The teachers are back, and nobody is happy

It is a new season. The rains have come, and with them, relief from the hot, dusty, forest-fire-smoke-laden air that we leave Oaxaca to avoid every year in early April. As we begin to wind up our annual trek to “El Norte,” we look forward to the clean, rain-washed air of our adopted city, and hope that by the time we get home the teachers will be gone.

As of today (May 28), the annual occupation of the streets around the Zocalo has been in full swing for eight days. Spearheaded by Section 22 (Oaxaca state) of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de Educacion (SNTE: National Education Workers’ Union), perhaps the most militant component of the national union, the occupiers have hammered nails into the green stone of buildings that have fronted the city’s central square for centuries to support their plastic tarps; spray-painted slogans on virtually every surface; blocked entry to restaurants, stores and public buildings with their sitting and reclining bodies; and mustered “flying squads” to blockade main entries to the city, gas stations, and banks.

At issue is a laundry list of demands as long as the eighty-some years since the Revolution of 1910 concluded with guarantees of democracy, equality and worker control of the schools—nearly a century of broken promises, authoritarian repression of dissent, and martyrdom of educators.

If you were an actuary, you would charge a large premium on life insurance for teachers, particularly in the remote areas of the country. Almost all the educators in the “outback”—and Mexico has a lot of mountainous areas where one must walk for hours from the spot where the road ends to get to a rural school—are young people doing their government service as “barefoot teachers” or new graduates from teachers’ colleges. Once they reach the village, they must find a family with room for their hammock. They usually make arrangements to share food with someone. The classroom is someone’s front porch, and if they want a blackboard, books, paper, pencils, etc., they must carry them in on their backs.

The villagers, mostly unable to read or write, speak Spanish as a second language, if at all. They are in a constant and desperate—and often losing—struggle for survival, and can only spare their children, busy working in the fields or the forest, for a few hours every day. Many have never been out of the village, and most have never been further than the next larger town down the path. They know little of world affairs, but they have intimate knowledge of the crushing reality of their lives, and they aren’t about to listen to the kind of colonialized baloney the government wants fed to them.

The teacher, like the priest and the policeman, is an authority figure, and like them is expected to tell the truth. Unfortunately, the truth is often in conflict with the desires of the local landowner, whose control of the resources and desire for profits is often the cause of the people’s discomfort. The villagers know this, but they don’t know what to do about it. They turn to the teacher. If the teacher feeds them baloney, their kids just stop coming to school. If the teacher helps them to organize, the pistoleros come around. More teachers are killed every year in Oaxaca than are policemen operating in the line of duty.

Most of the leaders in Section 22 are veterans of this situation. They have been radicalized by their experience, and angered by what they see as marginalization and mistreatment of educational needs by their government. They bring this anger to Oaxaca, and rub it in the noses of my neighbors. How, they ask, can you go on doing business as usual, when there are not enough books, or teachers in the schools? When “free education” means that students’ families have less to eat, in order to afford writing paper, bus fare, and uniforms (required)?

Why, they ask, does the “civilian sector” not support them when they demand, year after year, that the government at least fulfill the promises they made to end the strike last year? How can president Vicente Fox’s government spend money on troops helping the United States to prevent Mexicans from crossing the border for work, and cut back on hot lunches (often the only meal of the day) for elementary students?

Faced with an unrelenting attack from the media and the powerful business interests (most of the big hotels and restaurants are owned by people living in Mexico City and Monterey), they continue to disrupt and demonstrate, to blockade and to educate, while a growing number of Oaxacans become less tolerant of them and their tactics. In a city where so many live from day to day, a blocked road can mean no dinner on the table. Blockaded restaurants often mean waiters and cooks laid off—and there is no unemployment insurance in Mexico.

This year, for the first time, Francisco Toledo, enfant terrible of Oaxaca’s art scene, weighed in against the teachers. Toledo, who has used of much of the millions earned from the sale of his paintings to restore old buildings to public use, is from Juchitan, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (the spot where the country narrows). Juchitan is considered to be among the most radical areas of the whole country. Toledo is identified as a progressive. His campaign to keep McDonald’s from opening a store on the Zocalo was couched in anti-globalist rhetoric. Yesterday, he urged “caution” and respect for the rights of others on the teachers, even while he identified the government’s unwillingness to negotiate in good faith as at heart of the problem. That Toledo would be moved to intervene indicates how unhappy our fellow citizens are with the occupation.

As foreigners we can’t get involved in local politics, under penalty of deportation. We can, and do, point out the realities of the teachers’ situation to our fellow gringos, both tourist and expatriate, when they complain that the occupation is “ugly” or that it interferes with their pursuit of a quiet cafe latte on the Zocalo. We can, and do, put a few pesos in one of the cans being passed around in search of money for printing, tortillas, and gasoline. And, I confess, we occasionally find ourselves wishing that the whole business would resolve itself so that we could have “our” Zocalo back again.

Stan Gotlieb maintains a Web site at http://www.realoaxaca.com and can be reached by e-mail at stan@realoaxaca.com. Check out the paid-subscription—only Oaxaca / Mexico Newsletter, a sample of which is posted to the Web site.