A conversation with leaders from the Mexican Democratic Teachers Movement

Group Submission Type: Pre-conference Workshop

Description of Session

This workshop centers the experiences and stories of Mexican teacher activists in their struggle to transform their public education system. The Mexican Democratic Teachers Movement arose in the late 1970s, as a movement of dissident union members who founded the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (la CNTE). Over the past decades, la CNTE has become one of the most important vehicles for teachers to participate in the governance of their schools. Several leaders of the movement will attend the workshop, and workshop organizers will pose questions to these leaders focusing on three themes: 1) The history of the Democratic Teachers Movement and how teachers have organized under intense political repression; 2) The organizational structure and mobilizing strategies of the movement; 3) Teachers’ opposition to the 2012 Mexican Education Reform Initiatives, their reason for this resistance and the strategies they employ. Translation will be available during for the workshop.

Proposal

Names of Workshop Leaders/Organizers:

Christian A. Bracho is an Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at the University of La Verne, in southern California.
Javier Campos-Martinez holds a PhD in Social Justice Education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Christopher Chambers Ju is a Center for Inter-American Policy & Research postdoc fellow at Tulane University.
Aziz Choudry is associate professor and Canada Research Chair in social movement learning and knowledge production in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University
Mario Novelli is Professor of the Political Economy of Education and Director of the Centre for International Education (CIE) at the University of Sussex.
Rebecca Tarlau is an Assistant Professor of Education and Labor and Employment

Workshop Rationale:

The 2018 CIES Conference Theme, “Re-Mapping Global Education: South-North Dialogue,” is a call to challenge the hierarchies of knowledge and power between the Global North and the Global South. In the spirit of this call to break down traditional hierarchies of power and knowledge, and given the location of CIES 2018 in Mexico City, we are proposing a workshop that centers the experiences and stories of Mexican teacher activists in their struggle to improve and transform the quality of the Mexican public education system.

The Mexican Democratic Teachers Movement arose in the late 1970s, as a movement of dissident union members in southern Mexico, who decided to confront the monopolized power of the National Union of Education Workers (el SNTE), the largest trade union in Mexico. The Party for the Institutionalized Revolution (PRI) founded el SNTE in the 1940s as a form of controlling teachers and their schools. In 1979, dissident union members founded the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (la CNTE), with support from hundreds of thousands of other teachers mostly in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca. In 1989, la CNTE catalyzed a movement of half a million teachers who converged in Mexico City to call for the ousting of one of Mexico’s most notorious labor bosses, Carlos Jonguitud Barrios, a long-time leader of the national teachers union (el SNTE). As Maria Cook (1994) writes, “The very existence of the teachers’ movement—within one of the most traditional of official unions and among the state’s won employees—reflected a crack in the system itself, a loss of control at its center” (p. 9).

Although el SNTE remained a powerful force throughout the 1990s and 2000s, with a new union boss Elba Esther Gordillo coming to power, the Democratic Teachers Movement was able to continue organizing in several states, through both legal and extralegal organizing. The values of democratic organizing and autonomy from political parties were key strategies in these organizing efforts. This meant a constant transition in union leadership, a rejection of political party influence, and mass assemblies of teachers that allowed for a monthly process of “consulta a la Base”—consulting teachers at the base of the movement. In 2006, the Democratic Teachers Movement burst into global consciousness once again, when the Mexican state repressed and killed dozens of teachers who were protesting in the state of Oaxaca. Since 2012, after the election of President Enrique Peña Nieto, these dissident teachers have been at the forefront of yet another controversy: resistance to a new national educational reform effort, which many teachers perceive as a labor reform that reduces the teachers’ collective power. The Mexican government, however, claims that this reform is critical to eliminating the entrenched corruption in the public education system.

This workshop will be a conversation and debate with several leaders from the Democratic Teachers Movement in the states of Oaxaca and Michoacán. Workshop organizers include six long-time CIES members, including three people who have done extensive research on Mexican teachers unions (Christian Bracho, Christopher Chambers, Rebecca Tarlau), a researcher of the Chilean teachers movement (Javier Campos), and two researchers of social movements, education, and learning more broadly (Mario Novelli and Aziz Choudry). The workshop will be structured in three parts, each 1-hour long, with two workshop organizers posing questions and facilitating the discussion with the Mexican teachers during each thematic discussion. These three parts, which encompass the learning objectives of the session, include:

1) The history of the Democratic Teachers Movement, also known as the Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (la CNTE), and in particular, how teachers were able to organize periods of intense political repression.
2) The organizational structure and mobilizing strategy of the movement, in particular, how the union leaders maintain their connection to teachers and communities.
3) The 2012 Education Reform Efforts and why teachers in this movement oppose the reforms, the strategies they are using to combat these initiatives, and the links the movement has made with other teachers that face similar reform efforts in other global contexts.

This workshop is an opportunity for CIES members to hear first-hand from Mexican teacher leaders that have been part of an important and powerful education movement. The location of CIES 2018 in Mexico City is an ideal opportunity to organize this conversation. Furthermore, through a facilitated discussion with CIES members that research and write about social movements and unions, the workshop will draw connections between the experiences and stories of these teacher union leaders and the pertinent questions in CIES field.

Duration and Size: The workshop will include around 25 participants and will last three hours.

Sub Unit

• Pre-Conference Workshops

Workshop Organizers

• Rebecca Tarlau, Penn State University

• Christian A. Bracho, University of La Verne

• Javier Martin Campos, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Christopher Chambers-Ju, Tulane University

• Aziz Choudry, McGill University

• Mario Novelli, Centre for International Education, University of Sussex