Unsettled by Land and Water: Needing to Learn From Decolonial Partnerships in Mexico

• In Event: Love and Loss of Land and Language: Reciprocity With the Earth in Language Education

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
We use auto-ethnographic perspectives to participate in language teacher preparation conversations about how educators can help decolonize society and rejoin in reciprocity with the earth through their work. Two relationship-building visits to two Mexican states profoundly impacted our thinking and serve as the original sources of our reflection.

Theoretical framework
Many non-indigenous people are coming to recognize the need to engage and foster indigenous knowledge in the world toward both supporting indigenous communities (Four Arrows, 2016). We take a decolonization approach (Mignolo, 2005; Smith, 2013) toward recognizing interdependence among all living things (Cajete, 2000) and the situated knowledges of indigenous communities (Bonfil Batalla, 2007; Urrieta, 2013).

Methods and data sources
Our work is critically auto-ethnographic (Boylorn & Orbe, 2013). Memory, conversation, and rigorous field notes informed our theorizing about trips that were designed with the purpose of building partnerships for future study abroad programs and science education preparation experiences. In Veracruz in June of 2019, we were guests of the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural, a university catering to the local indigenous knowledge community. This encounter with Totonaca and Nahua knowledge systems was part of a 2019 pilot program of ten Southwestern U.S. public school teachers who learned from and with indigenous elders and undergraduates. In Oaxaca in February of 2020, we were guests of Universidad de la Tierra, a center for radical thought and activism. This visit included encounters with local Zapotec and mestizo communities and schools seeking alternatives to neocolonial and destructive schooling, land uses, and social hierarchies.

Results/reconceptualizations
Theme One: Slowed water as a metaphor for deeper learning. Near Oaxaca city, we were guided through a steep plot of land that had been turned into a space to demonstrate permaculture or sustainable land use. The way the land had been used by humans had simply made the water move too quickly across it, and the land was reconfigured in many ways to slow the water down so that it would linger and soak in, allowing the ravine to flourish in ways it hadn’t in quite some time despite a drying climate. We came to see that this could symbolize how our activist guides explained problems and alternatives in education. We have eroded and denuded the preparation of the next generation with our institutionalization of learning via schooling and its torrent of information.
Theme Two: Guestliness as a metaphor for inhabiting the earth. Here we respond to Esteva and Prakash’s (2014) concept of the hospitality of the Global South. We use lived experiences to contemplate what it means to be the Global Northerner seeking to receive that hospitality with the reciprocity and right relationship that it deserves. This guestliness of the privileged in turn becomes a metaphor for the guestliness with which the human part of nature ought to resume inhabiting the earth.

Scholarly significance
We provide new conceptualizations and suggestions for how to consider building lasting relationships across disparate communities in efforts to decolonize transnational collaborations.

Authors

• Garrett Delavan, Georgia State University

• Sara Itzel Barreira Arcos, Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural, Espinal

• G. Sue Kasun, Georgia State University

• Angelica Hernandez Vasquez, Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural, Grandes Montanas

• Ana Carolina Granados, New Mexico State University