Where is Oaxaca
Oaxaca
Friends In Oaxaca
Here in Oaxaca I think I know more local young ones than older ones. Of course it helps that the younger locals often speak English even if just a little and between my Spanish and their English we do fine. And they are happy to practice English. In fact yesterday 4 young art students came to study using my free wifi. I gave them some beer and put on some New Zealand reggaton. It made them happy. And we practiced speaking a bit.
It’s really interesting to be able to get young views of Mexican culture vis a vis the different generations here. And what they think about Mexico and the hopes and fears they have for themselves in the future. Being young they are more open to discussing the more controversial aspects of the culture and the politics here with someone they feel safe with. I try to be as explicitly unbiased as I can and just listen.
Most of the younger ones I know are really into self-sufficiency. There is a round table at the Universidad de la Tierra that was established by Gustavo Esteva each week. A few years ago, he took about 25 students to four countries for a year…to study local self sufficiency methods…Thailand, New Zealand, Tanzania and the last being Oaxaca. And to stand their patronizing do-good mind set on it’s head. One girl from Texas I hosted almost had a breakdown on the program because it confronted her whole do-good world view. We spent hours debriefing. A couple years later she returned to Oaxaca with her Caribbean boyfriend and they stayed with me. Another one on the program was Malaysian who had been going to school in Maine and I got to stay with her and her parents in Kuala Lumpur and even meet her Chinese grandparents who had been quarantined during the war by the Japanese. I didn’t even know about the Japanese in Malaysia during the war!!!
Meeting those kids, because I hosted some of them through Couchsurfing, was so enriching because I already had been reading about the work that Gustavo and Ivan Ilych did together on “unschooling” when Ivan was still alive. Gustavo is in his 80’s now and not well so you don’t see much of him around. He has written extensively.
Gustavo has had a most interesting trajectory. Grew up in a Zapotec family in the Etlas in Oaxaca. Got a good education. Studied at Harvard. Worked as an exec for Coca Cola, got a high up job in the Mex govt…then one day he went back to visit his Zapotec grandmother and saw clearly for the first time how integrated or not the culture was with their economic survival in a neoliberal world. He did a 180 and has been fighting neoliberalism ever since. And opened Universidad de la Tierra in Reforma focusing on self sufficiency.
Why I Prefer Oaxaca
We expats are finding what we did not find “at home.” Much like the hippies did in the 60’s. I retired in 2002, traveled for 5 years, went back “home” for 2 months and was bored to tears. Most of my friends had moved on (or I had moved on). I was just going back and forth between the computer and the TV. I thought, I could just die here in this chair! Where are you going to go…the mall? Similarly, my son married a Thai who was used to colorful life on the streets and brought her to the states on a 3 month tourist visa to see how she would like it. She hated it and went back a month early. I understood completely. Many of the comments I hear here I also hear from expats in Thailand.
As for why I am here and not somewhere else…I lived with a Mex-American family for 4 years of high school and then worked on behalf of the migrant community for 30 years…most of whom were from Oaxaca and for the last 10 years developed and administered a violence prevention/alternative ed program for Latino high school dropouts. I loved the families we were working with from Oaxaca and mentored several of the girls from the Mixteco. I wanted to come see the culture where they all were from and what made them who they are. 10 years later I am happily still here. But it is sad that we cannot find an authentic culture at home and have to “borrow” someone else’s.
Why I Host Strangers
I’m all for volunteering but I spent half my life doing it so I’m kind of od’d on it. Hosting through Couchsurfing and other hospitality sites is a kind of volunteering with my time and money but I get more back from it. And I don’t have to negotiate anything with anyone except my guests! 😉
Being travelers and interested in new experiences and cross cultural understanding, we are usually on the same page even as different as they are from me. In fact the more different the better. And the older ones have a perspective the young ones don’t have.
I recently hosted Annarita, 60, an Italian who has been living in France for years and who shared her perspective on the Euro situation just before the election there. And being an observer here for 10 years they are usually interested to hear about an outside view of the political situation here. The rest is up to them.
I usually share my videos of the 2006 uprising. It gives them a bit of a different perspective as they walk around the city among the locals. And of course being an expat I try to introduce them to as many locals as I can even if it’s just someone they can go clubbing with. And I get to follow half of them on FB afterward. I’m still messaging with guests I hosted years ago.
Hitchhikers Found Me!
Two Italians and a Pole. Anna and one of the Italians hitched a boat across the Atlantic! This is the 2nd I’ve had who did this. The first was a Brazilian.
An Expat’s View Of The Struggle In Oaxaca
The government has (since the 1968 slaughter of students in Mexico City) hired “students” who sign up for university but don’t go to school to infiltrate and instigate trouble in order to turn the populace against theteachers. They are called “porros” and they do most of the damage like molotov cocktails, slingshots, burning of cars and buses and graffiti. That’s not to say that some more radical teachers don’t participate in that stuff but I don’t think most of the teachers do.
