Indigenous Education: Resilience of Zapoteca/o Identity in 21stC L.A. Schools, Study by Rafael Vasquez

September 27, 2013 at 6:53pm

I would like to share my response to the research of a colleague, R. Vasquez, conducted with another colleague, W. Perez. But before doing so, I must declare that what I would say about indigenous education is hampered to the extent that it is by my informal and limited understanding at a large removal from being a Zapoteca in the first place. Therefore this is merely a set of thoughts in the interest of disseminating the importance of this research for many beyond my ability to summarize and therefore I can only ponder in the following response to Vasquez's research.

Research relevance in education. Can you really know about what a school is teaching children who they do not know anything about?

It does appear that schools function well in what they do if you look at Oaxacan children (highly motivated and high aspirations and performance). The stunning truth of it may, in fact, offer a new theory of learning for the 21st century one that lacks new theories.

Why always search for an exceptional, ideal, or philosophical model outside of the native American examples in California? FOr as workers migrating to the agricultural fields, partly, but also as skilled workers, entrepreneurs, professionals who are active in traditions while participating as integral members of cosmopolitan locales of Southern Los Angeles, Oaxacans have been here and their contributions have been here.

The study employs a classical model of American education, particularly fulfilled by American Indian children from home origins in the long-settled indigenous zones of southern Mexico, and path-breaking foundational investigation of their educational pathways.

While some children may carry Disney retail merchandise in backpacks or school supplies as indigenous or other children are equally likely to do, indigenous children also present with their own unique communal and personal identity. While their appearance may be likened by the unknowing to that of Mexicans, they are both not Mexican nor Mexican-American in any other way than by refutation of a national identity that is shared with others from non-indigenous origins in the U.S. and Mexico or within their borders.

At once their identity is conscious of the experience of the stereotype threats applied to Mexicans and is compounded with Mexican stereotypes of them, the collapse of the distinction of the two identities coincides in the racial misidentification along with its potentially detrimental ascriptions.  An epithet embodied in a socialization process--the anti-indigenous removal of value for native peoples, along with the systemization of education toward general knowledge and immersion in national assimilation--targets but is rebuffed by Oaxacans.

How can evaluation of education be improved with qualitative knowledge of Zapoteco resilence? Why would a larger populace want to become aware of the minority population's example of resilience if that culture is one in which its members are born as such before the effect of immersion in majority society begins to have its deleterious impact?

Are there advantages to non-assimilation which are anterior to education?   

Why does preserving the culture of native persons represent a valid and meritorious objective for schooling if fewer people are and will be indigenous than assimilated?  

Is education more than a transfer of skills? Is it also an indoctrination in itself from which Oaxacan children appear to prevail?

This question could not have been asked if its premise were not something inculcated by education as an institutional voice of the palliative purposes of schools.

Are schools aware or can they be made aware of the shadow they inadvertently cause on the identities that sustain and mitigate for their own cultural objectives even if those are unconsciously generalized to the extent if they are for Zapotecos.

Is it the case that Zapoteco identity accounts for the purpose of living a human experience by intrinsic value and if so is this humanistic response to compound oppression a specific purpose of the same resilience of identity?