"Youth should be the change in their society”: Chuj Youth Organizing Educational Efforts and (Re)imaginings

• In Event: Shaping Educational Change in Latin America and the Caribbean

Proposal

Malxun (pseudonym), a Maya Chuj youth organizer, educator, and school principal, told me, “I think that… we have gotten people to believe that the youth should be the change in their society,” when I asked her to reflect on her work in the school and youth organizing spaces. Across both of these spaces, Malxun saw and centered possibilities for Chuj and youth centered approaches grounded in the experiences and knowledge of Chuj young people.

This paper centers the experiences and frameworks used by Maya Chuj youth organizers as they moved into formal schools. In particular, it focuses on the experiences and insights from Malxun, who had been a youth organizer for years before becoming a teacher and then principal at B’eyb’al Komam Kicham (The Path of Our Ancestors) Cooperative Secondary School (pseudonym), in Xantin (pseudonym), Guatemala. Drawing on the framework of decolonial feminisms (Lugones, 2003, 2010), this paper highlights the creativity of Chuj educators and youth in challenging the colonial histories and structures of formal schooling and the possibilities of a more community- and Indigenous youth-based model.

Decolonial feminisms offer a lens for exposing the interconnections of gender, economic, race, and colonial systems and centering resistances and (re)imaginings developed by those directly impacted by modernity/coloniality (Lugones, 2007, 2010). These theories make clear the ways modernity and coloniality are inextricably linked (Quijano, 2000; Mignolo, 2011) and aim to disrupt racialized gender colonial violence and work toward an “otherwise” not beholden to modernity/coloniality (Andreotti, 2021).

The findings presented in this paper are from a larger 18-month transnational ethnographic study with Maya Chuj youth organizers and educators in the United States and Guatemala. Methods included participant observations, 92 individual interviews, focus group discussions, and classroom observations. Over the course of 18 months, I engaged with six different youth organizations and three different secondary schools to explore education and community (re)imaginings and efforts for transformation.

To do so, this paper draws on, brings together, and contributes to scholarship on youth organizing and teacher activism that look at how schools can be oppressive spaces for youth and the efforts of young people, communities, and educators to transform them (e.g., Author, 2018; Chang & Gamez, 2022; Moya, 2017; Myers, 2007; Tarlau, 2019). This paper seeks to build on and contribute to the literature that works to bridge the gap between in and out of school spaces and knowledges (e.g., Baldridge et al, 2017) by showing what was possible in a school that recognized and drew on the experiences, frameworks, and commitments of community-based organizations—in particular, Indigenous youth-based organizations—and youth to create more youth- and community-centered and decolonizing curricula and practices. Historically, formal schools were imposed on Indigenous communities as part of the colonial, imperial project aimed at undermining local knowledges, privileging colonial ways of knowing and being, and solidifying colonial global power and positioning (Author, 2018; Batz, 2019; Grande, 2004; Mignolo, 2010; Montejo, 2005). This paper is grounded in the recognition that schools represent as a fraught site from which to work towards rebuilding and decolonizing community relationships (Bang, 2018) and centers efforts to (re)imagine education from an Indigenous youth-centered perspective informed by the models and lessons learned from Chuj youth-led organizing efforts.

I discuss how for students, educators, and community members, schools were both sites of de/colonial concern and possibility; while schools remain spaces of violence and colonial imposition, they were also spaces through which Chuj young people were working to imagine a future for themselves and their community. Findings show how Malxun drew on organizing frameworks to transform education for and with youth within the constraints of formal schooling through (1) transformations to the role and voice of the student government and (2) project-based curricular changes. Malxun saw the school government as a way to highlight youth’s abilities to be leaders and facilitate change within their school community and the curricular approach as one that could more deeply connect the school with the community and Chuj knowledges. Student leaders had opportunities to support and engage in curricular design and school decisions, which Malxun saw as central to challenging the imposed hierarchies of colonial schooling. At the same time, the curricular changes challenged entrenched modern/colonial boundaries between the school and the community.

Overall, this paper shares efforts to (re)imagine education from an Indigenous youth-centered perspective informed by the models and lessons learned from Chuj youth-led organizing efforts. Malxun is an example of what is possible when community-based organizing and formal schooling come together to challenge modern/colonial institutions and the power of organizing experiences in transforming formal schooling for youth. Her work suggests that this type of community organizing experience should be valued in school leadership and education. I connect this with efforts of other Chuj administrators, educators, and students to show the possibilities and urgency of engaging in creative disruptions of modern/colonial processes in schools. In particular, and line with this year’s CIES theme, “education in a digital society,” I connect these findings with the ways youth organizers have taken the lessons from organizing and calls for educational transformation for and with Chuj people to imagine a transnational virtual organizing and digital space of curricular co-creation to disrupt ongoing processes of Indigenous erasure in and through schools in both Guatemala and in the diaspora in the United States.

Author

• Alexandra Allweiss, Michigan State University