Building communal education in Oaxaca

Painting © Yohali Gutiérrez Estrada @iohaliesstrada.

Interview • Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar • May 30, 2024 • Leer en castellano

The Autonomous Communal University of Oaxaca (UACO) is a grassroots initiative that aims to change how public education works in Mexico. The idea of launching a communitarian university became reality through assemblies and long term organizing in Indigenous communities. 

Since its founding in 2000, it has grown to more than 1,000 students and dozens of facilitators, as the professors are called. Today the UACO offers bachelor’s and master’s degree programs, and there are 16 Communal University Centers (CUC) that operate according to community principles in each location.

Building the UACO is a work in progress. Those involved continue to debate the big issues, such as teaching and learning processes, methods of evaluation (grading) the central pillars of its core educational principles, including how the commons and communality are defined. Students undertake participatory, community focused projects, and later hand in a written assignment in which they describe what they have learned through their efforts.

Since Oaxaca’s state congress decreed the Organic University Law in April of 2020, the UACO has faced a series of legal hurdles. At the end of 2023, after a drawn out legal process, the state of Oaxaca reaffirmed its support for the university but imposed some limits on its autonomy. 

At the end of April, we sat down with Ursula Hernández, one of the co-founders of CUC-Valles Centrales, which is located in Hacienda Blanca, San Pablo Etla, outside of Oaxaca City. Hernández, who was previously a student of mine, now works as an academic advisor to CUC-Valles Centrales. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity before being translated into English.

Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar: Can you tell us a little about the philosophy that guides the UACO?

Ursula Hernández: We believe that education should be a deeply transformational experience that not only helps students acquire knowledge but also helps them question their own experience, as well as reflect critically on how we live.

There is support from the communitarian structures for the idea that we need to create our own pedagogical practices.

Official recognition and our ability to grant bachelor and masters’ degrees means that our educational work is authorized institutionally, but there is another kind of logic at work within the UACO. We see this reflected in different facets of the work, including in the positionality of the person who is in charge of the classroom and who teaches. There is no teacher as such; those who lead the classroom are more like facilitators supporting a process of collective learning.

In the case of Valles Centrales, the two calls for applications for the bachelor’s degree programs went out to older people, who had previously abandoned their studies for various reasons. For the master's degrees, many of the students are elementary school teachers.

Our starting point is the idea that each person has knowledge to share, and with which we can collectively educate ourselves.

Jaime Martínez Luna [the first dean of the UACO] is among our most important theoretical references on communality. Interesting spaces for reflection are also beginning to emerge today. For example, in the CUC-Tlaxiaco there is a Center for Communal Research of the Indigenous Peoples of Oaxaca. Super important reflections are emerging in each CUC. This has a lot to do with the context in each locality.  

In the case of Valles Centrales, we study and practice communality in the context of the city, of urbanization. We ask ourselves different questions in order to understand communality in an urban setting. And there is no consensus about its meaning.

We work a lot with the notion of the four pillars of communality, which are: work, celebration, territory and organization. These are the foundations upon which communal governance rests.

We created a master's degree in communality in order to encourage systematic reflection on our collective experience.

RGA: Can you tell us how studying at UACO helps students connect with other types of knowledge?

UH: Several times when I’ve been taking part in a class, someone will begin speaking about their grandparents and then start to cry. They’ll break down and say: “Oh, I’ve tried to leave this behind, to hide this for so long.” Because there’s this idea that, when you study, you have to leave behind these forms of knowledge and experience, which tend not to be valued. That’s what “progress” and “development” mean in many educational contexts, but that’s not how it works here. 

To these students, we’d say: “Well, what we are trying to work on here is just that, to figure out what knowledge is necessary and relevant for us.” This often provokes a lot of feelings for the compañeros. I’ve seen that happen many times.

In my case, my maternal grandparents migrated [to Oaxaca City] from a community nearby. My mother grew up there and although she has lived in Oaxaca City for many years, she always talks about the village.

I have never lived in the village, I’m from the city; I go there sometimes, but I don't live there. It’s like a kind of root that forms you, and sometimes you don't even realize that it’s there. 

That's what you discover and put into relief. You resignify what you know. Many times you don't even recognize it yourself or what it is that’s shaped you. 

Some of this reflection and rooting work is done in classrooms here in Valles Centrales. CUC-Valles is very diverse; there are compañeros who have histories of migration, others who were born in Oaxaca City, and others who live in communities. The compañeros who are from or live in communities and are part of the CUC-Valles bring a different set of questions to the table.

Our work is not about learning by rote. No one is going to tell you, “Chomsky said such and such.” But they will tell you, "I'm in a different place, I'm looking at things differently, I'm thinking about my classroom with the students in a different way. I'm naming things differently.” The relationships with their environments also change.

RGA: Could you give us an example of a student project at the UACO?

UH: There is a student who is currently doing his master's degree in communal education. He’s from Santo Tomás Mazaltepec. He invited us to his community when they were about to start planting and they showed us how they do it, the ritual and the work. Together with his family, we sowed the seeds. At that time, they were sowing seeds of the cresta de gallo flower, which is used during the Day of the Dead. 

We helped with planting and a friend of his, who is from a collective in the community, came over and explained aspects of their lives there—their knowledge of the clouds and the territory and its history. 

So they gave us a class and we planted seeds in return. We went back three months later and harvested the flowers, which were used to create the altar for the Day of the Dead on November 1 in Hacienda Blanca. 

This learning and these exchanges take place over an extended period of time. The student worked with this idea and learned to ask himself new questions, and think about it in a different light.

Each student carries out their project and from there produces a written text that reflects on a broad set of activities. We refer to this as “organizing experience.”

RGA: In closing, we would like to know what has surprised you about your experience at UACO?

UH: It has been moving for me to think that we can learn in a different way, and not only from texts, as much as I love the theoretical part.

Years ago, when my grandfather was alive, he told me that in the town where he lived—which was inside a plantation—they used to say that when the landowner left after land redistribution that people went hungry because they were so used to being told what to do. “That's what they said, until we undid the idea that the boss was going to tell us what to do,” he said. 

I believe that this is part of our process. No one is going to tell you how things work or what to expect. There is no one right way of doing things. We have to build it together.