Zapatista education promotes a relationship with knowledge based on the needs and questions of students and communities
~ Ana Paula Morel, from Teia Dos Povos ~
In the corn fields of the Lacandon Jungle in Mexico, it used to take three months to harvest; however, with the ecological catastrophe caused by the “capitalist hydra”, the Zapatistas in the region can no longer rely on the old cycle, explained one of the spokesmen for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Subcomandante Moisés. Faced with serious problems like these, the movement organized an educational activity in Chiapas1which brought together scientists from various parts of the world to answer questions and comments from indigenous Mayan communities. The proposal was not, then, that indigenous people leave their lands to go to university, but that the university “rise up in our communities, that it teaches and learns among our people”, commented another deputy commander.
Zapatista education is an inspiration for many movements and peoples fighting for autonomy, as it has built an education system based on the self-organisation of communities, the composition of scientific and traditional knowledge, and the common struggle for land. For some years now, the movement has been asking itself a fundamental question for our times: how to fight for autonomy in the face of ecological collapse? One of the principles of Zapatista education is “walking by asking questions”. We must ask or we cannot walk, they say. Activities in autonomous schools usually begin with questions. That is why we also begin with other questions: how can we promote educational practices to face the same collective threat, such as ecological collapse, without disregarding the differences between peoples? Is it possible to weave autonomous education like that of the Zapatistas in other geographies? Can autonomous education be thought of only on a local scale? Is public education related to the fight for autonomy? What kind of freedom does autonomous education defend? Is autonomy as an anti-colonial practice a path of resistance or does it depoliticise educational processes? More than definitively resolving these issues, a much broader and more collective task, we intend to open debates, in dialogue with Zapatista education and, finally, with the challenges and paths of the Web of Peoples.
Zapatista education
Since 1994, one of the largest popular uprisings in recent history has been underway in the mountains of southeastern Mexico, in Chiapas. Over the past thirty years, the Mayan peoples of the region have practiced self-determination in various spheres of collective life, including education. It is not capital or the state that decides on Zapatista education, but community assemblies, with a strong role for women. Currently, in a context of attacks by paramilitary groups, increased drug trafficking in the region, and threats of development projects in communities by the Mexican government, Zapatista education and the construction of autonomy continue to reinvent themselves. Recently, the movement announced a change in its structures: the hundreds of autonomous municipalities are being replaced by thousands of Local Autonomous Governments, which will be able to directly control their autonomous administrative spaces, including schools.
Zapatista education has woven a path full of complexities and potentials, by proposing to reclaim schools based on the struggle for autonomy. The Zapatista autonomous education system is different from the state and private schools in the region. Zapatista educators are indigenous people from the communities who do not lose their connection with the land. They are called promoters of autonomous education, or, in Tzotzil (one of the Mayan languages), jnikesvany, which means the person who moves. The jnikesvany of education move and promote the relationship with knowledge based on the needs and questions of students and communities.
All education promoters are appointed by community assemblies. There is also an education committee (also elected by the community) responsible for guiding and supporting the work of the promoters. Each educator is accountable to the community. At the same time, the community also has its responsibilities: during the time that the promoters dedicate themselves to the community’s educational activities, the community must pay them back directly with corn and beans or with collective work on the educator’s family’s farm.
If, due to its anti-state nature, an unwary observer might imagine some similarity between Zapatista education and the homeschooling proposed by the far right in Brazil, in reality, these proposals are antagonistic. Homeschooling is ultra-privatist and conservative, and it empties out the most collective aspect of education, making socialisation and relationships with different knowledge and worlds impossible. In the opposite direction, Zapatista education expands the relationship between school and collective life and has as one of its guidelines popular self-organisation and the end of private property.
The autonomous schools were a major transformation in the daily life of the Zapatista struggles. Some of the older Zapatistas report terrible experiences in the schools that existed before the 1994 uprising. They say that they attended school for years without understanding what the Spanish-speaking teachers were saying, and that school was always a space devoid of meaning, where they felt oppressed because they were indigenous. In this context of extreme racism and with the end of negotiations with the State in 1997, the Zapatistas definitively decided to form their own educational organisation. The movement then called on its rank and file to withdraw their children from official schools and organise community members to participate in training for future educators. With this call, official schools were replaced by autonomous schools, and in places where there were no schools, new Zapatista schools were built through collective efforts.
