In the maize plantations of the Lacandon Jungle [1] in Mexico, three months were once needed to complete the harvest. However, with the ecological catastrophe provoked by the “capitalist hydra”, the Zapatistas of the region can no longer rely on the old cycle, explained one of the spokespeople of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) [2], Subcomandante Moisés. Faced with serious problems such as these, the movement organised an educational activity in Chiapas that brought together scientists from various parts of the world to address questions and comments from indigenous people of the Mayan communities. The proposal was not, then, for indigenous people to leave their lands to go to university, but for the university to “rise up in our communities, to teach and learn amongst our people”, commented another subcomandante.

Zapatista education is an inspiration for many movements and peoples struggling for autonomy, as it has built an education system rooted in community self-organisation, in the composition of scientific and traditional knowledge, and in the common struggle for land. For some years now, the movement has posed a fundamental question for our times: how to struggle for autonomy in the face of ecological collapse? One of the principles of Zapatista education is “walking whilst asking questions”. One must ask questions or one does not walk, they say. Activities in autonomous schools usually begin with questions. Therefore, we also begin with other questions: in what way can we foster educational practices to confront a common collective threat, such as ecological collapse, without disregarding the differences amongst peoples? Is it possible to weave an 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 struggle for autonomy? What kind of freedom does autonomous education defend? Is autonomy as an anticolonial practice a path of resistance or does it depoliticise formative processes? More than definitively resolving these questions—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 Teia dos Povos. [3]

Zapatista Education

Since 1994, in the mountains of southeastern Mexico, in Chiapas, one of the largest popular insurrections in recent history has been underway. Over the last thirty years, the Mayan peoples of the region have practised self-determination in various spheres of collective life, including education. It is not Capital, nor the State that decides on Zapatista education, but community assemblies, with strong leadership from women. Currently, in a context of attacks by paramilitary groups, increased drug trafficking in the region, and the threat of developmentalist projects in the 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 potencies, by proposing to reclaim schools based on the struggle for autonomy. The Zapatista autonomous education system is different from state and private schools in the region; Zapatista educators are indigenous people from the communities who do not lose their relationship with the land. They are called promotores de educación autónoma (promoters of autonomous education), or, in Tzotzil [4] (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 in community assemblies. There is also an education commission (equally elected by the community) responsible for guiding and supporting the work of the promoters. Each educator is accountable to the collective. At the same time, the community also has its responsibilities: during the time that promoters dedicate themselves to the educational activities of the community, it must reciprocate directly with maize and beans or with collective work in the educator’s family plantation.

If, due to its anti-state character, an uninformed observer might imagine some similarity between Zapatista education and home schooling proposed by the far right in Brazil, in reality, such proposals are antagonistic. Home schooling is ultra-privatist and conservative, emptying precisely the most collective aspect of education, making socialisation and relationship with different forms of knowledge and worlds impossible. In an opposite sense, Zapatista education expands the relationship of school with collective life and has as one of its directions popular self-organisation and the end of private property.

Autonomous schools were a great transformation in the daily life of Zapatista struggles. Some of the older Zapatistas report very poor experiences in schools that existed before the 1994 uprising. They recount that they attended school for years without understanding what Spanish-speaking teachers were saying, and that school was always a meaningless space, where they felt oppressed for being indigenous. In this context of extreme racism and with the end of negotiations with the State, in 1997, the Zapatistas definitively chose to form their own educational organisation. The movement called on its bases, then, to withdraw their children from official schools and to organise community members to participate in training for future educators. With this call, official schools were gradually replaced by autonomous schools, and in places where schools did not exist, new Zapatista schools were built through collective work brigades.

Some agreements were discussed collectively to guide the autonomous educational system: autonomous schools have as their main language the mother tongue of the community, and throughout the educational process other languages are incorporated, such as Spanish; teaching-learning in school cannot be separated from community and land; there are compositions (not necessarily harmonious mixtures) between scientific and traditional knowledge with reference to the struggle for autonomy; students are not empty receptacles that simply receive content from educators, they are active subjects who also participate in decision-making about the educational system. Zapatista education is a cry against “banking education” [5] and flourishes in the small steps and silences of the communities.

