Education for Social Change Rooted in the Knowledge of Ancestors by Marta Gregorčič
Posted on | June 18, 2007 | No Comments
The idea behind popular education is resurrecting the educational revolution, which follows Freire’s saying that ‘no one teaches anyone and no one learns alone’ (nadie educa a nadie y nadie se educa solo). Freire’s idea of transformation is close to the hearts of the most underprivileged, i.e., the most indigent and exploited populations of Latin America, who have consistently been the most willing and able to rise and fight for human dignity.
Popular educators Equipo Maíz are not trained teachers or lecturers, but researchers who go out into communities to observe their social struggle first-hand and to disseminate knowledge and share experience through publications the collective is famous for. The collective calls itself the Maize Team because maize is one of the most frequently used symbols of solidarity in the struggle against colonialism and neo-liberalism throughout Central America. Like maize, the team of educators too represent a natural resource of the territory, a wealth of power that works collectively and in solidarity. From October 2006 through January 2007, Matej Zonta and myself explored revolutionary political practices in six Central American countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. We met with one of the three original founders of the collective, Carlos García.
The collective produces books and other publications that heavily rely on pictorial material to convey information: cartoon strips, photographs, charts, and illustrations are combined with dialogue and storytelling. This animates frozen images and brings the narrative to life in the vernacular and with original compositions and collages. Publications and workshops of this type promote reading culture and raise its level among the population at large. The reading culture of the indigent and/or native populations of the countries we visited is extremely low-grade; this is due to indigenous languages having no written form, to the predominant oral tradition in popular education, and last but not least, to the hundreds of years of oppression and slavery (El Salvador is the only country in Central America where indigenous ethnic groups were enslaved and no African slaves imported, as was typical of the neighbouring countries). To this day, national policies fail to provide educational and other institutions for the indigenous inhabitants and the poor, although such institutions are counted among the “gains” of the self-declared democracies. For this reason Equipo Maíz, like numerous other similar organizations in El Salvador and other countries in the region, concentrates on audio-visual materials in its workshops, to make the most of the participative methodology of popular education and its traditionally extensive practice.
Popular education (in other parts of the world called also alternative, radical, emancipatory, revolutionary, or political education, although we should not generalize the terms or disregard the essential distinctions between them) has a long-standing tradition in Latin American countries. The Equipo Maíz has reconstructed the context of popular education on the basis of seven key political developments or practices that have paved the way for contemporary popular education in El Salvador and other Central American and Caribbean countries: the victory of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in 1959; the second bishops’ conference of Latin America in Medellín in 1968, which first broached the subject of opportunities for the poor; the concept of the pedagogy of the oppressed, propounded by Paulo Freire in 1970; the first book on liberation theology by Gustavo Guiterrez in 1971; the beginning of neo-liberal terrorism with Pinochet’s coup in Chile and Salvador Allende’s death in 1973, which cut a swathe for U.S.-supported military juntas throughout Latin America; the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, after which a literacy project modelled on a similar Cuban project halved illiteracy in the country within only one year, despite the fact that military interventions with the support of the U.S. continued throughout the decade of the Sandinista government; and lastly, the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Romero in San Salvador, who spoke up for the voiceless and inspired countless to revolt in Latin America and elsewhere in the world.
The beginnings of Equipo Maíz were three researchers who sought resources for critical consciousness, resistance, and support of the people’s struggle during the twelve years of civil war in El Salvador (1981–1992). Currently the collective consists of men and women exploring five main fields: the methodology of popular education; sexuality and gender; economic literacy; risk management; and historical memory. In the twenty-five years of existence and fifteen years of the collective’s activities, based on workshops and on publishing teaching materials for popular education, over forty works have come out: five on sex education; five on ecology; seven on historical memory (of which the most extensive and probably most momentous is a history of El Salvador); six on popular education; nine on economic literacy; five on methodology; and four on economics.
