Communal resistance and school: reflections on Ya’ Blligo, a sacred Zapotec place

Abstract

This article denounces the homogeneous and colonizing caracter of the educational system and with it its lack of recognition of epistemic, cultural and linguistic diversity and plurality. Emphasizing the need for actions that have to be taken from the school context to make visible the cultural meanings found in the ways of life of native peoples. Which demands that the teacher becomes a cultural mediator, who promotes mutual respect between the cultures present in the school space. In the attention of the girls and boys of the native communities, present throughout the country, it is essential that the teacher recognizes the matrix of thougth of their belonging cultures, in search of their own education, contextualized, enabling processes of recognition, appropriation and strengthening of their cultural and linguistic identity.
Faced with this challenge, it is important that the teacher develops processes of decolonization and cultural affirmation, with this purpose we sought to document the zapotec cultural meanings present in Ya’ Blligo, a sacred place of the community of San Andrés Solaga, relying on a qualitative methodology, specifically in deep hermeneutics, proposed by John B. Thompson. Recovering two strategies of ethnography such as participant observation and deep interview. Strategies that, together with the narrative, were fundamental in understanding the cultural meanings that emerged from a process of interpretation and reinterpretation of information.
Cultural meanings that have resisted and continue to shape the worldview and identity of the zapotecs, which determines the form of relationship with the sacred and social environment in which they live, recognizing among them: the complementarity in the interaction that the zapotec being establishes with his environment, which is demonstrated in asking, giving and receiving; the search for a dignified and humane life, which is achieved through work; the importance of valuing, preserving and putting into practice the way of life that our grandparents have inherited us from their words and actions.