I know the union is really corrupt and they coerce the teachers and their relatives and friends to march aided by the more radical teachers. Parents are suppose to get a pkg of goods (forgot what it’s called in Spanish) regularly as long as they participate in anti govt activities. The teachers have to sign off on it. But if the parent isn’t participating the teacher won’t sign off.
That’s not to say of course that most of the teachers and parents don’t support the strikes. Also when the Union was handling the salaries teachers wouldn’t get paid if they didn’t participate in strike activities. Now the Govt has taken over the administration of Section 22 of the Union and is handing out salaries.
The governor here in Oaxaca has tried to clean out the union. Months ago they confiscated computers, and several brand new pickups belonging to the Section 22 Union. Recently they arrested 2 of the leaders…one for embezzlement and the other for stealing textbooks. The textbooks were taken by Sec 22 because they were supposed to go a rival union section, section 59. Section 59 was started by a couple hundred teachers who objected to Sec 22. But that wasn’t reported. I think I read that that guy was released on bail.
Then there are practices that people object to. Like teachers can sell their certificates to someone else or hand them down to family members. Sometimes these people aren’t even educated beyond the 3rd grade.
On the Expats in Oaxaca FB group an American woman who is married to a Mexican, and who lives in a small village in the mountains (didn’t say which village) and has 3 children in a school there posted this:
“The Reforma Educativa, has various issues, essentially, it is an ADMINISTRATIVE reform, in regarding job conditions for school teachers and fails to talk about curriculum or anything at all that happens in the classrooms.. Public primary school teachers are not well paid, but have always had a very generous benefits package to make up for it, which includes many things most foreigners, myself included, would find ridiculous, like the right to leave your position to one of your children or sell it when you retire. (That was based on the idea that if you were a business owner you’d do the same, so to make teaching an attractive career in earlier times they included some sort of building up capital for your children into it) So this reform basically makes teachers like temp contract workers, who can be fired at anytime are no longer building up seniority and yes, one of the conditions is all the teachers will be forced to pass an exam in order to keep their positions. There is a ton of mis information flying around on either side. There is a ton of corruption in the teachers union leadership, so neither side is innocent. But the vast majority of public primary school in the state would make you cry when you walk in, I know they make me cry, even some that are considered among the best.”
“The Battle Has Just Started!” Gustavo Esteva
There are 21 blockades all of the state’s eight regions and they have cut off the movement of goods from Mexico City and the states of Puebla, Veracruz, Chiapas and Guerrero. Transport trucks and buses have been denied passage and in some cases, such as Nochixtlán, where violence at a blockade took up to 12 lives on Sunday, passenger cars were being allowed to pass but only after an inspection.
Why Oaxaca Teachers Are Striking Again
Information has been updated with 12 dead, 27 detained, at least 7 disappeared, 100 injured
Laura Carlson of the Center for International Policy says that Oaxacan teachers are protesting not only teacher evaluations, but also the entirety of neoliberal reform under Pena Nieto.
For the last 40 years the teachers and other segments of society in Oaxaca have been rising up against the neoliberal economic model of privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy.
They are rising against President Pena Nieto who is trying to impose an economic model, which in the U.S., begun by the failed trickle-down theory of President Reagan, resulted in the rise of the financial oligarchy and financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing Occupy Movement, and in much of the rest of the industrialized world resulting in the anti-austerity movements there.
Laura explains:
OAXACA EN GUERRA
OAXACA EN GUERRA OAXACA, Oax. 19 de junio de 2016. – YouTube.
Teachers have been striking in Oaxaca for the last 34 years. This year. so far, 21 barricades have been set up by the teachers in all of the state’s eight regions and have cut off the movement of goods from Mexico City and the states of Puebla, Veracruz, Chiapas and Guerrero. Transport trucks and buses have been denied passage. Passenger cars were being allowed to pass but only after an inspection.
Police, in trying to remove the barricade at Notchitlan, killed 12 people on Sunday June 19.
An Expat Joke
One night, David Ben Gurion dreams that he is dead. God says “you’re David Ben Gurion! What can I do for you?”
And Ben Gurion says “Show me heaven” and it’s very dull. People standing on clouds, meditating, nothing going on. So then he says “OK, show me hell”. And it’s great! Interesting conversations, great food, music, everything!.
So, a few years later he actually does die and, just like in the dream, God asks what he can do for Ben Gurion.
“I’ll take hell.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes”
It’s horrible! Horrendously hot, endless work, no water, no food…. awful. So he goes to complain
“I saw this in a dream and it was wonderful! What’s going on?”
and God says
“Then you were a tourist. Now, you live here”.
Laughingnomad 