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One of the early chroniclers of the Promotores Culturales was Nancy Modiano and it is through her work that we get a sense of the quality and value of Bilingual Education. In her book, La educación Indigena en Los Altos de Chiapas, (1973), Nancy ethnographed a comparative study that conclusively proved that the Promotores Program administered and headed through the relatively progressive Instituto Nacional Indigena, (INI), had superior results in Spanish fluency than the Federal bilingual immersion schools. Modiano's 1964 study showed that the Mestizo teacher, who on the average had more teacher preparation, used an immersion method (amazingly similar to what Ron Unz proposes) and spent 4 times as much time teaching Spanish than did the Promotores. The Promotores, who were indigenous and who only had limited knowledge of Spanish, only spent one hour on Spanish a day, (as opposed to four). Modiano's study is probably the first scientific study, which demonstrates the superiority that mother-language based bilingual education has to offer. There were unsuccessful attempts to use this classical study to discourage the Federal Government from consolidating the Bilingual Promotores Schools under the general auspices of the Secretaria de educación Pública (SEP).
By the 1970's, after the INI provided education was taken over by the PRI's Secretaria de educación Pública, it became increasingly clear that indigenous education was once again being used as a tool to controls and subjugates the indigenous populations. The PRI-government bilingual education continues to be a powerful ideological mechanism with the main objective of teaching indigenous populations how to conform to the status quo of ever more extreme domination, abandonment and suffering.
In her 1983 book titled Los Maestros Bilingúes y la Estructura de Poder Politico en los Altos de Chiapas 1970-1976, Luz Olivia Pineda offers her first of several analyses of how national policies and politics of power are exhibited through the educational system. Pineda was particularly interested in the participation of the bilingual teachers in the structures of power (Pineda, 1983). In 1989 Luz reexamines the state of the bilingual program and detects that it has seriously deteriorated under the general purview and charge of SEP. In her 1993 work titled Caciques Culturales: El caso de los maestros bilingúes en los Altos de Chiapas Luz Olivia Pineda makes a detailed analysis of the ideological and political role that many bilingual teachers had agreed to take up. In chart 1, (page 17) Luz Olivia shows how the ideology leads to political behavior and participation. In this case one can trace the natural and expected transfer of bilingual teachers to the political realm. This had, over time, developed an upper echelon within the indigenous communities, damaged the respect for the bilingual teacher role held by the early Promotores and finally led them to defend the status quo through "elected" positions and appointed posts within the official government.
This new type of caciques were essential for the containment of the indigenous resistance and when the uprising occurred against their collective will they stood as bulwark paramilitary force against the alternative revolutionary change. Many of these bilingual teachers have been identified as key and essential organizers of the death squads and paramilitary groups and some identify them as main players responsible for the massacre of Acteal, where 46 people were murdered. (Comunicado del 16 de Septiembre, 1997)
Autonomy: Breaking and Resisting Ideological Structures
Many of the bilingual teachers that never gave into the ideological and political pressure became Zapatistas and committed themselves to the development of autonomous education free from dominant ideology and to education based on competency and quality and not on ignorance and manipulation. (Pineda, 1990, Encuentro en Oventic sobre el desarrollo de la educación bilingúe, 1996, El Navigante, Fecha desconocida.) In their own words, "Indigenous education should be bilingual and intercultural, should use the indigenous languages and should be concientizadora and liberating for both men and women" (Proceeding of The National Forum on Indigenous Culture and Rights, 1996). It is a well-known fact that many of the comandantes in the Zapatista Army as well as in the Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indigena (CCRI) were previously bilingual teachers. Two of the most notes are Comandante Tacho and Mayor Moises. In the words of the CCRI, "Indigenous education should be bilingual and intercultural, should use the indigenous languages and should be concientizadora and liberating for both men and women" (Proceeding of The National Forum on Indigenous Culture and Rights, 1996).
Autonomous Communities: Mother of Autonomous Education
Autonomous education can only exist within the confines of a politically autonomous community, where the community has full political control and not in an open context, where the ideology of the state freely interferes through and with all its powerful forms. Adelfo Regino Montes, leader of the National Indigenous Congress describes autonomous indigenous education as communal education, understood as that process of teaching-learning conceived and developed from the community in accordance to its interest and particular culture, harmonized with national priorities and recognizing Mexico's cultural diversity. (Montes, 1997).
The Zapatista uprising brings to the fore the direct confrontation of indigenous people who had been relatively isolated and marginalized for 500 years and a new global system that is taking exploitation and suffering to new heights. It is a world showcase that is utilizing a unique method of struggle to challenge the hegemony of world corporativism and its approach is particularly evident in the area of reconstructing education.
In summary, the Zapatistas have taken praxis based on Marxist, Critical theory, combined it with an indigenous worldview, applied it to new conditions and have pushed to a higher level of theory and practice. The Zapatista autonomous model has systematized and made viable the autonomous classroom implicit in Pablo Freire and other critical theories by providing a nurturing context and connection with other similar social and political incubators. They have taken the autonomous classroom and protected it in the autonomous community where it can be developed, implemented and supported by its creators, the entire autonomous communities. The Zapatistas have thus solved the paradox of perpetuating the system albeit all the intentions of changing it. The Zapatistas demonstrate a profound understanding of the ability of the Capitalist State to contaminate and quickly absorb any liberating and progressive reform and turn it around into a weapon against social justice.
