México profundo
Rising to the challenge of cross-cultural study
It’s a January night in Santa Maria Yavesia, a Zapotec village deep in the Sierra Juarez mountains northeast of Oaxaca City, Mexico. Basketball is big in Yavesia, and even on this cold night village kids hustle up and down the court in the lighted central plaza. As the game plays on, a bus pulls into town and a gaggle of wide-eyed, distinctly white visitors tumbles out. They’ve been on the road from Oaxaca for five hours, entranced by the rugged scenery and dramatic vistas. Although their leader has dubbed them the “Dream Team,” they haven’t earned that accolade on the courts, and they haven’t come to play.
The eighteen UVM students and one professor climb off the bus with their eyes riveted on the game, amazed to be greeted by such a familiar sight. It will be the last one until—gradually—the foreign becomes the familiar. They’ve come to Yavesia for a week and to Oaxaca, where they landed just three nights ago, as novitiates in the first UVM-sponsored, full-semester study-abroad program. Some of them live only in the present in Spanish; some read a fair amount but are stricken mute when spoken to; a few converse easily, if superficially. That will change, as will many pre-conceived ideas about Mexico. Unexamined notions about their own lives and culture will become sensitive targets, sometimes victims, of their new experiences. Despite their excellent preparation, on-the-ground learning will trump the classroom anytime, and the man they trust to lead and launch them into the unknown, associate professor of anthropology Luis Vivanco, has taken a vow of immersion.
The game ends, and villagers suddenly appear out of the darkness, moving toward the increasingly nervous newcomers. The scene recalls the annual meet and greet in Patrick Gym’s parking lot, where Vermont families swarm to welcome their urban-honed Fresh Air kids. The comparison isn’t far off. Keith Bray, a junior with one semester of Spanish behind him, is sure he has the worst Spanish skills of the group, and he’s deeply worried. There are five males in the group, and the lottery is going by same-sex twos. Bray is the last one left, and a young girl, about 10, comes to choose him, the odd man out. Bray has “a deer-in-the-headlights look,” Vivanco realizes, and calmly reassures him before the student steps into the dark side streets. Bray’s not alone; all the students will take small leaps into new territory this night.
Sophomores Marsha Zebley and Angela DiGiulio trek up the mountain with their home-stay mom. After dinner, they ask for the bathroom. “She grabbed a flashlight, and we looked at each other,” Zebley says, “like, why would she need a flashlight?” Had Vivanco been there, he’d have made a bad joke about “light-bulb moments.” The outhouse it is, where the duo take turns holding the flashlight for each other. Zebley says, “I think within half an hour of getting there, we realized just how far away from Oaxaca and the U.S. we were.”
Angela DiGiulio and Liz Gladfelte
dine with their Yavesia host family.
Had the program’s patron saint, Oaxaca-based writer and activist Gustavo Esteva, been with them, he’d have told his story about the tyranny of the toilet, explaining the political and social implications of outhouses/composting toilets versus the flush variety. Water—its consumption, treatment, pollutants, connection to tourism, and above all, its ownership—looms as the environmental issue of Mexico. And that’s just one of the hot-button issues Esteva delivers like scud missiles to formerly comfortable audiences. The global marketplace, education, and—most surprisingly—human rights take body blows from Esteva’s infiltrating ideas, sometimes crushing Western visitors, but —with immersion programs like this—more often rebounding in them as inspiration. During their second day in Oaxaca, they meet him and undergo what Esteva calls “shock therapy.” In this series of powerful lectures, he challenges the very ability of Western minds to understand indigenous realities and presents the opportunities—and challenges—of intercultural communication.
Esteva has influenced and aided UVM’s two-week, intersession programs in Oaxaca for a decade, providing philosophical underpinning for the immersion approach and assuring access to places like Yavesia. The underlying agreement between Esteva and programs like UVM’s is based on mutual respect and a sharing of cultures. Any sense of studying or coming to help the natives is anathema to both parties.
BURSTING BUBBLES
“It takes a particular kind of intrepid soul to take on an inaugural program like this,” Vivanco says. He’s talking about his Dream Team—sophs, juniors, one senior, an even-split between Vermonters and out-of-staters, many honors students—and all carefully chosen for this venture. He well might have been talking about the back-up team—himself; his wife Peggy O’Neill-Vivanco, a career international educator and student life advisor for the program; and their two children, Isabel, 4, and Felipe, just 8 months when the semester begins. Luis and Peggy met in Costa Rica, where they both worked in study-abroad programs, for which they share a passion matched only by exacting insistence on doing them right. That includes a mutual immersion—they in the students’ lives, the students in theirs, and everyone’s in the culture.