Some agreements were collectively discussed to guide the autonomous education system: autonomous schools have the community’s mother tongue as their main language and other languages, such as Spanish, are incorporated throughout the educational process; teaching and learning in schools cannot be separated from the community and the land; there are compositions (not necessarily harmonious mixtures) between scientific and traditional knowledge with the struggle for autonomy as a reference; students are not empty vessels who simply receive content from educators; they are active subjects who also participate in decision-making about the education system. Zapatista education is a cry against “banking education” and flourishes in the small steps and silences of communities.
As we recently celebrated the centenary of the pedagogue Paulo Freire, an important systematiser of a pedagogy of autonomy, we see how there are reverberations in this experience that takes autonomy in education to its ultimate consequences. Liberation theology, one of the driving forces behind Zapatismo, transformed in Chiapas into Indian theology, is marked by the popular education movements that took over Latin America in the 1960s. This trend was absorbed and transformed by the resistance of the Mayan peoples of the region, producing a powerful critique of capitalism and colonisation.
There is an intense indigenous intellectual movement that occurs underground in the daily lives of Zapatista communities. In their training, Zapatista educators study authors of popular education and Euro-Americans from the classical and contemporary left. They affirm the importance of this study, while at the same time saying that it is not enough to read books; the educational proposal and training also come from their reflection on the lives of the people. The ch’ulel is the “soul”, the breath of life, a force with different levels of intensity, present in all beings on Earth. Trees, rivers, land, animals and humans have ch’ulel , they are in a relationship between subjects, they have value. What happens in the education of those “above” is precisely to teach people to give less value to other beings. It is this mechanism that produces racism and ecocide.
Capitalism weakens the ch’ulel of beings; autonomous education is one of the ways to enhance ch’ulel. Even in autonomy, there is no day of complete ch’ulel , but rather a constant walking and asking questions. The pedagogy of walking and asking questions allows schools to become spaces for experimentation and strengthening struggles, where communities gain a central place, where one must give oneself completely to learn not only with one’s head. To teach and learn, one must belong to the land. The land, a fundamental demand of the movement since the 1994 uprising, would not be just an inert resource, but is the foundation of the gods (yajval ) and of collective life.
Current challenges and the Web of Peoples
During the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising, along with a big party with dancing and music, a speech was given by the Zapatista command – or rather, by the subcommand, since the people are in charge in Zapatista territory. Subcommandant Moisés issued a warning to the youth: given the harsher context they are living in, there is no model or formula; a lot of collective practice is needed. The defence of common life was a recurring theme in his speech. It is necessary to defend common life, collective organisation, and the land, which is not just a local struggle: “it is not possible to humanise capitalism”, “those who come from outside need to organise themselves from different geographies”, he said.
The territorial dimension of Zapatista autonomy and its educational system is not equivalent to defending a self-sufficient struggle. Given the ecological collapse we are experiencing, it is even more clear how a fire caused by agribusiness in a territory in Brazil has consequences for the people in Mexico, just as the development project of the Maya Train has effects on the lives of the people in Brazil. Therefore, it is very important to think about educational practices based on connections between different struggles and geographies. As the Zapatista educator Emiliano said: “Zapatismo does not seek to be a model that everyone must follow in the same way, but is a call for peoples to fight in their own way, with their different geographies”.
Although the Zapatistas are an inspiration, we should not use the autonomous Zapatista educational system as the sole measure to assess whether other movements are in fact autonomous, either because they resort to public policies or because they do not share autonomous strategies in all spheres of collective life. With such a stance, we would run the risk of disqualifying educational and struggle processes that are not completely equivalent to Zapatista autonomy, but which are resistances for autonomy.
