Chiapas: beyond the modern pedagogical project

Abstract

The modern pedagogical project implies a logic of denying contemporaneity, one of its clearest features. Despite the chronological coexistence between Europeans and Americans over the last five hundred years, indigenous communities have been relegated to the past, in contrast to the apparently advanced modern civilization, reinforcing the belief in a lack of simultaneity in the ontological sphere. Liberation movements, since the 1960s, have collaborated in deconstructing Eurocentric hegemony and revaluing the knowledge of Latin American inhabitants. Pedagogy, philosophy, and theology of liberation paved the way to question the cultural horizon related to the discourse of development since the 1940s. However, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the rhetoric of globalization was imposed against the promotion of local worldviews. This article reveals how the Zapatista experience, which emerged in the 1990s in southern Mexico and continues to this day, can be considered a concrete example of resistance against the modern pedagogical project and the homogenization produced by globalization. It looks forward to pedagogical decolonization and defense of the cultural background of the Tseltal people in Chiapas.