11Deep Coalition and Popular Education Praxis
Cricket Keating
Coalition is always the horizon that rearranges both our possibilities and the conditions of our possibilities.
—María Lugones, Preface to Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes:
Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions
Central to María Lugones’s political philosophy and praxis is a deep commitment to popular education, a mode of political organizing that challenges the dichotomy between theory and practice as well as the division between “organizers” and “organized.” As an approach to social change, popular education emphasizes the importance of opening up movement-building and decision-making processes so as to include people’s often undervalued and overlooked experiences, forms of knowledge, and perspectives. Although Lugones is most well known for her foundational work in feminist philosophy, Women of Color feminisms, and decolonial politics, Lugones’s work has been pivotal to the contemporary development of the theory and practice of popular education as well. In particular, this chapter explores Lugones’s work with the popular education collective la Escuela Popular Norteña (EPN) in developing a distinctly coalitional approach to popular education, one that takes up the complex interlocking of oppressions based on race, culture, class, gender, sexuality, age, and ability in people’s lives, towards the building of what she calls “deep coalition.”
Deep coalition, in Lugones’s framing, are those coalitions that go beyond short-term interest-based alliances and challenge us to align our own self-understandings, interests, and goals with other oppressed groups (IP 26). For Lugones, we come together in deep coalition not only to pool our collective resources in the fight against oppression, but also, and perhaps more powerfully in terms of long-lasting change, to transform our relationships with each other. Such an approach to coalition highlights the ways that our own understandings and potential enactments of our lives are deeply tied to one another and to the meanings that we create together, as well as the ways that the transformation of our relationships with one another has the potential to ground deep social change. Exploring ways to motivate, practice, and sustain this transformation constitutes the focus of much of Lugones’s work, both in her writing and in her political engagement with people. In her praxis, she has long worked with others to build anti-hierarchical spaces where power can be interrogated through collective analysis and living differently can be practiced, even within institutions and settings that are often extremely hierarchical. In doing so, her work both draws on and points to a new direction in popular education praxis.
Popular education is a mode of political and educational praxis that grows out of critiques of hierarchical and top-down approaches to political organizing and education. As an approach to education geared to liberation, popular education pivots on a process of people developing critical consciousness and analysis through collective critique and visioning. One of the central tenets of popular education theory and practice is that oppressed people have knowledge and experience that can serve as important grounds for political change and social transformation. In the words of popular educator Geoff Bryce, “popular education is experience based and action-oriented, bringing people at the grassroots together for dialogue in a non-hierarchical setting, enabling them to analyze the conditions in which they live and to develop plans for collective action based on their own values and perceived needs” (Escuela Popular Norteña 1994).
Popular education has its roots in struggles for social change in the Americas. Two of its most influential theorist-practitioners are Paulo Freire from Brazil and Myles Horton from the United States. Work inspired by their writing and organizing has been pivotal in many struggles for liberation. For example, learning circles and comunidades de base growing out of Freire’s theories of education have played important roles in Latin American liberation movements (Freire 2000). In addition, the Highlander Folk School, founded by Horton in Tennessee, produced many of the South’s union organizers in the 1930s as well as some of the leading organizations of the Civil Rights Movement, including the Citizenship Schools and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (Horton 1997).
Inspired by the work of Freire, and in conversation with Horton and others at Highlander, Lugones, Geoff Bryce, and Sylvia Rodriguez founded EPN in 1990 as a “school for political education at the grassroots, focused on the liberation of Latinos from poverty, violence, and cultural extermination” (EPN Mission Statement). The three had been working together for many years in Valdez, a small rural Hispano community in Northern New Mexico with a long history of struggle around issues of land, water, and cultural survival. Among other community political work, they worked with Valdeños on successfully blocking the development of condominiums on the valley floor in a sustained community protest that became known as the “Valdez Condo War.” Since 1990, EPN has developed popular education programs in Valdez and in Chicano, Mexicano, Central American, Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and mixed communities, both urban and rural, across the United States. Some of the themes the collective has worked on include colonization, internalized oppression, homophobia, the interlocking of oppressions, community economic development, participatory research, community health care, political video, micro-radio, community art, ethics for communities in struggle, alternative schooling, violence against women, linguistic and cultural resistance, and tools for building movement. This work has taken several forms, including one- to two-week-long intensive residential encuentros; developing popular education materials and workshops for organizations such as Incite!: Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence and Critical Resistance; and designing thematic workshops for various community settings.
