Abstract

BARONNET, Bruno. The Construction of Demands for Education among Indigenous Peoples from Southeastern Mexico. Rev. colomb. educ. [online]. 2015, n.69, pp.47-73. ISSN 0120-3916.

This article analyses processes of social construction that shape the demands for education in the Cañadas (canyons) of Ocosingo, in the Lacandon Jungle, south-eastern Chiapas in Mexico. The relations among educational actors and peasant communities, mainly Tseltales, are marked since the emergence of schools in the twentieth century by an organizational context of negotiation and confrontation with the State, involving processes of politicization of ethnic identities and social appropriation of school education. Under the conditions created by political conflict, the Maya peoples have generated and extended new experiences of community schools since the end of the 80s and over the last two decades, in accordance with renewed practices of self-government that give meaning to an alternative project that they have assumed as their own autonomous undertaking. Based on socio-anthropological research methods, ethnographies and interviews, the article studies the generation of autonomous educational practices in a multicultural region in conflict, whose territories are reorganized twenty years after the creation of new municipalities by the Zapatistas. Moreover, in the two decades preceding the emergence of the Zapatista movement's schools, the demand for education is also constructed in relation to self-organizing peasants struggling for the dignity of the Mayan cultures. The current alternative practices are presented as a product of self-managed educational policies by indigenous actors, embedded in structures of communal and regional power that are unrecognized and excluded within the framework of national education policies.

Keywords : Intercultural education; autonomy; indigenous peoples; Chiapas; Mexico.

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