From the point of view of methodology, the most interesting work is Harina para mi costal: it illustrates and documents the methodology of political praxis which the Equipo Maíz has been developing for sixteen years in interaction with indigenous communities, the illiterate, and marginalized groups. The collective organizes workshops correlated with its best-known publications. A special 122-page volume containing written text, documentary photographs depicting various periods and parts of the country, and above all caricatures, cartoon strips, and other detailed pictorials, presents the collective’s less known activities, which the collective sees as complementary to its publications and of at least equal importance. The publication is fairly old; nonetheless, it deserves to be briefly summarized, as it deals with the collective’s practical and theoretical work. The first part gives a concise overview of popular education and educators since the 1960s in Latin America and in El Salvador in particular. The aim is to learn from past experiences in popular education and self-organization practices, since the Equipo Maíz emerged as a result of past practices and individuals involved in them. Chapter two relates the Equipo’s own experiences of popular education, with due consideration given to the findings of others. As there is a number of comparable groups of popular educators in El Salvador and other Latin American countries, the Equipo Maíz wants to share its reflections, assessments, self-criticisms, reservations, and convictions that have arisen in the last decades, and to establish empowering dialogue and exchange with other groups. This chapter lays out the collective’s strengths and weaknesses. Chapter three gives a case study of how to design the methodology for organizing grupos de base, i.e., collectives that organize in order to implement their policies in the face of the prevalent neo-liberalism, which has significantly reduced and divided people’s self-organizing efforts. After the peace treaty was signed in El Salvador in 1992, autonomous practices gradually evolved into a new form of political participation, as a formation of communities and networking of autonomous policies. (This topic is dealt with in En el camino se arreglan las cargas, published in 2002 and reprinted in 2004.) Chapter four ends on the note of questions and reservations. The Equipo Maíz claim to have more questions than answers, more doubts than certainties, but this does not present a great problem. Their doubts and inquisitive spirit only encourage the group to search for new ways to continue their journey. Their fundamental question, at the core of this and other works, is whether the issues they address are apposite to the present situation in El Salvador. They appeal to their readers for suggestions and comments.
In 2007, the Equipo Maíz brought out their first publication on migrations, presently the most widespread occurrence that is breaking up families and communities and undermining the self-organizing of the grupos de base in most Latin American countries. El Salvador: emigración y remesas highlights the highest social and political hurdle in all Central American, South American, and Caribbean countries – emigration. Emigration voids whole regions of people as father and sons, and increasingly also mothers and daughters, depart for the riches of the North. Especially in southeastern parts of El Salvador, emigration has led to deserted territories and the need for a new workforce that will cultivate the land; this are more and more frequently season workers from neighbouring Nicaragua and Guatemala. In ten days, we visited some ten autonomous organizations, collectives, communities, and initiatives involved in the struggle against neo-liberalism. Everywhere we heard repeated the generally known truth that “the elections were rigged.” In the end we asked about this also José María Tojeira, the rector of the Jesuit university Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas, and he too propounded the hypothesis that seasonal workers double as an imported voting force: prior to every election they are quite easily “imported” into the country by the incumbent nationalist party ARENA and granted the right to vote. The seasonal workers double as an imported voting force: being granted the right to vote, they are “imported” without any great difficulty into the country prior to every election by the incumbent nationalist party ARENA. In some parts, all ARENA do is to organize free transport into El Salvador; according to our interlocutors, there are masses of Guatemalans and Nicaraguans willing to mark ARENA on the ballot even without any extra payment. In El Salvador and the neighbouring countries, corruption reigns supreme.