By emphasizing the importance of addressing multiple oppressions, EPN’s work differs in several respects from traditional approaches to popular education. For example, while traditional formulations of popular education praxis often cast the division between oppressors and oppressed as a dichotomous one, such that some people are understood as the “oppressed” and others as the “oppressors,” EPN’s coalitional approach to popular education theorizing and practice takes up the complexity of people’s relationship to multiple systems of oppression. Given this complexity, the lines between oppressor and oppressed often shift, such that people are positioned as oppressed in some contexts and along some lines of power and as oppressors in others. Taking up this complexity in a popular education situation means that one cannot assume a homogeneity of interests among oppressed communities (and thus presuppose a singularity of oppositional practice that could be applicable or translatable to all its members). Instead, a coalitional approach to popular education highlights the heterogeneity of people’s positioning in relationship to power, and underscores the interlocking, intersecting, and intermeshing of multiple forms of oppression in people’s lives (see this book’s chapter 4).
Further, rather than presuming that a shared experience of oppression provides the impetus for political solidarity and collective action, a coalitional approach emphasizes that the experience of oppression and resistance is highly contextual and varies depending on one’s positioning in terms of race, class, gender, age, sexuality, ability, nationality, ethnicity, and other nodes of power. Instead of looking for commonalities in experiences across contexts, a coalitional approach to popular education is grounded in a collective process of learning about each other’s varied contexts and resistant practices and then thinking together about how to connect these practices so as to better sustain and amplify their effects in challenging oppressive conditions. As Lugones explains, popular education spaces in this approach can be:
defamiliarizing environments where one’s experiences acquire a diversity of “readings.” These readings expose the differences in power and privilege among the learners as barriers to possible understanding and to collective action authored by all learners for their collective benefits. … In these environments, popular education proceeds to create new possibilities that are firmly rooted in these re-readings of experiences, [that] arise from conflict, and [that] do not erase the complexity of styles, needs, values of learners. (Escuela Popular Norteña 1994)
Indeed, rather than treating difference as something to be ignored, oversimplified, or overcome, this coalitional approach to popular education takes up people’s multiple positioning as extremely generative grounds for developing a collective understanding of the many ways that people resist oppression in their everyday lives.
Lugones, often in collaboration with other collective EPN members, designed more than 15 popular education workshops in her work with EPN. These workshops, like so much of Lugones’s work, ask people to reflect upon their own and each other’s lives in ways that highlight rather than downplay difference and complexity. The workshops themselves create spaces for people to learn and practice new ways of being and of interacting with each other toward the goal of deep coalition. In the workshops, people come together in collective dialogue in order to learn 1) to recognize and appreciate each other’s resistant strategies across a wide variety of contexts 2) to back up each other’s resistant practices as well as link them to their own across different contexts and lines of power 3) to treat each other well in the context of different modes of oppression.
One of the crucial components of building deep coalitional solidarity is developing an eye for the ways that we resist oppressive power relations in our everyday lives. Such resistance can be enacted in public and on a large scale, but it is most often enacted in everyday modes of being and relating. This everyday resistance is often quite hard to see or recognize for two reasons: first, becuase those enacting the resistance might want the resistance to stay hidden in order for it to be successful; and second, because those in power often have a stake in resistance not being recognized as such.1 In Lugones’s words, “resistance hardly ever has a straightforward public presence. It is rather duplicitous, ambiguous, even devious. But it is also almost always masked and hidden by structures of meaning that countenance and constitute domination” (PP x). Given these conditions under which resistance is so often hidden, a particular challenge for building deep coalition is learning to see each other’s modes of resistance, including one’s own, in oppressive situations. A coalitional approach to popular education involves creating dialogic situations in which people develop an understanding of their own and other’s strategies for challenging oppressive logics, interactions, relationships, and institutions in their everyday lives.