The plan for this semester is the antithesis of most study-abroad programs, the kind Luis calls “American bubbles,” in which students live in dorms, study, eat, and travel together, often with no emphasis on language study. In Oaxaca, UVM students live with host families, explore the city and converse with Mexicans on their own daily, and take classes in anthropology and Spanish, all of which are organized around field trips, stays in communities, and intensive interaction with locals. “We have some bubble-element,” Vivanco admits, “but immersion is the bottom-line.”
In Yavesia, the first night and first hurdle over, the group gathers again on the basketball court, everyone chattering about last night’s experiences. Props go to Bray for the hands-down best claim—eating squirrel with his host family—making him the day’s mini-celebrity.
Professor Luis Vivanco
The Yavesia trip proves central to the entire program, bonding the group with each other and with Vivanco, and animating a concept they will examine over the course of the semester, that of México Profundo. Associated with influential Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil, it asserts that most Mexicans live in a deep or profound Mexico, a civilization based on indigenous values and traditions. It is an image of Mexico that contrasts sharply with México Imaginario, the imaginary Mexico, or the country as the Western world and Mexican elites would have it.
Despite the town’s rural quality and lack of comforts deemed essential by Westerners, the residents are self-assured, and, in important ways, chapters ahead of their visitors. “One of the dilemmas that we face with every single group is that many of our students don’t know who they are,” Vivanco says. “They come from an environment in suburbia where parents are not home much, both working, raised by their peers, more interested in their iPods than in storytelling. … When we bring students here they have to confront people who know exactly where they stand in the world because they have a whole community who know who that person is. Our students are anonymous in our society.”
A key issue for Yavesians, as for indigenous communities throughout Mexico, is how to maintain their culture and self-determination while participating in the broader world. Students learn that the town recently rejected a Japanese company’s offer to bottle its spring water from a source the villagers have considered sacred for hundreds of years. Junior Eva Antczak is at first bewildered. “They could make thousands of dollars; everyone could benefit,” she thinks. The village, with a history of resistance to outside interference going back to the Aztecs, has survived much worse and has become expert at it, she and the others learn. “In the end what I appreciated most is that they resisted,” she says.
LESSONS IN HUMILITY
The tradition of Oaxacan hospitality, Vivanco explains to students, “is thoroughly woven into the culture. You treat the visitor with everything you’ve got.” That’s a problem for students. “They want to help them because they see what material limitations these people have,” Vivanco says. He tells them, “Don’t try to pay people back; it would belittle their hospitality. … They see it as a giving of themselves and of their culture. What you need to do—and this is a life lesson—is to learn to accept, with humility, the gift.”
Quick studies, the students reshape their instinct to help through an acceptable tradition—and another new concept to them—tequio, a mandatory and unremunerated work obligation for all community members. “If a road needs to be repaired, everyone over 16 has to come,” explains Zebley. In talking with the woman who heads the women’s and family center in the town, students offer to join in the tradition on two needed projects, one for the center and the other for the kindergarten’s garden. It becomes “a day of villagers and students working side-by-side, getting paint or dirt on them, with fun chitter-chatter back and forth,” Vivanco says, “a whole new level of interaction.”
Closely connected to tequio is the cargo tradition of collective governance, which translates from the Spanish as “charge.” It is a practice that seems to captivate the students’ thinking, as many of them enthuse over its explanation to a visitor. Sophomore Jessica Ziegler’s home-stay father is “one of the most valuable, powerful men of the village,” she says. His house is also one the poorest in the town, “because he is performing his cargo, a job that can be obligatory or voluntary, but is unpaid.”
Sophomore Zach Ogden expands: “A certain number of public jobs are elected, generally for one year, but also are unpaid. But, no one goes hungry. They always are taken care of by others in the village.” “A cargo can be anything from picking up garbage on the streets to serving as president or mayor of the town or running a small business,” Ziegler adds. The bus service between the town and Oaxaca City, for example is a cargo for the driver, typically a year’s service. Zebley distills the lesson: “You think about what’s best for the town before yourself.”
One of the lessons of Yavesia is that while indigenous villages might place central emphasis on communal values, they are not utopias. During this visit, for example, Vivanco and the students observe widespread tension. Home-stay families are noticeably worried, even frightened. Their men are going up into the mountains to defend against incursion by another village that is threatening to log Yavesia’s trees. It’s a recurring problem of contested boundaries, worsened by a deal the other village has made with loggers. “They resist sometimes with their lives,” Vivanco says.
