Chapter 8 Developing a repertoire of activism strategies

Abstract

Lenia Toledo Rasgado attended the very first Camino de la Iguana literacy workshop that occurred in 2012 in Juchitán when she was in her late teens. A cousin from Mexico City was visiting and was interested in going, so she and her sister went along too. Growing up in the center of La Ventosa, a village 15 minutes outside of Juchitán, her parents had discouraged her from speaking Zapotec. She had never used Zapotec in school, and they had been forbidden to use it when she attended primary school in La Ventosa. Over the years she had picked up a lot nonetheless, and as a young adult she felt she could more or less get by, although she was more comfortable in Spanish. When she was in secondary school in Juchitán a member of the collective Comité Melendre had given a presentation about Zapotec history in her class, which had inspired her interest and desire to learn more. She admired Zapotec poets and cultural activists, especially the female writers Natalia Toledo and Irma Pineda. After participating in the 2012 Camino de la Iguana workshop she began writing poetry but felt that she did not know the writing system well enough, and when the Camino de la Iguana was offered in La Ventosa in the fall of 2013 she attended again. I was also attending and joined her and the other students in the activities and the final convivio, or closing celebration. The workshop was held in the brand new “Bacusa gui” (firefly) cultural center (during the workshop participants learned that it should be spelled “bacuza gui” in the popular alphabet, although this didn’t motivate anyone to repaint the sign). The cultural center had been completed just a few months before as a corporate social responsibility project by a Spanish-owned wind farm whose windmills had come to fill the horizon on all sides of La Ventosa over the previous seven years. Some residents of La Ventosa had benefited economically from this development through employment or leasing land, and now had houses as big and freshly painted as the cultural center. Other residents had not benefited, and remained in one or two-room cinderblock or adobe brick houses, but with the same view of the forest of white windmill towers. The following winter I participated in planning a language and botanythemed workshop for children in La Ventosa as part of the Smithsonian-funded project to document ethnobotanical knowledge, and I asked if Lenia would be willing to participate in it by teaching some language activities. When she readily agreed we talked about some games she could play to help children learn to use simple, daily phrases. We initially planned to conduct the workshop in one group, facilitated by Gibrán Morales, a visual artist from Oaxaca City who was