Yet as late as the 1960s, thousands of landless families emigrated from the densely populated El Salvador into the neighbouring Honduras with a much scarcer population. History books also record a short so-called Football War between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969; that conflict was protracted not only due to the mass immigration of Salvadorans, but also because of the colonial tendencies of the Salvadoran elite trying to subjugate the neighbouring countries with a Central American free-trade zone. During the Salvadoran civil war in the 1980s, emigration to Honduras increased (by some estimates, hundreds of thousands Salvadorans left their homeland), but it only became record-breaking when the nationalist party ARENA assumed power in the early 1990s and started crash-introducing a neo-liberal policy that brought in its wake a tide, or even a tsunami, of poverty and a consequent exodus. Statistical figures do not show the sudden surge in poverty, privation, illiteracy, and malnutrition, since some 1000 people – as a rule of the poorest strata of society – emigrate on a daily basis. Outwardly, the country appears economically stable. The approximately eight-million-strong population purportedly does not suffer any want.
That, however, is not quite the case. The last two decades have seen almost a third of the entire population emigrate from predominantly rural, i.e., the poorest, parts of the country. People find it much harder to live there in “peace” under the new “democratic” government than they did during the civil war. Currently, the annual emigration estimate is 185,000 people. 90 % of all emigrants attempt to enter the U.S. (half of them California), where one third of the entire population born in El Salvador, i.e., approximately 3 million Salvadorans not counting the children born in the US, lives. Since 2002, on the average 30,000 people per annum have been “successfully” deported from the North.
The money the immigrant population in the U.S. sends to their families and communities in El Salvador in effect supports the economy of the entire country. Emigrants send home more money per year (approximately 20,000 million dollars) than is earned by the entire production inside the El Salvador (15,800 million dollars). Despite the fact that the money goes to the emigrants’ poor families and communities, it is in reality also the richest upper crust of the Salvadoran society that lives off the emigrants’ life of toil. How come? The Equipo Maíz presents the circulation of money in nine steps: first, a family or a community pools their last savings to hire a “coyote” to smuggle an emigrant into the U.S. There, as a rule, the immigrant does hard physical labour, without any registered status, registered place of residence, work visa, social or health insurance, etc. He or she sends the earned money via a bank to their family and/or community, who in turn withdraw the money from a local bank. Then the family or community takes the earnings to a shopping conglomerate to buy staple food – in El Salvador like elsewhere in Central America that’s beans, milk, eggs, salt, sugar – and perhaps a few treats and some household utensils. The owners of the vast shopping centres – for the most part transnational corporations – put the money in the bank. The bank lends the money to import businesses, which take it to the U.S. to purchase more foreign consumer products to import into El Salvador. The dollars the emigrants had originally sent to El Salvador thus end up back in the U.S.: not, however, in the hands of the poor population, but in the hands of the few rich owners of giant transnational corporations. Another thing that is happening is that families and emigrants spend an increasing part of their earnings to communicate long-distance (which speedily increases the profits of the mobile telephone industry) and to visit, due to the quickly growing mobility with the new airlines (the last fourteen years have seen the number of flights between the U.S. and El Salvador increase tenfold; here it should be stressed that tourism in El Salvador is in its incipient stages and that the airlines are used almost exclusively by Salvadorans).
Since the peace treaty was signed in 1992, virtually all – small, medium-size, and large – domestic companies in a country that used to be industrialized have gone belly-up. And since the signing and implementation of the Free Trade Agreement between the U.S., Canada, and the countries of Central America (El Salvador was the first of the latter to ratify the agreement in 2006), farmers, industrial workers, merchants, etc. can no longer compete with the cheaper, highly subsidized produce and products imported from the U.S. by corporations. A majority of the population and the state scrape by on the money sent by emigrants, which, in the language of statistics, represents an equivalent of 91% of the national budget.
