the early twentieth century ultimately ‘transcended state directives’ in later decades (p. 52). Rightward moves in national/state policy aimed to diminish normalistas’ activated political agency post-revolution, in part by professionalising the teacher corps through reforms that privileged officialist networks tied to the PRI and SEP. Such efforts galvanised rural and dissident teachers to unify in opposition and demand reforms acutely focused on the injustices and inequalities in the country's poorest regions. Teachers’ identities at the normales were intimately linked to community action and solidarity with local struggles, and Padilla shows how national actors such as Jaime Torres Bodet ironically critiqued the narrow vision of rural teachers while also relying on them to mobilise action in the country's remote/distant regions.

In subsequent chapters, Padilla's historical account suggests that at the rural normales the idea of the Revolution was transformed by subsequent encounters with other revolutionary ideas, actors and movements. While the PRI tried to consolidate the Revolution in an institutional and partisan form, rural normales maintained the grassroots revolution by institutionalising socialist ideas and practices in both the official and unofficial curriculum at each school. The voices she includes in these chapters highlight how the young teenagers who came to the normales brought with them personal experiences of poverty and inequity, and found in the normal a collective of like-minded compañeros who felt empowered to become agents of change at school, in the local community and perhaps back in their home communities. Her analysis of school curricula and student essays reveals how the normales preserved radical notions of revolution by maintaining a commitment to socialist education and collectivist action grounded in protest and struggle. Even in the face of national-level reforms, rural normales affirmed socialist ideals and refused to be absorbed into officialist networks.

In her introduction, Padilla indicates her goal is to write a national history of the rural normales, in part to describe the broader networks and policies that shaped the system's transformations in the twentieth century. Indeed, her book tells a national tale, but Chapter 5's specific focus on struggles in Chihuahua offers an effective regional focus exploring how the local context shaped normalista movements and their alliances with campesinos, among others. This chapter's contributions suggest that recent scholarly focus on rural normales in Mexico's southern region (e.g., Guerrero, Michoacán and Oaxaca) may miss the ways normalistas in other regions historically fought to preserve their rich political culture and a revolutionary praxis that characterised the movement nationally.

In latter chapters, Padilla persuasively locates the normalista movements of the 1960s in the ‘Global Sixties’, at a time when students all over the world took on the mantle of militant struggle. Here, Padilla draws deeply on the voices of former normalistas and teachers, who narrate powerful memories of their adolescent lives boarding together, encouraging each other's political consciousness and learning about revolutionaries in Mexico and abroad. Students’ lives at the normales were shaped by an institutional culture that drew on both historical models of rural teaching and contemporary ideologies of revolutionary struggle and modernity, while also countering their continued ‘demonisation’ as agitators, ruffians and/or communist agents in a Cold War context. As part of their socialisation, students practised a repertoire of protest that addressed the particular needs of the normal school itself, while also looking beyond to local, regional, national and ultimately global circumstances of poverty, struggle and demands for rights. Padilla's analysis of major educational reforms in 1969, in the wake of the Tlatelolco Massacre, also highlights the competing visions of education held by officialist actors and student activists, and suggests that the militancy which characterised student movements at the normales in the 1970s (the focus of Chapter 8) was a direct response to government efforts to decimate the normal school system. Moreover, she describes how a renewed focus on indigeneity, cultural autonomy and democratisation informed normalistas’ struggles and alliances with other sectors of Mexican society, as well as in guerrilla movements.

In sum, Padilla's book casts light on the ways professionalism and professionalisation measures, both now and historically, often operate as mechanisms for consolidating state authority and minimising the agency of individual teachers and teacher associations. The normalistas in Padilla's account sustained decades-long battles to maintain autonomy and preserve a revolutionary and rural teaching formation grounded in community action, collective solidarity and political praxis as pedagogy, in opposition to reforms that favoured urban ideals, national imperatives and decontextualised academic pedagogies. In telling these richly detailed accounts of normalista life between the 1920s and 1970s, Padilla's book provides insights into the ongoing political violence student teachers face today, and creates a through-line from the revolutionary praxis of a century ago to the contemporary moment of global neoliberal reforms today.