AT HOME IN OAXACA
After returning to Oaxaca, the students scatter to their home-stay families and generally ignore Vivanco’s requests for office hours. Despite the frustration at not seeing more of them outside classes, Vivanco understands their desire to explore. The colonial center of Oaxaca City is seductive, its square, the zocalo, a culture on parade—families with babies, school children tossing four-foot-long balloons, Mariachi bands, and tourists. Aromas from Oaxaca’s famous cuisine waft into the open air (foods so cherished that Oaxacans living in L.A., have it air-couriered daily), and rugs, baskets, black pottery, and clothing crafted by Oaxaca’s equally famous artisans spill out of carts, storefronts, and strolling vendors’ baskets. Also beckoning are the cobblestone streets that spray out from the square’s hub, lined with markets, galleries, museums—and those reassuring Western artifacts—Internet cafés and ATM machines. It’s January, so students who normally would be piling on layers of clothing and scurrying from building to building gratefully immerse themselves in this benign climate’s al fresco gifts. They’re also meeting Mexicans, stretching their Spanish and confidence muscles, and bulking up intellectually.
Luis and Peggy ponder ways to compete, and Peggy hits on a solution. In Burlington, the couple frequently host dinners and parties in their home for students, and a few familiar comforts might sit well here, she thinks. They initiate pizza and cookie nights, an instant success. The students munch, vent, de-compress, re-connect, and a tradition is born. Peggy, who dubs herself “Oaxacan intestinal health supervisor,” fields the students’ personal and medical problems, dispensing many bottles of “gringo-ade” (Gatorade), and answering panicky calls at all hours. “This is not a 9-to-5 gig,” she says.
Over the course of the semester, the students will add geology, gratis retired professor Barry Doolan, to their strata of Oaxacan knowledge; they study its arts with Vivanco; and steadily slip into Spanish more confidently. They’ll also become protective of their new home. “I feel like I live here now,” Zebley says. “I feel … animosity toward tourists who just come by, snap photos of everything and of people, too, as if they’re just novel objects.”
Knowing more also leads to questioning more. Students grapple with the devastating effects of migration, NAFTA, government indifference, the myriad issues that flow from the flood of cheap American corn to the place where corn was domesticated and where it doesn’t just nourish but anoints life’s every tradition. Some question whether Esteva’s commitment to localization and opposition to globalism can work.
“It is arrogant to assume that in six weeks, six months, or even six years, you could make complete sense of the reality here in Oaxaca,” Luis says. “What you can do is come up with good questions that help orient your own thinking about it.” No surprise that one of the professor’s favorite quotes is Einstein’s words: “Ninety-nine percent of a good answer is a good question.”
Everyone has taken risks during the semester, and Luis and Peggy agree that’s as it should be. The key to international education is moving from learning about the world, the defining tendency of the classroom, to learning in and from the world. And that experience, risky as it is, is a central part of this program’s success, Peggy says. “It is more important to deepen the study-abroad experiences and try to move beyond the superficial and comfortable—that is really the point at which we learn the most.”
COURSES OPEN OAXACA TO ADULT LEARNERS
About the time our eighteen undergraduate students began to claim Oaxaca as their second home, groups of adult learners —alumni, teachers, retirees—arrived in the colonial city for one of Continuing Education’s weeklong Adventure Learning courses. The one most popular with teachers, “Art, History and the Cultures of Oaxaca,” was offered for two sessions, coinciding with school vacations. Chosen to design and lead the course was Corrine Glesne, retired UVM professor of education who has been at the heart of UVM’s intersession programs in Oaxaca for a decade and whose long-established friendships with Oaxacan artists and craftspeople opened many doors to her students.
Like their younger counterparts, the adults needed immersion to achieve some lessons. Linda Lou Parker recalls doubting her decision to come as her taxi sped past concrete block, graffiti-sprayed buildings on the 10 p.m. trip from Oaxaca airport. “This was not the place I was envisioning,” says the Richmond teacher, whose encounters with Mexico until then centered on tourist-appealing resorts. By the end of the course, however, the place and the people had changed her thinking. “What a wonderful place,” she says. “What wonderful people. … I will return.”
Some lessons were small but important in opening the groups to larger issues. Foods considered exotic prior to the course became daily requirements; language barriers were hurdled, especially when retail transactions were at stake. And the instinct to think of Oaxacans as “poor” dissolved through intimate experiences with their hospitality, the richness of their traditions, and the rooted purposefulness of their lives.
Georgia art teacher Ellen Hsieh says she found new connections between cultures. “When you include the trade routes between Mexico and the American Southwest you realize what an amazing impact Oaxacan civilization had on art,” she says. Hsieh is expanding her units on Mexican art and is creating lessons for classroom teachers “to show how Oaxacan cultures used math, language, music, art, dance or movement, science, and interaction in their daily lives.”
Continuing Education will offer the new course again in winter 2007, and potential courses exploring Oaxaca’s famed culinary arts and the politics of food, Latin jazz, intensive Spanish language training, and a hands-on experience with a free-trade coffee cooperative in Vera Cruz. For more information on these and other courses, visit www.uvm.edu/~advnturs/.
(for UVM staff)