As we recently celebrated the centenary of the pedagogue Paulo Freire [6], an important systematiser of a pedagogy of autonomy, we see how reverberations exist in this experience that takes autonomy in education to its ultimate consequences. Liberation theology [7], one of the driving forces of Zapatismo, transformed in Chiapas into indigenous theology, is marked by popular education movements that swept Latin America in the 1960s. This current was absorbed and transformed by the resistances 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 life of Zapatista communities. In their training, Zapatista educators study authors of popular education and Euro-American authors of the classical and contemporary left, affirming the importance of this study, whilst at the same time saying that reading books is not enough; the educational proposal and training also come from their reflection on the life of peoples. Ch’ulel is the “soul”, vital breath, a force with different levels of intensity, present in all beings on Earth. Trees, rivers, earth, animals, and humans have ch’ulel; they are in a relationship between subjects, they have value. What occurs in the education of “those above” is precisely teaching 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 paths to magnify ch’ulel. Even in autonomy, there is no day of complete ch’ulel, but a constant walking and asking. The pedagogy of walking whilst asking allows schools to become spaces of experimentation and strengthening of struggles, where communities gain a central place, in which one must give oneself entirely to learn not only with one’s head. To teach and learn, one must belong to the land. Land, a fundamental claim of the movement since the 1994 uprising, would not only be an inert resource, but is the foundation of the gods (yajval) and of collective life.

Current Challenges and Teia dos Povos

At the commemoration of 30 years of the Zapatista uprising, alongside a great party with dancing and music, there was a statement by the Zapatista command—or rather, the subcommand, because in Zapatista territory, it is the people who command. Subcomandante Moisés issued a warning to young people: faced with the harsher context they are living through, there is no model or formula, much collective practice is needed. The defence of common life was recurrent in his speech. It is necessary to defend common life, collective organisation, the land, which is not only a local struggle: “it is not possible to humanise capitalism”, “it is necessary for those who come from outside 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. Faced with the ecological collapse in which we live, it becomes even more explicit how a fire produced by agribusiness in a territory in Brazil has consequences for peoples in Mexico, just as the developmentalist project of the Maya Train [8] has effects on the lives of peoples 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 struggle in their own way, with their different geographies.”

Although the Zapatistas are an inspiration, we should not use the Zapatista autonomous educational system as the sole measure to evaluate whether other movements are truly autonomous, whether because they resort to public policies, or because they do not share autonomist strategies in all spheres of collective life (Barbosa & Rosset, 2024). With such an attitude, we would run the risk of disqualifying educational and struggle processes that are not completely equivalent to Zapatista autonomy, but which are resistances for autonomies.

The land retakes with the encantados [9] of the Tupinambá de Olivença and Pataxó Hã Hã Hãe in southern Bahia, the self-demarcations of Munduruku lands in Pará, amongst so many other examples, demonstrate how the territorial struggle of peoples has an educational character (Munduruku, 2012). In this path, Teia dos Povos defends that the transition from land to territory passes through a formative dimension anchored in the reclaiming of capacities to act collectively based on the struggle for land: “Our perspective is not to demand from the State the concession of land plots. It is fundamental that the people themselves conquer the lands because it is from struggle that all the symbolism is born that will transform land into territory” (Ferreira & Felício, 2021, p. 44). This does not mean, however, that autonomy is absolute; there are many spaces of coexistence with the State in territories articulated in Teia dos Povos.

In the case of the Terra Vista Settlement [10], in southern Bahia, for example, there are two public schools, one municipal and one state, which, with their contradictions and potentialities, are important spaces for training and dialogue with the movement and community. Additionally, there is the Universidade dos Povos (University of the Peoples), the educational front of Teia, which seeks to promote pedagogical sovereignty through libertarian education, grounded in the cosmovision of peoples, in the principles of agroecology, in traditional knowledge, and in the struggle for land and territory. Calling this initiative “University” is a provocation that subverts the conventional notion of university, in an experiment to strengthen and deepen the knowledge of peoples.

