A contribution by María Luisa de la Garza- CESMECA-Chiapas
San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Mexico. November 17th 2023.
Last November 17th, in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the discussion group on Indigenous Education. Four Perspectives on intercultural dialogue. Experiences from Northeastern Brazil and Southeastern Mexico, with Dr. Clelia Neri Côrtes, from the Federal University of Bahía, Brazil; Dr. Ramón Pérez Ruiz, totsil researcher and teacher, currently principal of a state primary school; Dr. Alex Köhler, visual anthropologist at CESMECA-UNICACH, and the eminence in social anthropology Raúl Gutiérrez Narváez, from REDIIN (Red de Educación Inductiva Intercultural), under the coordination of Drs. Ma. Helena Martínez Torras, from CIESAS Southeast, and Ma. Luisa de la Garza Chávez, from CESMECA-UNICACH.
One of the initial settings of this activity, in which there was a very engaging and enriching dialogue, was about problematizing the term “interculturality”, since it still supports some integrationists and homogenizer purposes towards indigenous peoples from Mexico. To counter that education model, Raúl Gutiérrez shared that, throughout his years of experience, he has seen the emergence of alternatives when raising children, like the Red de Educación Inductiva Intercultural, with presence in Oaxaca, Chiapas, Michoacán, Puebla and Yucatán. He shared that this experience emerged from the uprising by the Zapatist Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), as a way to transform education towards a more purposeful, fully autonomous model, whose bases would come directly from indigenous, pedagogical projects from the Peruvian Amazon. Mr. Raúl finished his speech honoring that this day, November 17th, marks the 40 year anniversary of the EZLN.
Dr. Ramón Pérez Ruiz engaged in the debate on interculturality by explaining that, in totsil, there is no concepts as such, and abounded in the cultural exigences that Mexican people need to face when their mother tongue is not Spanish, exigences that Spanish-speakers don’t suffer or understand. He also argued that the sentiment towards that bilingualism has begun to shift, at least in the public discourse; signaling that today intercultural education is not confined to “the indigenous people” and that the system has begun to open towards a bigger contextualization and wisdom dialogues. He reminded that “all have a right to be different if we’re equal” and that it would be difficult discussing equality if the asymmetric relation between cultures is not addressed. That’s why Dr. Pérez Ruiz suggested being careful with contents and discurses in textbooks, bearing in mind not only words in texts, but also poems, songs, drawings and, generally, images.
Dr. Axel Köhler, arising from his previous work with media resources as an academic and activist, brought up to the discussion the work of the Movement for the Defense of Life and Land (Movimiento para la Defensa de la Vida y el Territorio, MODETIVE, which also celebrated its 10 year anniversary) and its requests on the right to be autonomous, specially when choosing their own authorities. Its collaboration with the community government in Chilón, Chiapas, from 2020 onwards, arose with the goal of co-creating knowledge from a title called “agro-eco-visual education towards autonomy and a dignified life”, targeting tseltal youngsters. The appropriation of media was one of their main goals, besides the learning of technical and media-related knowledge to promote and strengthen a decolonized point of view and the creation of media content made by women and children.
In the last round of depositions, Dr. Clelia Neri shared her experience of over 40 years on the context of education made for and by indigenous people in Brazil, which has also grown thanks to NGOs, social movements and the civil society from 1964, strongly influenced by the work of Paulo Freire. The work in this field in Brazil is avant-garde in Latin America. Dr. Clelia also shared her book Educação escolar indígena: resistência ativa e diálogos interculturais, and highlighted the importance of educational work with the following sentence: «Education is like wind, that we only feel if it was nice or not after it is felt».
From the attendees, teachers and principals, both active and retired, expressed themselves. Their experiences, fears and uncertainties reflected their vocation and interests to renew the educational model from a critical, self-reflecting perspective. For instance, a teacher named Lupita argued that textbooks from Nueva Escuela Mexicana, although they allegedly deal with critical interculturality, they still folklorize the diversity of peoples and cultures in Mexico. Later on, a maths teacher called Herminia discussed on how racism is alive in classrooms and how teachers, with their individual and academic freedoms, eventually try to let go of these practices; however, she wondered on the path of achieving an intercultural education while structural racisms is rooted in the educational system.
Among other comments, it was insisted that we need to reevaluate EZLN’s autonomous educational model, since from the the horizontality and contextualization of knowledge, learning processes can arise from other ways of living, thinking and feeling. In this regard, institutional interculturality and its educational policies, not bearing in mind the diverse ways to see the world, reproduces just one way of generating knowledge and disregards others, labeling them as “imaginary” or “supernatural” ideas.
One of the most sensitive shared experiences was coming from a huixtecal retired teacher, who commented on the “sad” education he received as a kid. Thanks to foreign missioners, he told, he learned how to read and write in his language, tsotsil. When he got to San Cristóbal to continue studying, he was taught to read and write in Spanish, and luckily “not all teachers discriminated him”; however, he was constantly reminded that he had “language problems” because his teachers ignored that, in tsotsil, there are no “f” or “g” phoneme, which is why his pronunciation was singular. This teacher continued studying until he graduated as a teacher. His first works was practically impossible, since he was sent to a prepechan school, where he could not understand his students. He was able to come back to Chiapas (to Chenalhó), but was challenged with the fact that students barely spoke tsotsil and teachers did not teach on the indigenous peoples. The teacher commented that interculturality seemed a “promised land”, since peoples don’t even know each other, and stressed that “different worldviews, worlds and points of view are not taken into account” because teachers themselves are not integrated in the social setup.
In a couple later stakes, we were invited to reflect on the kind of education we are providing from our vital and political stances, analyzing our actions and the content we give in class, and it was acknowledged that, perhaps, it was needed to prescind of textbooks.
Some of the final remarks of the speakers were related to the concerns that the New Mexican School entails, which has incorporated elements from autonomous schools, in order not to forget to take action and to advance from the idea of “intercultural conflict” towards an “intercultural ecology”, as indicated by Raúl Gutiérrez.
It is imperative that intercultural education stops promoting that students reject their languages and cultures. To do that, it is necessary that teachers are educated properly, that the contents are designed from a “bottom-up” approach, that local wisdom be made visible and families, mothers, fathers and grandparents are integrated as potential teachers, among other ideas. “Something can be made”, they said; and stressed that “although it may be an unreachable goal, we need to keep fighting”.
This event was organized by the Academic Body “Estudios Críticos en Comunicación, Política y Cultura”, from the Centro de Estudios Superiores de México y Centroamérica (CESMECA), in the Universidad de Ciencias y Artes from Chiapas.