The vicious circle here described has plunged El Salvador into total dependence on the U.S. in under fifteen years; it is perpetuated by the official national policy of the nationalist ultra rightwing party ARENA, which encourages emigration. This was ARENA’s declared political programme, which helped it beat FMLN – Farabundo Martí’s Front of National Liberation – in the 1992 election. The history of El Salvador is blood-soaked and consistently colonial. Farabundo Martí is a national icon standing for the struggle against imperialism and dictatorship. He was the only commander of the indigenous guerrilla who did not lay down the arms and submit to the imperialist military dictatorship in 1932, but led the communist party and was subsequently murdered. There were no more revolts until 1979, with genocidal dictatorships following one another until the indigenous people came to deny their identity. In 1979, FMLN resurrected Martí’s cause and led a general popular uprising that united the impoverished majority population of El Salvador. Despite the exceptional support enjoyed by the guerrilla movement, FMLN failed to win the war because ARENA had constant military and financial U.S. backing, which included trained anti-guerrilla troops (either paramilitary units trained in Honduras or death squads imported from Argentina). Now ARENA plays the emigration card, with the implied threat of economic suicide: if you vote for FMLN, the U.S. will deport all Salvadoran immigrants and the nation’s economy, minimalist as it is, will inevitably collapse.
When ARENA brought in death squads in the 1980s, this led to mass genocide of the indigenous population in El Salvador, similarly as elsewhere in Latin America, and to forced signing of the Peace Treaties, which gave free range to neo-liberalism and put an end to any possibility of a dignified existence for a majority of the population (also the Guatemalan civil war came to a similar end in 1996). El Salvador was among the last countries in which the Cold War was waged, that is why the U.S. made such a genuine effort to suppress any rebellion. As a reminder of this, San Salvador, the state capital, now has the dubious honour of being home to the second largest U.S. embassy in the world (outdone only by the one in Israel). In El Salvador, 75,000 people lost their lives for the “free world.” And then there were many more refugees, women and children who fled to Honduras, to be slaughtered there by the U.S. military forces; this was orchestrated by the “eternal U.S. ambassador” John Negroponte (just a reminder: this is “The Ambassador” of the documentary film of the same title, the man who was the U.S. ambassador to Iraq between 2004 and 2005, though he started his career much earlier, during the Vietnam War. He is infamous for purportedly having had a hand in the military coup in Chile and for the ambassadorial-military interventions in the entire region of Central America while he was posted to Honduras, none of which, however, prevented him from becoming the U.S. representative to the United Nations … Late in April 2007, Negroponte visited Darfur; we can deduce from this how genocides come to a lightning-quick “conclusion” when such ambassadors intervene).
This is a brief outline of the smallest and most densely populated Central American country, called also “the little flea of America.” Equipo Maíz is but one of the many groups and collectives who have been exploring and introducing popular education, which brings to light the unrecorded history of popular struggle and revolutions, the potential of the new revolutionary practices, and also the political upheavals caused by neo-liberal transnational organisations and agreements. Social, economic, and political change in El Salvador came about so unexpectedly and on such a large scale as the earthquakes and hurricanes that wreaks havoc in the region along the tectonic range (between Guatemala and Nicaragua). The natural disasters and the brutal incursions of neo-liberalism in El Salvador and the broader region of Central America apart, the tectonic shifts of people(s) between the Atlantic and the Pacific overflow, multiply, network, grow stronger, and merge. The potential for grassroots social and political organizing with new forms of education and organization and new policies became apparent at the end of the previous millennium. The Equipo Maíz is but one in the constellation of revolutionary practices in the tectonics of power in Latin America. Its way of creating popular education by way of political, art, and radical social practices would deserve serious consideration also in other, non-Latin American territories, where there is a noticeable lack of interest in and support for popular education, or of relevant reflection, action, and intervention.
Bibliography:
Equipo Maíz. Harina para mi costal: Una experiecia de educacion popular en El Salvador. San Salvador: Asociación Equipo Maíz, 2000.
Equipo Maíz. El Salvador: emigración y remesas. San Salvador: Asociación Equipo Maíz, 2007.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc. 2000.
Gregorčič, Marta. Alerta roja: teorije in prakse onkraj neoliberalizma. Ljubljana: Časopis za kritiko znanosti, @Politikon. 2005.
Gregorčič, Marta and Matej Zonta. (Militant research of revolutionary political practices in El Salvador, January 2007).
http://www.equipomaiz.org.sv/
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