Chuj Youth and Educator's Intersectional Decolonial Resistance

• In Event: Theorizing From the Intersections: Understanding Education Policies and Practices Through Critical Feminist Theories

Abstract

The third panelist draws on data from an 18-month ethnography with Maya Chuj youth organizers and educators in Guatemala and United States, to discuss how Chuj youth have worked to challenge and dismantle the contours of the settler colonial project from within and across nation states that are constantly working to eliminate indigenous peoples and knowledges and maintain their power. This paper simultaneously looks at school, community, and youth organizing spaces created for and by Maya Chuj youth in the US and Guatemala to examine how the histories and processes of (re)militarization and corporate extraction interact and shape education, migration processes, and youth’s lives as well as the possibilities for decolonial (re)imaginings.
The paper argues that Chuj youth were in many ways at the epicenter of intersecting modern/colonial processes and structures that permeated their lives, threatened their futures, and informed their resistances. At the same time, Chuj youth refused to be limited by these processes and histories in their imaginings of and efforts towards a future for themselves and their community. Through youth organizing, Chuj youth created educational spaces for and with themselves from which to challenge the colonial knowledges circulating through schools and engage in direct resistance to colonial power structure.
This paper uses a decolonial feminist framework (Lugones, 2003, 2010), which brings together theories of coloniality of power (e.g., Quijano, 2000; Mignolo, 2007) with women of color (e.g., Anzalduá, 1987; Lorde, 1984) and third world feminisms (e.g., Mohanty, 1988, 2003), to make visible the complex interlocking nature of gendered, economic, raced, and colonial systems that are a part of indigenous youth’s lived experiences and highlight the possibilities of resistances. Lugones proposes a “modern, colonial, gender system” lens to theorize “the oppressive logic of colonial modernity” (p. 742). This framework illuminates the need for understanding militarization, corporate extraction, and migration through shared histories of control and domination. At the same time, it makes visible the ways Chuj youth challenged colonial dichotomies and developed an understanding of their own strength and knowledges in the face of racialized capitalist extraction, patriarchal power structures, and colonial logics of elimination and knowing that what is theirs has the power to change these relationships and the world around them. As Mario Felix, a youth organizer, explained, “Let’s make that which is ours flourish, since it is a precious thing… and that is the richness that we have that no company can take away from us.”
With these modern/colonial processes playing out in complex ways across Guatemala and in marginalized communities around the world, Chuj youth’s and educators’ experiences and visions add insights and voice to the critical resistances that are a matter of life, death, survivance, and indigenous futures. Drawing on their experiences and insights, this paper exposes the ways multiple systems of colonial power overlap and intersect and offers possibilities for imagining and being otherwise.

Author

• Alexandra Allweiss, Michigan State University