The land repossessions with the enchanted Tupinambá of Olivença and Pataxós Hã Hã Hãe in southern Bahia, the self-demarcation of Munduruku lands in Pará, among many other examples, demonstrate how the territorial struggle of the peoples has an educational character. In this way, the Web of Peoples argues that the transition from land to territory involves a formative dimension anchored in the resumption of the capacity to act collectively based on the struggle for land: “Our perspective is not to demand the concession of plots of land from the State. It is essential that the people themselves conquer the lands because it is from the struggle that all the symbolism that will transform the land into territory is born” (Ferreira & Felício, 2021, p. 44). This does not mean, however, that autonomy is absolute; there are many spaces for coexistence with the State in the territories articulated in the Web of Peoples.
In the case of the Terra Vista Settlement in southern Bahia, for example, there are two public schools, one municipal and one state, which, with their contradictions and potential, are important spaces for education and dialogue with the movement and the community. In addition, there is the Universidade dos Povos, the educational front of Teia, which seeks to promote pedagogical sovereignty through libertarian education, based on the worldview of the people, the principles of agroecology, traditional knowledge and the struggle for land and territory. Calling this initiative a “University” is a provocation that subverts the conventional notion of university, in an experiment to strengthen and deepen the knowledge of the people.
There are considerable challenges in this process. Capitalism and colonialism often produce a notion of autonomy that is confused with the supposed freedom of the individual. This perspective is even present in activist spaces. Along with this, there is a concept of “decoloniality” that is empty and depoliticised. In identifying this problem, the Aymara libertarian thinker Silvia Cusicanqui proposes a distinction between decoloniality and the anti-colonial struggle:
Since colonial times, there have been processes of anti-colonial struggle; on the other hand, decolonialism is a very recent fashion that, in some way, takes advantage of and reinterprets these processes of struggle, but I believe that it depoliticises them, since decolonialism is a state or a situation, but it is not an activity, it does not imply agency, nor conscious participation. I put the anti-colonial struggle into practice in facts, in some way, delegitimising all forms of objectification and the ornamental use of the indigenous that makes up the State.
In addition to the depoliticising decolonial, educational activities for the anti-colonial struggle are underway, in the sense proposed by Silvia Cusicanqui. One path is discussed by Mestra Mayá, author of the second book released by Teia dos Povos. She tells how she became a teacher who educated in the land reclamations with the enchanted:
Parents would go to the retakes and carry their children, and what I had to do was go. I had 396 classrooms. And I participated in all 396 retakes. (…) I would go there and ask the children if they knew why they were in that place. That way, we were learning and rewriting our history.
For the author, the pedagogy of repossessions involves collectively telling and retelling the stories of the people who were dispossessed. In the history of colonization on the continent, the class struggle is a struggle for land, marked by violent appropriation. Educational work of repossessions is necessary to learn from the Earth, keeping alive the spirit linked by the enchanted in a guerrilla war that is constantly updated:
We may be having a lot of difficulty with the struggle. When we put our feet on the ground, our ears to the ground, when we feel the groaning of the earth, hear its call, we know how we will follow our steps, because we are listening.
The call of Mestra Maya and the inspiration of the Zapatista autonomous education system point to an education focused on belonging to the land, but which is not synonymous with defending a merely local struggle or an identity. One of the challenges of pedagogical sovereignty is precisely to build autonomy based on interdependence: interdependence between human beings and more-than-humans who inhabit the Earth; between different types of knowledge to face ecological collapse. Interdependence is contrary to the dependence generated by capitalism that divides and takes away the capacity to act collectively. The education of students based on the dependence characteristic of vertical practices of banking education expresses the logic of the social structure of oppression and triggers curricular policies and practices that legitimize a supposed universal common good, by concealing popular knowledge and social contradictions.
Autonomous education as a path to interdependence enables unity: an articulation that does not lead to homogenization, as proposed by the Web, or the struggle for a world where many worlds fit, as the Zapatistas proclaim. Debating these and other challenges collectively becomes increasingly urgent in the face of the fire that is destroying the lands of peoples here and there. We conclude with a final question that Zapatismo constantly provokes: “¿Y tu, qué?” (And you, what are you going to do?).