In this process, there are considerable challenges. Often, capitalism and colonialism produce a notion of autonomy that is confused with the supposed freedom of the individual. This perspective is present, including in spaces of militancy. Alongside this, there exists a conception of “decoloniality” that is emptied and depoliticised. Upon identifying this problem, the Aymara [11] libertarian thinker Silvia Cusicanqui proposes a differentiation between decoloniality and anticolonial struggle:

Since colonial times there have been processes of anticolonial struggle; in contrast, the decolonial is a very recent fashion that, in some way, profits from and reinterprets these struggle processes, but I believe it depoliticises them, since the decolonial is a state or a situation, but it is not an activity, it does not imply an agency, nor a conscious participation. I take anticolonial struggle to practice in deeds, in some way, delegitimising all forms of reification and ornamental use of the indigenous that the State makes. (Cusicanqui, 2019)

Beyond the depoliticising decolonial, educational activities of anticolonial struggle are underway, in the sense that Silvia Cusicanqui proposes. One path is discussed by Mestra Mayá, author of the second book launched by Teia dos Povos. She recounts how she became a teacher who educated in land retakes alongside the encantados:

Parents went to the retakes and carried their children, and what I had to do was go. I had 396 classrooms. And I participated in all 396 retakes. (...) I would arrive there and ask the children if they knew why they were in that place. Thus, we went learning and rewriting our history (Mestra Mayá, 2022, p. 63).

For the author, the pedagogy of retakes passes through telling and retelling collectively the histories of peoples that were expropriated. In the history of colonisation on the continent, the class struggle is a struggle for lands, marked by violent appropriation. Educational work of retakes is needed to learn with the Earth, keeping alive the spirit linked by the encantados in a guerrilla war that constantly updates itself:

We may be facing great difficulty with the struggle. When we put our foot on the earth, our ear to the earth, when we feel the groan of the earth, hear its call, we know how to follow our steps, because we are listening (Mestra Mayá, 2022, p. 74).

The call of Mestra Mayá and the inspiration of the Zapatista autonomous education system point to an education oriented towards belonging to the land, but which is not synonymous with defending a merely local struggle, or an identitarianism. One of the challenges of pedagogical sovereignty is precisely to build autonomy based on interdependence. Interdependence amongst human beings and more-than-human beings that inhabit the Earth; amongst different forms of knowledge to confront ecological collapse. Interdependence is contrary to the dependence generated by capitalism that divides and removes the capacity to act collectively (Stengers & Debaise, 2017). The training of learners based on the dependence characteristic of the vertical practices of banking education expresses the logic of the social structure of oppression and triggers curricular policies and practices that legitimise a supposed universal common good, whilst concealing popular knowledge and social contradictions (Freire, 1987).

Autonomous education as a path to weave interdependence enables unity: an articulation that does not lead to homogenisation, as proposed by Teia, or the struggle for a world where many worlds fit, as the Zapatistas announce. Collectively debating these and other challenges becomes increasingly urgent in the face of the fire that destroys the lands of peoples here and there. We conclude with one last question that Zapatismo constantly provokes: “¿Y tu, qué?” (and you, what will you do?).

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The Popular Education Column is an important space for articulation between knowledge and practices that emerge from the daily struggles of indigenous, quilombola, peasant, and urban communities. This space arises in a context that demands new perspectives and approaches to education, recognising the cultural diversity and life experiences of the peoples that compose our country. Thus we begin the Popular Education Column, which Ana Paula Morel will lead.

Ana Paula Morel, as a popular educator and anthropologist, brings with her a rich trajectory of experiences in diverse contexts. Her intense experience with the Zapatista experience in Chiapas and her work at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ) [12] make her a reference in the field of education and health practices developed in partnership with communities. Currently, at the Federal Fluminense University (UFF), she continues her trajectory of struggle for libertarian education.

Bibliography

BARBOSA, L., & ROSSET, P. Concepções e exercícios da autonomia entre os movimentos indígenas e camponeses da América Latina. Revista Nera, v. 27, n. 2, 2024.

CUSICANQUI, S. “Tenemos que producir pensamiento a partir de lo cotidiano”. Entrevista de Kattalin Barber. Revista El Salto, 2019.

FERREIRA, J. & FELÍCIO, E. Por terra e território: o caminho da revolução dos povos no Brasil. Teia dos Povos, 2021.

FREIRE, Paulo. Pedagogia da Autonomia. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2011.

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. Pedagogia do Oprimido. 17. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1987.

MESTRA MAYÁ. A escola da reconquista. Teia dos Povos, 2022.

MUNDURUKU, Daniel. O caráter educativo do movimento indígena brasileiro (1970-1990). São Paulo: Paulinas, 2012.

STENGERS, I. & DEBAISE, D. L’insistance des possibles. Pour un pragmatisme spéculatif. Multitudes, v. 65, p. 82-89, 2017.