Elevating the Voices of Maya Youth in Climate Justice Activism

• In Event: Learning From Learners' Voices: Resistance and Transformative Activism Through Liberatory Education

Abstract

Young people have emerged as key voices in the struggle to combat climate change and create livable, just futures. Yet while youth climate organizers aim to center the communities most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, the perspectives of indigenous youth have been largely absent from the public conversation. In this presentation, I report on a youth participatory design research project led by the organization Voces y Manos in a rural Maya community of Guatemala. Taking place in a region that is experiencing the devastating consequences of climate-change fueled drought, the program aimed to create a space where Maya youth could lend their voices to the growing climate justice movement, specifically by exploring how their ancestral knowledge offers strategies for addressing the climate crisis at both local and global scales.

The program was organized around the concept of Buen Vivir (living well), which is often understood as an indigenous, anti-capitalist alternative to Western notions of development. Whereas capitalism understands the good life as the accumulation of material wealth, Buen Vivir emphasizes conviviality and dignified relations among humans and with the natural world. Latin American decolonial theorists Gudynas and Acosta (2011, p. 103) define Buen Vivir as the “opportunity to construct another society based on the coexistence of the human being in diversity and harmony with nature, through the recognition of the cultural values in each country and the world.” Although Buen Vivir has gained rapid notoriety and emerged as a guiding principle of Indigenous social movements throughout Latin America, very little work has examined the potential of Buen Vivir in educational praxis. Thus, the aim of the current presentation is to examine the following questions: (1) how was a pedagogy of Buen Vivir organized to foster youth voices? (2) what meanings of Buen Vivir did youth participants articulate? and (3) what new forms of social action did the pedagogy enable?

The presentation will discuss a set of principles of a pedagogy of Buen Vivir that emerged from Voces y Manos’ participatory design research, as well as videos and other visual artifacts which illustrate the meanings of Buen Vivir that youth participants developed. At a time when calls are mounting to center indigenous ways of knowing, being, and relating in response to the climate crisis, this study offers strategies for fostering the agentic participation of indigenous and marginalized youth in climate justice and other youth-led movements.

Author

• Michael Bakal, University of California - Berkeley