Education is central to the Mayan struggle, as formalized by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas. In this text, Raúl Romero Gallardo & Xavie Gálvez unfold the structure of self-governance created by the Zapatistas and how education takes its role within it.
On the wall of a wooden house, in the mountains of southeast Chiapas, reads the phrase: “Education is the heart of autonomy.” Talking about Zapatista education means also talking about armed struggle, as well as dialogue about and the collective construction of autonomy. To approach education under these circumstances within the struggle, we start this text off with some insights around the historical background and political organization of the Zapatista movement.
In 1983, a small group of mestizos reached the Lacandon Jungle in Chiapas with the intention of developing armed struggle.
Influenced by Marxist ideology and by Latin American national liberation struggles, they were confronted with the fact that, for centuries, Indigenous communities had already been resisting colonial exploitation on their own terms.
This reality, along with navigating challenges in the jungle, forced them to abandon their vanguardist logics and learn from the ways in which Indigenous communities experienced the world. Such processes constituted a profound educational experience, through which this group of mestizos learned from Indigenous languages, traditions, and cosmologies. In turn, they shared with locals their knowledge in areas such as politics, first aid, and military training. This point of the struggle is usually known as “the underground phrase,” and it is considered to be a moment of authentic learning not only through dialogue but more importantly, through praxis.
On December 19, 1994, almost one year after its first public appearance, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) announced that, as a result of the campaign “Peace with Justice and Dignity for the Indigenous Peoples,” they had taken control of thirty-eight municipalities in the Mexican state of Chiapas with the support of the local population. They made it clear that following the so-called “ceasefire,” the occupation had taken place without any confrontation. In turn, the civil population of these areas assumed the task of renaming municipalities and choosing their authorities. Soon, their rebel conscience became evident—municipalities were given names like “General Emiliano Zapata,” “Freedom of the Mayan Peoples,” and “Ernesto Che Guevara.” Territories that were possessed before by landowners and ranchers were recovered and reclaimed by Zapatista Mayans. Thus, these regions were voted to be governed through direct democracy by the Political Constitution of the United States of Mexico of 1917, the Zapatista Revolutionary Law of 1993, and the specific laws of each municipality. This way, the Municipios Autónomos Rebeldes Zapatistas (Zapatista Autonomous Rebel Municipalities, also known as MAREZ) were born.
The MAREZ started to practice self-government through Autonomous Councils. The EZLN said that they would only give protection in the face of military or paramilitary attacks: “The armies should be used to defend, not to govern. It is not the role of an army to be police or agent of public ministry,” said the Zapatistas through their spokesperson in 2003. In 2001, the EZLN gave one last chance for the Mexican state to recognize its sovereignty, and the right of all Indigenous peoples, to self-governance. Thousands marched in streets all over the country to support this demand. However, the political class, including so-called “left-wing parties,” turned their back to the Indigenous peoples by rejecting the San Andrés Agreements about Rights and Indigenous Culture (Acuerdos de San Andrés sobre Derechos y Cultura Indígena). These agreements had resulted from a process of dialogue between Zapatistas and the Mexican government, where the former invited all the Indigenous groups of Mexico and specialist advisers from different areas to participate. The dialogues were interrupted on various occasions, due to the government restarting a war or unfolding repressive actions.
The Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Mam, Chol, Tojolabal, and Zoque peoples, all of them with Mayan roots, organized in the EZLN. They argued that “the time to ask for” and “the time to demand” were over, it was now “time for action.”
After communicating the total suspension of any contact with the federal government and political parties, on August 9, 2003, they announced the creation of five organizing regions called “Caracoles Zapatistas,” and their respective Councils of Good Government. The Caracoles replaced the Aguascalientes, which had been created in 1995 to be a gathering point between cultures of Zapatista communities, of Mexico, and of the world. According to the southeast rebels, the Caracoles were created to take the Aguascalientes even further, to be “windows to see ourselves in the inside and to look outside,” “for speakers to throw our word far away and to allow us to listen to the word of those who are far.” The Councils of Good Government work with principles of rotation, revocation of mandate, and accountability; true bottom-up power. They elect Municipal Councils, and these, in turn, elect community authorities. This is an emancipatory form of power where delegates who are given their authoritative role by the people, have to oblige those they represent. Currently, in 2023, there are twelve Caracoles with their respective Councils of Good Government, coordinating a total of forty-three autonomous entities.
