Strategies for Building Real Educational Utopias in Brazil and Mexico

• In Event: Education Activism as Affirmative Resistance: Examples of Real Educational Utopias Through and Outside the State

Proposal

Globally, one of the most divisive debates for social movement activists is how to engage their respective states. Often pejoratively described as a choice between “reformism” versus “radicalism,” activists who garner a degree of power and recognition through collective action must make many complex choices. Do you take resources from the state and risk co-optation? Do you reject state resources and forfeit a means to support the material needs of communities in struggle? Do you prioritize taking state power over contentious politics, either by running for electoral politics or through the co-governance of state institutions?
In this paper, I argue that Latin American social movements have developed different strategies for engaging Latin American states because the states themselves and these states’ strategies to control social movements are often radically different. I draw on my research with the São Paulo teachers’ union (APEOESP), Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST), and the Oaxacan dissident teachers’ union (Local 22-CNTE), as well as secondary research on Mexico’s Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) to show what social movement strategies looks like across national contexts, and how these strategies influence education. Importantly, in Brazil APEOESP and the MST have many more similarities in terms of their relationship to the Brazilian state than they do with their teacher union and agrarian counterparts in Mexico. Similarly, Local 22-CNTE and the EZLN have more strategies in common with each other than they have with the Brazilian movements. I argue that this is due to the respective state contexts, which directly shaped the strategies of diverse labor and social movements in both countries. However, within these different national contexts there are also possibilities for local agency, as we can see by also identifying the intra-country differences between these movements. These different strategies have direct implications for education, as some movements choose to influence education through electoral politics and policy reforms, while others attempt to co-govern schools with state officials or wield direct power within public schools without the mediation of the government. Other social movements have chosen to reject the public education sphere and instead set up their own autonomous schools completely independent of and run in parallel to the state’s public school system.
This paper suggests that there is not one best social movement or union strategy, but rather, activists must make choices about how to engage the state based on their lived experiences of state-society relations and their geographical and historical contexts. Thus, the paper illustrates the need to move beyond dichotomous descriptions of social movement-state relations such as radical versus reformist, autonomist versus institutionalist, collaborative versus cooptation, and instead, analyze the historical and contextual reasons for the diversity of movement strategies in relationship to the diversity of Latin American states.

Author

• Rebecca Tarlau, Stanford University