International Development Journalism Competition: Lessons from Oaxaca
Elena Gonzales folds yarn between her fingers. Her tapestry is woven in an intricate pattern of ochre and indigo, with fibre that has been dyed using moss and bark, fruit and flowers. Here in the hills of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, indigenous Zapotec communities have been weaving rugs for more than two thousand years. Elena spins the loom and the centuries fall away.
Like many Zapotec children growing up in the 1980s, Elena did not attend school. Faced with a primary curriculum that took no account of Zapotec language or culture, her parents decided that she should be educated by her community. She was taught to weave by her grandmother. Self-sufficiency is the historic norm in Oaxaca, but in recent decades as rural life has become increasingly entretejidos – interwoven – with the modern market economy, Zapotec children who have not gone to school are finding themselves on the wrong side of an urban-rural education divide that excludes them from employment and contributes to deepening poverty.
The Zapotec predicament is far from unique. According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development, indigenous people – that is to say, people rooted by history and language and by myth and memory to a particular place on the planet – make up one third of the world's 900 million extremely poor rural people. For indigenous people the foremost barrier to primary education is language.
"Our children may be bilingual or monolingual in any of the sixteen original languages that exist in Oaxaca," explains Fernando Bojórquez, founder of the National Congress of Indigenous and Intercultural Education, "but they are taught and evaluated in Spanish, sometimes via national standardized examinations, without taking into account their abilities or their linguistic and cultural rights."
For the people of Oaxaca, language is precious. More than just a collection of words or a set of grammatical rules, each language is a unique window to the world, a repository of cultural wealth. "Language preserves in every word the essence of our community," explains a Mixtecan school teacher.
Language is also a legally enshrined right. The Law of Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples was passed by the Mexican Congress in 2003, granting indigenous languages the same legal status and validity as Spanish. Despite this, schools still offer a Spanish-centric curriculum, "a system of education," explains Fernando Bojórquez, "which itself contributes to the extinction of the languages and cultures of original peoples."
Oaxaca's linguistic diversity is born of its terrain: a rugged landscape of ravines, caverns and sheer jungle ascents. Pockets of pre-Hispanic culture have survived successive generations of colonisation and still thrive here. The Mixtecs are the second largest of these. They take their name from the Nahuatl word Mixtecapan – the place of the cloud-people – after their home, the mountainous Sierra Madre del Sur, which they call Ñuñume – the land of the clouds. Land, language and identity are profoundly entwined in Oaxaca, an interrelation expressed as communalidad.
Communalidad is seen as the central concept in Oaxacan life, so deep-rooted in the local mindset that it resists translation into English. Gustavo Esteva, a public intellectual who works at the Universidad de la Terra (University of the Land) explains that "In indigenous tradition, people are knots in nets of real relationships… this is communalidad, existence formed by the interlocking of networks of real relationships that make up each person."
The people of Oaxaca understand themselves as interwoven threads in a cultural tapestry. The day-to-day act of weaving is named communalidad.
Decades of organised protest centred on communalidad have seen indigenous movements evolve a powerful human rights narrative, in which the school system is shown to violate their rights to self-determination and freedom of expression. In May 2011, 70,000 teachers occupied the main square of the state capital in protest against the Alliance for Quality in Education (ACE) law, which would further violate the linguistic and cultural rights of Oaxaca's indigenous peoples by consolidating national standardised testing in Spanish.
Oaxacans have also initiated a series of alternative education projects focussed on the preservation of communalidad. These include a network of Language Nests, an educational strategy imported from the Māori, original peoples of New Zealand, that see children of a pre-school age taught in the language of the community by grandparents, ensuring a bilingual upbringing.
For the indigenous people of Oaxaca the struggle is far from over, but for Elena there is hope and there is defiance. "In Oaxaca today, revitalization is possible." Her children attend the local Language Nest, where they are taught to yarn (in word and on loom) by their grandmother.
Oaxaca illustrates that human rights must be placed at the heart of development. The second Millennium Development Goal sets the target of achieving universal primary education by 2015, but in isolation this goal does not reflect the human rights obligations that states must adhere to in aspiring towards such a target, including the obligation to eliminate discrimination.
A 2009 UNESCO Global Monitoring Report found that of the 72 million children out of school globally, four fifths were rural. Discrimination against rural and indigenous peoples can only be countered by ensuring these people have the right to effective participation in decisions that affect their lives. The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has called for a "human rights-based approach to development to be operationalized by states, the UN and intergovernmental organizations." Such an approach would see indigenous peoples empowered to articulate their own definitions of poverty, development and education.
For the world's most impoverished and vulnerable, those for whom the future hangs by a thread, human rights are essential for sustainable and equitable development. Human rights are universal and interdependent, indivisible and interwoven. For those for whom school offers not a road out of poverty, but a slippery slope of assimilation and acculturation, Education to Extinction, for the indigenous children of Oaxaca, human rights are a source of hope and a voice of defiance. Defiance voiced against the silence of a language lost, the stillness of the unspun loom; nameless clouds upon the peaks of Ñuñume.
This feature was written for the Guardian International Development Journalism competition before 13 June 2011.