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Kate Irick works as a Peace Education Promoter for Servicios y Asesoría para la Paz (SERAPAZ), an MCC partner in Mexico City that accompanies, trains, and strengthens social actors in the transformation of their conflicts.
In June, I attended a workshop hosted by the Satyagraha Institute in the northern mountains of Puebla, a seven-day-long seminar on Gandhian nonviolence. What I found most inspiring during the week of sharing and learning in this incubator for social change, was the expression of nonviolence rooted in cooperativism.
At the site of the seminar, the hearts of the community were united with shared dreams and practices, built out of human dignity. This took on multiple forms: the struggle to honor indigenous identity, to transform unjust political realities, to coexist with the natural environment–all within a context marked by violence, marginalization–and to create a home that rejoices in sustainable practices, built through a half-century of cooperative work.
The workshop was on theory of nonviolence, and the context served a living example. With its own cooperative bank, health program, schools, agricultural center, sustainable tourism project, education/training center, and over 20,000 members, the Tosepan Union of Cooperatives is one of the largest and most advanced cooperative projects in all of Mexico.
At the cooperative founded elementary and middle schools in Cuetzalan, the curriculum is based on the Montessori model, but with an approach rooted in cooperativism. The math curriculum incorporates Mayan systems of counting and the science class works to create a plant library of local species and their medicinal uses. The kids maintain chicken coops and learn to grow corn, squash, beans and tomatoes— the main sustenance of the region.
All of this takes place a national context where indigenous groups face expulsion and displacement from their lands due to megaprojects, a lack of control over their territory, corruption, discrimination and poverty and in a regional context where entire communities have migrated to the United States due to poverty, lack of employment and access to basic services such as health and education. The holistic work of the cooperatives, supported by an educational model pertinent to the ecological, social and economic identity of the region, enables the next generation to be raised within a vision for a sustainable future as a clear alternative to migration.
One of the facilitators during the seminar, Carl Kline, of Brookings, South Dakota, encouraged us to open our minds to the different manifestations of peace work and nonviolence that we engage with.
“Isn’t Nonviolence caring for the sick? Tending to our gardens? Opening ourselves to meaningful dialogue with our neighbours?” he asked.
These questions plant seeds of hope for the future of our global society. From our first breath of air each morning to the surrender of our conscious selves each evening, we have the tools to be building, building, building nonviolence all day long, as part of a daily practice.
A unifying activity, done at the end of the workshop. Kate Irick
Indigenous communities in southern Mexico, such as the one we visited, have invested their future in a dignified life here on their native soil, in raising children with an education that incorporates Creation Care and indigenous knowledge that is taught in the languages of their prehispanic ancestors. Their willingness to confront the realities of violence is a river of peace in a landscape scarred by violence and greed.
What might we take away then, from a community with its own cooperative school, bank, clinics, lodging, and food production? From a place confronting the logics of forced migration and environmental degradation of natural resources?
These indigenous and peasant struggles provide the keys for a healthy co-existence with this planet, of which there are innumerable examples of in Mexico. They work to protect the land, the water, and the very air we breathe. If we lift up these voices to the world stage, we will see that the indigenous peoples of Mexico and the world are the guiding force in the movement against climate change. Many face direct threats to their lives as a result.
These keys offer the way forward: our society and our spirituality must opt for life-giving practices. This is hope, it is peace, it is nonviolence, and it starts with tending the garden and listening to our neighbours–on a global scale.