The kitchen to the left and the dining hall where students and staff eat.

The classrooms of Primero de enero. Their library and a store are off to the left.

Since I entered the University six years ago, I have known that I want to build and rebuild schools. As a non-member of the communities I anticipate working with, this aspiration has always presented itself as problematic. How do I learn what those communities need? How do I keep my perspective of the problem (and the solution) from resulting in mismatch? I'd searched in my courses, my colleagues, and my personal interaction with such communities for possible solutions. The Zapatista educational movement has begun to answer some of these pressing issues. Their theoretical rhetoric of autonomy behind their effort to build a school with the extensive assistance of foreigners has offered incredible insight. And to a large extent, I believe I found in Chiapas a feasible and promising approach to building schools in the community.

The vision of ESRAZ (Escuela Secundaria Rebelde Autonomia Zapatista)

Education has been a part of the Zapatistas' program from the start. During the 1995 delegation between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government, compromises concerning the rights of the indigenous people were made. Called the Accords of San Andres, it was determined that the right of indigenous people to establish educational centers in accordance with their manner of living would be incorporated as a reform into the Mexican Constitution. Despite the negligence of the government to carry out their part of the deal, the Zapatistas maintained their belief in the importance of autonomous schools and in January 2000, with the help of international support, they opened the first autonomous indigenous Junior high school in the country of Mexico.

Lessons Learned; Community Schools, Autonomy, and Organization

My role as a researcher at Primero de Enero was a participant observer. My first day in the community, I proposed my inquiry to the on-site school director. Arriving during their two-month in-service training for the instructors at the school, I was able to partake in the workshops. There were two sessions a day (running three days for each content area). Most of my time was spent observing the interaction between teachers (called promoters) and advisors (brought in from the community to teach content matter). Though the people of the community were extremely guarded and hesitant to answer questions because of the national tension they are encountering, I was able to interview a promoter, two advisors, an international group, and the Educational Council (much like a school Board). I will use pseudonyms to ensure anonymity.

The auditorium at Aguas Calientes II with a mural of Emiliano Zapata

Through these observations and interviews, I was able to gain an understanding of why international support is important, how it is used, and how it doesn't become imposed on the local culture of the school. All community persons involved agree that international support has been important in the creation, growth, and maintenance of Primero de Enero. Though monetary and international presence (as a discouragement to the government to act violently against the indigenous communities) are often acknowledged first, the Mayans are also asking for "the knowledge and experience of conscious teachers, to help [them] to prepare new plans and programs for [their] rebel junior high school". How is it, though, that this outside knowledge is even pertinent to the needs and goals of the Mayan communities that the school serves? This was one of the first questions I asked the Committee of Education. How the community was able to maximize the benefits of international support without jeopardizing cultural relativity or self-determination is embodied in two notions: scope of vision and organization.

Scope of vision: The Zapatista vision is two-fold: localized betterment of the Mayan situation in terms of equity and living conditions and an international solidarity in justice and an aspiration for a better global condition. In speaking to one of the members of the Committee of Education, I was informed that their vision is not just for Mayans, nor just for Mexicans, but for a new world as well. In this way, the contributions of international people add to their collective notion of a better world: a reciprocal relationship of learning that works toward such a vision.

Organization: The organization of Primero de Enero is key in understanding how the school incorporated external support and maintained a high level of cultural relevance and autonomy. The Zapatista movement is made up of a number of collective communities. Decision-making is collaborative, but there are Committees that finalize decisions based on the input of the communities at large. The call for indigenous autonomous schools and the creation of Primero de Enero was one of these collective decisions. El Committee, the Committee of Education, consists of a group of Zapatista leaders. The decisions about Primero de Enero all pass in front of this committee. The approach to professional development that I observed was entirely based on this procedure. Advisors, who were each hand picked by the Committee based on their expertise and their pedagogy alignment with the Zapatista movement, were brought in to teach the promoters subject content and educational processes. The advisors decided in a team how to approach the material in a relevant and appropriate manner, presented a curriculum to the Committee, and then modified it when needed or recommended by the Committee. The advisors then introduced the material to the promoters in a manner that allowed for collaborative meaning making of the content. How best to pass that knowledge on to the students was understood as a collective process between teachers, advisors, and students themselves. When it came to external participants, the process was much the same. An outside person or organization whether they were invited or, as often happened, interested in the movement and wanted to contribute presented a written proposal to the Committee. If the proposal was accepted, the foreigner(s) would then run a workshop. Though there is a formal procedure for administrating decisions about learning and teaching at Primero de Enero by the Committee, the ultimate decision lies in the hands of the promoters and students who together appropriate the material. However, the Committee, advisors, teachers and students alike demonstrated a conviction in the Zapatista beliefs and unified objectives in the upliftment of the Mayan communities through the means of education.

Me next to the camp where national and international human rights observers stay during their time in Oventic.

Though I see both vision and organization as important to the development of any educational institution, I am more interested in the organizational aspect of Primero de Enero and its implications for establishing successful movements to build community schools. It appears that the Zapatista community has discovered a working model to develop schools that both benefits from outside support and holds fast to autonomy in hopes of ensuring that the school will be more closely tied to the needs of that community. There were, however, noticed shortcomings of the model that should be acknowledged in an attempt to offer suggestions and recommendations for building community schools. The Committee of Education did not have a consistent presence in the school during my time in Oventic, and when they were there it seemed that there was little direct contact with the promoters after the initial review of the curriculum proposal. The danger of this is that while the goals are prescribed by the Committee and understood and agreed upon by the promoters and advisors, there seemed few measures taken to monitor whether what was happening in practice was aligned with their shared ideology: there was a great amount of trust that the advisors' pedagogy would translate into practice and little insurance that it, in fact, did. My recommendation would be to incorporate a process in which this kind of scrutiny and reflection takes place.

I recognize that the situation is very different in Chiapas than it is in the States, but nonetheless I believe that there are lessons to be learned about how reformers in this country can approach reform. The locus of control needs to be re-distributed to the community changing our role as reformers to learn from the communities themselves, offering assistance and expertise on their terms and in alliance with how they view their goals and needs. Rather than learning how to appropriate our knowledge to our perspective of that community's needs, we should develop relationships that foster authentic empowerment and genuine collective efforts.