Collective work is key to their process. They use it to finance the organization and create cooperatives with different functions, such as baking bread, farming cattle, and producing shoes. Through collective work, they have even built bank institutions like the Autonomous Community Bank, which supports families in emergencies. Collective work occurs through territorial organizations and works as a point of convergence between different families. In Subcomandante Moisés words: “Collective work is made at a local level, community level; then it is made at a regional level, that’s how we call it, region is where forty, fifty, sixty towns are grouped, to that we call it region, and then collective work is made at a municipal level. When we say municipal level sometimes it gathers three, four, or five regions, that is the Zapatista Autonomous Rebel Municipality.” This recovery of land and implementation of collective work has supported a broad autonomous project where each element forms part of a whole: housing, land, work, health, food, education, democracy, freedom, justice, culture, and information.
Since 1994, EZLN had demands oriented to the sphere of culture and education, for example complete and free education for all Indigenous peoples, the officialization of all Indigenous languages in Mexico, mandatory teaching of their languages at all school levels, respect of cultures and traditions of Indigenous peoples, and the cultural, political and judicial autonomy of Indigenous peoples. These demands and initiatives, combined with the recovery of land and collective work, have allowed the movement to build up a local network of schools, as an alternative to the official public education system.
Between 2013 and 2014 the Zapatistas held several courses called “La escuelita Zapatista” (“the Zapatista School”). This project was a pedagogical exercise in which Zapatistas showed thousands of people from Mexico and other parts of the world how their autonomy works, or in their words, “freedom according to Zapatistas.” As support material, they distributed notebooks with reflections and videos made by them, where they explain important topics like the situation of women, Zapatista self-governance, and collective work: true education tools produced through collective self-reflection. On various days, students of La escuelita lived with Zapatista families. They were accompanied all the time by a Votán, a Zapatista man or woman who took care of them and answered any questions they had. For Zapatistas, a Votán is the “guardian and heart of the people,” “guardian and heart of the earth,” and “guardian and heart of the world.” In this sense, La escuelita assigned each student a heart to guide their steps. During this program, Zapatistas explain that there are four territorial instances for the organization: town, region, municipality, and area. And these, in turn, have three levels of autonomous authority: communal, municipal, and the Good Governance Councils. The highest authority is always the people and the assemblies they reiterate. Seven principles rule the autonomous governments, titled “The principles of leading by obeying”: to serve and not self-serve; to represent and not replace; to construct and not destroy; to obey and not command; to propose and not impose; to convince and not defeat; and to work from below and not seek to rise.
Doroteo, an ex-member of the Good Governance Council of Caracol la Realidad, describes how this education model has been built: “To create autonomous education we had to think if we were going to give the same study plans as the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) or if we were going to change; we decided to change. […] We concluded that we cannot change anything in mathematics, we have to teach it as it is. Another topic like this is reading and writing, nothing could be changed because it is, like, universal. But we did discuss and analyze what content had to be seen in history: we thought that many things had to be changed and we had to choose which things were good for our children and which were not. Like this, we took content out and added our content, including our history as EZLN and the history of other social movements that have taken place in history.” In this sense, one of the main challenges of the Zapatista education system is that, much like the rest of the political project, it exists outside the state. Juridically, the autonomy of the communities is not recognized. One of the implications of this is that their schools are not recognized by the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP).
