Among the trees and the cornfield, some girls and boys of different ages appear. They hurry happily to meet each other, look at each other with complicity, laugh and speak in their own language, Mazatec. They know that a new solidarity brigade is visiting their school. They are excited because they have been told that they will learn how to make films and radio.
The people who will share new experiences with them are part of a solidarity brigade from Colombia and Chile, who have visited various experiences of self-management and autonomy in Mexico. Eager to mirror what they have learned, they have ventured to places like the Escuelita Comunitaria Agua de Lluvia, located in the mountains of the Sierra Mazateca, in the state of Oaxaca.
This school, which bears the name of the community, Agua de Lluvia, has been created by the hands of the children, young people, a teacher and farmers who have bet on another type of education. It has been inspired by the autonomous schools created in Zapatista rebel territory in Chiapas and, from this perspective, they have ventured to think and walk in other directions in the education of the children of this community.
Nicolás Aguirre and his collective Tierra Negra have been working for at least 3 years with children in popular neighborhoods in Cali, such as Comuna 18, where they have provoked familiarity with communication technologies. “We consider communication to be one of the indispensable tools of struggle, as a response to disinformation and media manipulation. We have seen that children are very interested in communicating and, with the little knowledge we have acquired along the way, we seek to strengthen ourselves together,” she shares.
Aguirre prepares his tape recorder to release it to the children of Agua de Lluvia. He believes that no great knowledge is required to produce communication from the communities themselves. “From Colombia we work with the voices of children, youth and adults. Because these three voices must be heard and we have put this into practice in the assemblies, where the three voices are heard,” Aguirre says.
The children of Agua de Lluvia, for the first time, have explored with their hands an audio and video recorder. They have interviewed themselves, their teachers, their neighbors, the brigadistas themselves. “This process is very similar to the process we worked on in Cali. It is a process with children, it is an autonomous process done with nails, with the heart,” shares Nathalí Aguirre, also part of the Tierra Negra Cooperative in Cali.
Fear of autonomy
Roció Escudero Rodríguez is of Mazateco origin and for more than 30 years has worked as a teacher in various communities in this region. After several scenarios of political and social crisis that Oaxaca has experienced, since 2006, until the Covid-19 pandemic, she has tried to create an alternative space for education with her community.
But it has not been easy, not having economic resources or furniture, even the children and parents have been involved to build the first classroom. In addition to this, they have been hindered by some political bosses, even within the teachers’ union this project is not seen with good eyes, considering it a threat.
Professor Roció assures that “this project is created in a communitarian way and does not affect the teachers. On the contrary, it complements the children’s education. The difference is that this project is autonomous and no one receives salaries. The aim is to teach other things that the government school does not teach. We should not be afraid of autonomy”.
Juan Carlos Alvarado, a young co-founder of the escuelita, feels encouraged to be able to welcome one more brigade that shares other knowledge. “The approach to these technologies is important for the children, because in the community they are not accessible. There is no possibility of having contact with people from other parts of Mexico, much less from other countries”.
In the same line, the farmer Crescencio Juárez García has also joined in with work to build the school because he considers that it is important that there are other possibilities for the children. In addition, “because here no one receives a salary and the children do not have to pay anything, it is a commitment to the community. There are many things missing for the school, such as windows, tables and other things, but we are not asking for anything from the authorities or politicians and, even so, we are seeing how it is progressing, slowly, but it is advancing,” he says proudly.
Learning by doing
Unlike ‘professional’ methodologies, Camila Camacho from Bogota says that the workshops they have shared are aimed at breaking with the limitations imposed by the hard ways of teaching. “It is from learning by doing and from play and chance. Discovering through images other ways of seeing reality and how dreams can be built from imagination,” says the Colombian brigadista.
Camila, who is part of the VER (Visuality, Epistemology and Reality) collective, which arose after the absence of academic spaces that address the visual in relation to the social sciences, reaffirms that “children always have something to tell. Because we believe that only the voice of adults is the only one that counts, but it is not so. We have to think of other narratives of another possible world”.
Iñaki Tiña from Santiago, Chile, who shared his knowledge of neighborhood and community filmmaking, is encouraged to see how the children manipulate his camera. He knows firsthand that self-managed projects are not easy because “there is no money, no supplies, no structure; but you have to do what you can with what you have,” shares Iñaki, who is part of the Popular Film School and the Social and Antisocial Film Festival.
Camila concludes with a motto that has inspired the children she has worked with before. “Yes we dream it, we create it. I think that’s the key to everything. Learning that, if we live in community management, if we have community, it can enable an encounter that can allow processes of autonomy and resistance. This little school is an example that it is possible to dream and build another possible world”.