The proposed paper is part of a larger project on the indigenous experience with schooling. It draws on historical research done in the Nahua region of La Malintzi, in the state of Tlaxcala, in central Mexico. The archival research covers the first half of the XXth century, focusing on schools that were established in Nahua speaking towns. In all official policy documents for this period there is scarcely any mention of the fact that many of the children, as well as their parents, were monolingual Nahuatl speakers. Census data for these years greatly underestimated the number of speakers, in these municipalities, due to the stigma associated with admitting being "Indian". In the educational sphere, the language context of this region was simply silenced in the official record (although "race" was often mentioned). However, research from the seventies, as well as my own oral history interviews with elder inhabitants, reveal a complex process (including native language schooling in Colonial times) through which Nahuatl had survived for centuries. Around 1910, it was still used as the language for political discourse and even written communication among the insurgents who participated in the Mexican revolution. Then, over the span of a hundred years, the language has been almost totally displaced by Spanish in all public spaces, and all children are now basically monolingual in Spanish. The purpose of this paper, is to use fragmentary evidence to sketch what might have been the language experience of Native children in elementary schools during the early decades of the XXth century. Some archival documents, particularly those involving conflicts between teachers and communities, gives clues that allow one to go beyond the general silence that covers life in classrooms of the past. In this case, many of the teachers were locally born, and in some cases there is information on their origins and languages. Interviews with elder inhabitants have also given me some notion of the strategies that monolingual children used in the face of a predominantly Spanish school environment. On the other hand, in such a language ambience, there was probably much more oral use of the native language, particularly in schools with bilingual teachers, than was officially acknowledged or "allowed". Literacy was strictly limited to reading and writing Spanish texts, often with little comprehension of their meaning, and written Nahuatl, once widespread in the region, was not acknowledged. In sum, although silenced in the official record, it seems highly possible that the native language was still heard in classrooms of many community schools. Some may have advanced towards the transition to bilingualism, while for many others schooling was an experience limited to a few months or years, and offered little opportunity for learning the dominant language. This general conclusion is supported by findings in other regions of the country, and of the world, where children face an experience of schooling in an alien language.