Since March 2021, Rocío Bravo is a PhD student at the Institute of Political Science. She is a CONACYT-DAAD Doctoral Fellow under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Andreas Hasenclever.
Rocio earned her Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations from the Center of Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Mexico City; then, for a semester, she studied abroad at the Catholic University of Lima, Peru (PUCP). She earned a Master degree in Political Science from the Otto Suhr Institute of the Free University of Berlin (FU). During her studies in Berlin, she was also a research assistant at the Iberoamerican Institute (IAI).
Currently on sabbatical, Rocio is a Professor at the University of the Sierra Sur. At UNSIS, she has been instructor while also managing the school's Institute of Municipal Studies and the Bachelor on Public Administration.
For her PhD project, Rocio will analyze the conflicting intolerance that is caused by a religious divergence within the indigenous communities in Oaxaca, a southern state of Mexico. For centuries, México has been traditionally a Catholic country. For the past three decades, however, a remarkable number of Mexicans have become parishioners of the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches. This increase, particularly in México's indigenous communities, has been considered one cause for much religious intolerance, which has sometimes resulted in violent clashes between traditional Mexican Catholics and the new Mexican Non-Catholics. Many of their confrontations may have been caused from a belief that the new religious plurality has been responsible for a disintegration of the values of Mexico's indigenous communal life. For her PhD research project, Rocio will analyze this intolerance, which has been purportedly caused by a religious divergence within Oaxacan indigenous communities. Her hypothesis is that this religious intolerance, primarily in indigenous communities, is not strictly the result of differing, conflicting religions. Such intolerance may also have caused by the challenges in small communal systems which must now face the encroachment of 21st-century modernity.