This paper studies the participation of an important group of Mexican postrevolutionary intellectuals, leaders of the cultural-educational project during the early 1930s, in the construction of two closely related concepts: the ‘peasant problem’ and its nucleus, the ‘revolutionary peasant’, both central to the political and ideological consolidation of the new regime. It discusses the approaches that lead them to propose a new ‘peasantness’, suitable for the political and economic interests that dominated the process of formation of the postrevolutionary State. It also considers the struggle that developed within the group between the ‘productivists’, linked to Marxism-Leninism, and the ‘cultural-populists’, more concerned with the cultural survival of the Indo-campesino groups, for the right to define these concepts. The analysis is based on El Maestro Rural, edited by the Secretaría de Educación Pública since 1932.