During this autumn we will continue to re-publish pieces from Urgent Pedagogies Archive. With this interview we honor the memory of the writer, researcher and social activist Gustavo Esteva, who sadly passed away in 2022.

From the Archive re-surfaces pieces that have previously been published as part of Urgent Pedagogies Issues.

Gustavo Esteva at Universidad de la Tierra, Oaxaca. Still from Re-learning Hope: A Story of Unitierra, a film by Udi Mandel and Kelly Teamey.

Building spaces for learning together in freedom

Interview with Gustavo Esteva by Magnus Ericson
and Pelin Tan

Gustavo Esteva discusses the urgency and needs of Universidad de la Tierra /Unitierra (University of the Earth) – which is an autonomous university and an alliance of collectivities engaged in learning through action, based in Oaxaca. From his ideas and long experience in how to create spaces for learning, he explains a decolonial attempt of an urgent pedagogical initiative that fights for indigenous people’s rights.

Universidad de la Tierra /Unitierra (University of the Earth)  is an autonomous university and an alliance of collectivities engaged in learning through action, based in Oaxaca, Mexico. It attempts to respond to the recognition, particularly among indigenous peoples, that the dominant state-supported educational structure prevented children from learning what they needed to know to continue living in their communities and contributing to the common good of their communities and the sustainability of their territories.

Magnus Ericson:  To give us a background, can you tell us a little how Universidad de la Tierra or Unitierra was founded and how it all started?

Gustavo Esteva: Well, we were born as an expression of social struggle and we are still associated with social struggle. In 1997 at the Indigenous Forum of Oaxaca – Oaxaca is the state where I live and where the majority of the population are indigenous people – a public declaration was presented after a year of discussions. It claimed that the school has been the main tool of the state to destroy the indigenous people. And they were just reclaiming a historical truth; education in Mexico was created in the 19th century to de-Indianize the Indians. And in a very real sense they succeeded, millions of people entered the system as indigenous people and came out as citizens of fourth or fifth category but no longer indigenous people. Then the indigenous people of Oaxaca were saying basta! enough! We don’t want more of that! And they started to close the schools and kick the teachers out.

You can imagine the scandal, and the front page in the papers were saying “they are barbarians, this is not possible! We cannot allow this to happen!” And there was a lot of political and economic pressure on them, but some persisted and kept their schools closed. Then, a good anthropologist decided to teach the parents a lesson and he produced some tests to compare children going to school with those not going to school. And to his surprise, and the surprise of many people, he discovered that the children not going to school, of course, knew everything about the community, how to live in the community, the meal plan and everything. But they also knew better than the other children about what their schools supposedly should be teaching, for example, reading, writing, arithmetic, and they were even able to answer the questions about geography or history.

This was a really great surprise, but of course the communities were very, very happy with this outcome. The same communities were really enjoying this opportunity for the children to learn in a different way, came to us with their concerns. What will happen with the young men and women, once they learn everything they can learn in the community, but are still interested in learning more? Since they don’t have any diploma or any certification of their studies, they will not be able to continue their studies.

So then, with them and for them we created the Universidad de la Tierra. It is a coalition of indigenous and non-indigenous organizations. Jaime Martínez Luna, a brilliant Zapotec intellectual, gave us our name. He said that this university should keep its feet on the ground and on the earth, and it should care about Mother Earth.

We adopted the principle of learning by doing, meaning we don’t have teachers, we don’t have curricula, we don’t have classrooms. We learn by doing whatever we want to learn with someone doing that, with someone who knows how to do that, and is ready to share what she or he knows with other people. We are not involved in any form of professional formation, because we find the professions counterproductive. Basically, all the professionals disqualify the wisdom, the knowledge and the abilities of normal people. We are trying to de-professionalize ourselves. We don’t have a political agenda, we take on the political agenda of the social movements in Oaxaca and we follow what they want to do, what they want to learn, and what they want to create. This is how we have been working now for 20 years, following that path and learning many things from the communities and from the young men and women who come to learn with us.