Zapatistas don’t have only one education model for all communities: each region builds its own program according to its needs and possibilities. The Comisión de Educación is responsible for creating the contents of education programs alongside communities, and Zapatistas create their own pedagogical materials. Education promoters are responsible for the groups they’re part of. They are young people from communities that have been trained to guide students in the collective process of learning. Promoters do not receive a salary, but communities assume the responsibility of supporting them by giving them part of their harvest. In cases where promoters are the main economic pillars of families, they receive enough to keep fulfilling this role. It is also the community that is in charge of providing the necessary materials like notebooks, pencils, and schooling infrastructure. Like all important decisions in Zapatista territory, the content of the classes and the promoters themselves are chosen in assemblies where the community participates. In these spaces, the most active participation is that of families with school-age children, as well as students themselves.
The system encompasses primary and secondary education. At primary level, they focus on reading, writing, math, history, politics, nature, geography, culture, art, sports, health, and agriculture. At secondary level, they organize classes in the following subjects: language and communication, math, natural sciences, social sciences, humanism, tzotzil, and production. In various subjects, children and teenagers analyze their history as Zapatista people, the histories of other social movements, and global realities. Lessons can be given in classrooms or fields, and their calendars are very different from institutionalized education. Children are part of communities and participate in collective tasks, mainly land work, so they can be in school for a month and then return to their community to share the knowledge they have acquired. During their first years, Zapatistas received external support from national and international supporters to develop infrastructure and pedagogical training. Nowadays, they have developed self-management strategies.
Hence, the Zapatista education system has only been possible due to the autonomy they have built.
Their schools not only guarantee cultural and linguistic reproduction (education is bilingual) of the Indigenous communities that participate, but they also reproduce “rebel conscience.”
While each school has particularities according to the practices and capacities of each municipality, community, and Indigenous peoples, all schools and all promoters are articulated within a complex network that makes the Zapatista National Liberation Autonomous Rebel Education System. This system groups together the Zapatista Autonomous Rebel Primary Schools and the Spanish and Mayan Languages Autonomous Rebel Center. The entire education system constitutes one of the pillars of the Zapatista movement. Their education is not just limited to schools, but it also extends to people’s homes, assemblies and during land work. In these different spaces children learn vital knowledge and practices that are important for them to pursue a life with dignity, as part of the resistance and rebellion in place. Subcomandante Moisés said that on the land, the youth “can do measurements to see if he is not falling short; multiply and divide to find out how many plants of maize, tomatoes or potatoes, or whatever plants, are cultivated there, or measuring the extension of the land. Let the child do and see what happens. If he does it, it’s done, if not, next week it can be taught again. It is like this that we make our exams. With us, it is not like, ‘you have five minutes to answer.’ Here, you have all day to answer, if the child does it, there is progress; if not, more teaching has to be done.”
The Zapatista education system has elements of various pedagogies, including Paulo Freire’s concept of education for liberation. We could say its greatest attribute is that it contextualizes and adapts pedagogical resources to the needs and knowledges of communities. And this, as the Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariátegui would say, is an act of heroic creation. Historian and anthropologist André Aubry used to share his experience giving educational support to Zapatista communities. One day, he was trying to set an exam when he saw how students got together as a group to solve the problem he had given them. Used to formal and individualized education, Aubry went on to explain to them that the exam had to be done individually. Surprised, the students replied that in their community problems were solved collectively and therefore, they intended to solve the exam that way.
In this sense, the education of the Zapatistas is not separated from health, culture, economy, family, community, and land: it forms a part of a greater whole which upholds autonomy.
Throughout the years, Zapatistas have launched different educational initiatives like the process of intercultural dialogue during the underground phase, their creation of schools during 2013 and 2014, and the Zapatista National Liberation Autonomous Rebel Education System. However, we cannot pinpoint the rebel education of the Zapatistas to a specific moment in space and time nor to a defined model. It exists in relation to a long term and ongoing process of Indigenous resistance, armed struggle, dialogue and construction of autonomy. This is a process where learning is always happening and in this sense, it needs to be understood as an education that is constantly reinventing itself. ■