In 1992, Chiapas (the southern most state of Mexico) together with the states of Guerrero, Oaxaca and Hidalgo are considered the poorest by the World Bank and the most likely to have social unrest (Chiapas en Ciphers, 1997). Over 40% of the population lives on 4,000 pesos ($50.00) yearly income and 20% of the work age population has no income at all. (La Opinion, 5/5/98). In contrast to the immense poverty Chiapas is rich in timber, oil, cattle, coffee production and hydro-electrical plant producing 70% of Mexico's electricity. Chiapas has a total population of a little over 3.2 million. Out of a total of 111 municipalities, half of them (55) are Autonomous municipalities, 39 of which are completely under the Zapatistas and 16 with parallel governments in contention with the PRI-governments. Within the state boundaries of Chiapas exist at least 9 different ethnic and language groups that include Tzotziles, Tzeltales, Tojolabales, Mames, Zoques, Lancandones, Choles, Kachikeles and Mixes.
In Chiapas there are 1 million school age children of these only 72% are actually attending school. Chiapas has an overall illiteracy rate of over 50%, 63% for women and 30% of the population never went to school (Chiapas en Ciphers, 1996 p 35). In Chiapas two thirds or roughly 2 million inhabitants are indigenous. It has the highest infant mortality rate and 73% of families in Chiapas can claim a death of one of their children this compared to 4% for Mexico overall. The two main causes of death are malnutrition and tuberculosis.
This picture, of dire poverty, makes the World Bank prediction that it was in Chiapas where an uprising was most likely an obvious forecast. The uprising has had both positive and negative impacts on the population. On the one hand, the indigenous Zapatistas were able to create up to now 55 municipalities where the Zapatistas are creating their own educational system. On the other hand the conflict zones are surrounding by at least 70,000 regular army troops. There are 11 paramilitary groups operating in the state of Chiapas, many of them organized and led by bilingual teachers. In the northern municipalities, paramilitary groups have murdered at least 500 persons, in the last 30 months alone. There are, at least, 17,000 unarmed Zapatista villagers who have been displaced (run out of their communities) by paramilitary groups. At least 300 bilingual teachers have been displaced due to the conflict. Many of these are operatives of one of the paramilitary groups.
Neoclassical analysis of history would have one believe that political and ideological structures do not exist and what matters is the decisions of individuals (Tollefson, 1996). The Zapatistas base their practice on the premise that government education historically followed the government's historical plan that was not oriented nor informed by the practices and goals of the indigenous people but represented the interest and goals of the political economic system.
Three Dimensional Organizing : Infrastructural Building
Within some 2,000 autonomous communities, the indigenous Zapatistas are taking proactive steps in developing the type of indigenous education that they feel they need now. Not only are they unwilling to wait for the Federal or State government to implement this type of education, but consider a reliance on the State to be an oxymoronic approach, since the state by definition is inherently incapable of creating and producing a pedagogy for dignity. Notwithstanding its inefficiencies, unwillingness, and ignorance, the state would like to see the indigenous dependent on a state that occasionally throws crumbs at them (Primera Declaración de la Selva Lancandona, 1994).
The heart of Zapatista approach is to take proactive initiative and to develop internal reliance with the aim of building infrastructures within the communities in the ultimate form of autonomous parallel governments. The autonomous method contrasts to the approach taken by many well-intended reformers who in an isolated (their classroom only) manner attempt to change their classroom conditions; curriculum, environment, books, etc. This individual approach does very little in terms of solving the problem at most they tend to treat the symptom. The Zapatista approach to change exhibited by their approach to education stands in contrast to "activists" who dedicate their life to changing the nature of systems of educational inequality through electoral and legislative means. The Zapatista method does not deny nor ignore the benefit of symptom treating or system changing attempts and may even involve themselves in this activity but they do it as a way to develop a third and principal sphere of activity; Infrastructural building.
Zapatista thought informs us that symptom treating and system-changing activities without the main activity of infrastructural building is in fact perpetuating the status quo. If one treats the symptoms of a faulty system without ever getting to the roots then one is involved in a form of perpetuating that faulty system. Similarly if one changes the system just enough to give the same system another lease on life, allowing it to absorb or co-opt the change then one is again involved in the perpetuation of that system. Zapatismo proposes that civil society go a step further and develop the infrastructure that allows autonomous free zones to define and build an alternative system of governance that for a time will co-exist with the old. This bottom-up development is something that the dominant system is incapable of carrying out, without it being at the cost of its own demise. It is in the interest of the dominant system that one not ever imagine that civil society can be involved in developing its own parallel government and infrastructure. This interest is projected and adopted by us daily, it is part and parcel of the curriculum of educational systems.
This dominator's ideological influence is so pervasive and effective that it is exhibited even in the forms of resistance and struggle for justice. The symptom-treating, system-changing activities are universally present in movements for social justice. Methods of struggle for social justice, as demonstrated in the struggle for the mere right to bilingual education in California, exhibit symptom treating and legislative system changing strategies but also exhibits the tendency toward the Zapatista proposal of infrastructural-building. That autonomous tendencies need to be complemented by the overall building of an autonomous community that would include its own micro-economic projects, and an autonomous political structure.
Application of Autonomous Pedagogy in the USA
Daily, in the Barrios and Ghettos of the U.S. everyone struggles but they do so as individuals. Daily we struggle for a just education, with teachers and principles, daily we struggle with our bosses at work or with our union bosses who don't work. At best our struggle is through an organized effort, an organization of parents, workers, students or teachers. But seldom have we gone beyond community or city-wide organizations to the level of self or autonomous government. The Zapatistas are proposing that we take critical theory to its logical conclusion. If the dominating state's purpose is to perpetuate itself then why should we expect it to reform and do otherwise?
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