Tearing Down the Walls of Education

Students at the Chan Santa Cruz program in Mexico are getting their degrees in Bilingual Education (Maya/Spanish) and Historical and Cultural Heritage in Mexico. The community is not one to conform to the conditions imposed on the Maya by the Spanish conquistadors, the settler colonialists from centuries past, nor the neo-liberal champions of today.

A small group of us (two Maya visionaries from Chan Santa Cruz, a professor from Jalisco and a teacher from New York City) have founded a “civil association,” Poopolil’ T’aan, to support schools and teachers in the area. Attention and resources from the State Education Department of Quintana Roo or federal government are limited, and we ask teachers and school leaders to identify areas that would benefit them and their students. This might include materials, financial resources, and professional development. In the spring of 2025, we conducted a workshop at the
Chan Santa Cruz site, a center with 10 professors and 500 students who range in age from 19 to 60.

The workshop was hosted by the program at the Universidad Bienestar Benito Juarez (UBBJ) in the town of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the heart of Maya culture and history in the Yucatan. The network of Bienestar Benito Juárez colleges, initiated by the Mexican federal government in 24 states in 2019, offers a tuition-free education for working-class citizens who have not previously attended, or completed, a post-secondary program. The network seeks to increase years of schooling and academic enrollment, job-related skills, gender equality and household well-being.

Chan Santa Cruz mural. The photos were taken by William Stroud.

Director Maritza del Carmen Yeh Chan and the professors are educational leaders and activists committed to preserve and expand Maya language and culture in the community. The isolated settings and experiences for students in universities is something UBBJ attempts to overcome. Students plan, initiate and implement their own projects with urban and rural groups in the region which are designed to address issues that impact the health, education and well-being of residents. Sessions at UBBJ consist of weeks of in-school study and extended periods for conducting projects in the field. The UBBJ professors are known as creative teachers who have deep knowledge of Maya history and culture, although most have no formal training in
pedagogy. The workshop aimed to provide tools to strengthen their teaching and reading practices.

Students in the Bilingual Education program have internships in elementary schools in the municipalities of Noh Bec, Señor, Tihosuco and Chunhuhub and small local villages. For many Maya children, their first immersion in Spanish language, and the need to communicate in Spanish, begins when they attend public school. The levels of literacy and levels of achievement, as measured in the context of the dominant language and assessment practices and tools, are thus, in general, lower than children whose first language is Spanish. Less than half of Indigenous children in Mexico continue beyond elementary school.

The ability to make sense of the spoken and written language of the dominant culture provides life opportunities in formal education and success in that society that would otherwise not be available. However, lack of this condition of literacy—the ability to code and decode a spoken language and to make meaning of those graphic representations, while often associated with a status of inferiority, cannot be equated with ignorance in general.

Education, as distinct from schooling, is a condition of all human cultures as children learn to adapt to the customs, beliefs and values they experience in order to participate in the civic life of the larger society. The values and understandings children experience in public school often clash with those of traditional Maya culture. The Maya have a rich history of language, culture and education, underrecognized as a result of the colonization of their land by Spanish conquistadors and continuing discrimination.

Poopolil’ T’aan (Council’s Language)
The Yucatan Peninsula hosts about 800,000 people who speak Yucatec Maya and 6 million people who speak one of the 70 varieties of Maya. Both dialects and distinct languages exist within the Maya language community.

The peninsula, located between the Gulf of Mexico to the north and the Caribbean Sea to the east, has become an international playground where ecotourism is promoted while development of theme parks tears away at the otherwise undisturbed jungle. The Caribbean coastline, beaches, mangroves and jungle make for a fascinating setting for tourists from around the world. While 60% of the country’s revenue from tourism comes through the peninsula, little support for teachers exists and public education continues to be poorly funded.

“Banner” display inside the House of Culture Chan Santa Cruz. The photos were taken by William Stroud.

Reading seriously damages ignorance

Our workshop aimed to share with teachers strategies tested in different parts of the world to strengthen reading comprehension. The group consisted of eight teachers and the principal of the UBBJ campus. After our conversations with teachers prior to our work, we discovered that in this program reading comprehension was a current and persistent difficulty for students.

We introduced an approach—"Habits of Good Readers"—as a way to connect to and annotate text and increase engagement. This initially consisted of reviewing three strategies for interacting with the text "The End of the War of the Castes”: determining importance, making a connection and asking a question. It was important to choose a text that had relevance for the community—something that does not often happen with students in our schools.

We began with a read-aloud of the text after which the teachers paired up to tell their partner what they had identified as the most important part of the text and why. The partner had to actively listen and then repeat what they heard as accurately as possible. They then exchanged roles for the same exercise. The technique of “active listening” requires participants to pay close attention to the words and ideas of others in the group—a process for building a reading community.

In the second activity, teachers had to choose a different partner and share what connection they made with the text. We had discussed two types of possible connections: text-to-reader, through which teachers could connect a part of the reading with something that has happened in their own lives, or text-to-world in which one or more parts of the text would be related to current events somewhere in the world. Once the teacher shared their connection, their partner had to repeat what they heard as accurately as possible and then switch roles—in both cases practicing active listening. We shared with the group the importance of precision and repeating the same words they heard. In this part of the activity, it was evident that the challenge was not easy for the teachers.

Undoubtedly, the personal connections with the text were multiple and deep. Some had participated in a “forgiveness” event the Quintana Roo state government held in 2019 in Tihosuco, the hometown of Jacinto Pat, a Maya leader from the first stage of the war of the castes and initiator—along with Cecilio Chi and Manuel Antonio Ay—of the social movement that spanned five decades in the Yucatán Peninsula. They are symbols of resistance and dignity for people. The teachers’ interest in sharing, beyond just listening and repeating the words, was striking.

College students at work, Universidad Bienestar Benito Juarez Chan Santa Cruz. The photos were taken by William Stroud.

The last part of this activity consisted of defining a question prompted by the text. Everyone in the group had to think about it and keep in mind that the task was only to read their question, not explain it. We wrote their questions on the board and then discussed them, with the teachers participating freely. The end of the discussion revolved around which was the best question and why. It was important to be explicit about the characteristics of good questions so a sort of “how-to” guide could be used in the future. We wrote down the characteristics and, as a closing, we wrote in our notebooks how understanding of the text had changed as a result of our discussion.

At the end of the workshop, the teachers responded to the question, What did you do today that you could use in your classes? Especially when talking about the connection to the text, all the teachers shared that they made a personal connection with the reading. Some shared their activism and years of struggle in the search for greater dignity for the Maya people, others their presence at the event described in the reading and how dissent against the way the ruling power apologized was quickly silenced. They spoke of the Caste War as an unforgivable period in the history of the peninsula and the country, one that is rarely discussed in Mexican history classes. Personal and collective stories of constant discrimination, limited access to educational and employment opportunities, neglect and silencing, as well as the success of the ruling powers in dividing communities in the area. Today, there are circumstances of disagreement between peninsular groups in which there is discussion about who has the true authority to honor Maya history, the Maya language and Maya dress with dignity. It was evident how the teachers found points in the reading that sparked important discussions, which did not seem to be shared for the first time, about the conditions in which they, their children and their ancestors have lived over time.

 In the 1960s the political economist, Arghiri Emmanuel, wrote of a world system of “unequal exchange” where the workers of rich countries benefitted from the transfer of surplus value created by workers of poor countries (in terms of consumer societies). We, in the north, have benefited at the expense of our fellow citizens to the south in not only the standard of living, but also in our educational opportunities and experiences. What will we do to address these disparities going forward?