EPN’s The Map of Oppression is a workshop geared toward generating collective dialogue and insight about such everyday resistance (Lugones, n.d.). In order to do so, the workshop asks people to draw a map reflecting the ways the spaces in their lives have been shaped by those in power in society. In particular, the workshop asks people to draw lines on their map that indicate where they are allowed, enticed, or forced to go and where they are forbidden or discouraged from going. This kind of prompt—one that encourages people to analyze the power relations that mark their situations—is very much in the tradition of popular education. In traditional forms of popular education, the group might move from an analysis of the oppressive ways in which space is organized by the powers that be directly into a collective conversation about how the participants might work together to challenge this oppression. In EPN’s approach, however, the workshop takes a different tack: after analyzing the oppressive power relations illustrated in their maps, the participants next turn attention to the ways that they resist such power in their everyday lives. The workshop The Map of Oppression asks that people take another look at the maps, this time with a different lens, a magnifying glass that shows
how we are when we are following our own hearts and wills in resistance to the interests of those in power. It shows you how we are when we are trying to do and be self-determining and good to ourselves. … With it you see that we’re not just quiet and tired, but mischievous, energetic, active, creative. (Lugones, n.d., 2)
In the workshop, people share stories of what they uncover about their lives and their communities when they look at their map through this magnifying glass.
The Politicizing the Everyday workshop also focuses on the process of developing a sense of one’s own and others’ resistances (Beltré et al. 1999). In order to do so, the workshop draws on a traditional popular education approach: the use of a code (a photo, a word, a drawing, an object) as a catalyst for the collective analysis of power relations.2 In one iteration of the workshop, for example, the code presented was a conservative electoral campaign advertisement showing a picture of a tattooed Latino man locked up in jail on one side and a picture of a young Latina girl on the other side. Below the picture, a caption read: “Where do you want violent criminals? Here or Here?” The first exercise of the workshop asked participants to analyze the code in terms of what message was being conveyed. In their analysis of the campaign advertisement, for example, the workshop participants observed that the image drew on and perpetuated stereotypes of Latino men as violent and dangerous, and was geared toward generating support for the prison industrial complex among Latinos as well as Anglos by positioning the young Latina girl as vulnerable to violence.
Next, the workshop asked the participants to reflect upon their own experiences of seeing the advertisement. For many, the ad was upsetting because it brought to mind people they knew and loved who had been or were in jail. For others, it reminded them of ways that they had been harassed or targeted by police. Others noted that the picture of the young girl brought up memories of their own experiences of violence when they were young. In their discussions, the participants both explored what was problematic in the scenario and also located themselves in the discussion. Both these moves—reading power as well as situating oneself in relation to power—are crucial in popular education. Rather than highlighting only one primary line of oppression, the workshop asked participants to pay close attention to the multiple lines of racialized, gendered, and classed power that could be seen at play in the code. For example, in addition to analyzing the racist message the advertisement conveyed, they also noted that the picture of the little girl was stereotyping young Latinas as vulnerable and in need of protection by the state.
After decoding the power relations they saw embedded in the political advertisement, the participants next were asked to look for resistances. For example, they noticed that the man in the ad had tattoos and that while the ad seemed to imply that this was an indication that he was dangerous, the participants noted that tattoos are often themselves a form of resistance. One person said that she thought it was resistant that everyone saw through the oppressive message behind the ad and that they recognized and were critical of the stereotypes of Latinos that were being used in it. Others discussed ways that they resisted violence against women and girls that didn’t depend on the state, but rather on networks of familial and community support. Another pointed out that the very act of listening and learning from each other in the workshop was deeply resistant.
Complex Unity is an EPN workshop that focuses on the importance of building movements against violence against women of color that challenge the notion that unity is built on sameness. As the workshop notes, “the need for unity comes from the realization that struggling against violence must be a collective project, but collectivity is reduced to sameness” (Beltré et al., n.d., 1). In contrast, the workshop calls for “a unity that is creative, that shows our connections in an empowering light, a unity that makes us imaginative, strong, that takes advantage of what each one brings to the struggle against violence because of our differences. We need a unity that is complex” (1). As a starting point in building this complex unity, the workshop focuses on ways that people have resisted gender-based violence. The workshop’s aim is not only to illuminate and encourage particular resistant acts, but also to find each person’s “resistant self” that has desires, intentions, and motivations that move against such violence, often even while in the midst of it (Beltré et al., n.d.,1). In order to direct attention to that self, the facilitators of the workshop ask participants (including the facilitators themselves) to share a time when they encountered violence and to think about ways in which they resisted the harm being done to them. Participants are asked to “find the self that resisted in the situation of violence, the self that didn’t just accept that everything that was happening was good, fitting, or what you deserved, what you should accept” (Beltré et al., n.d., 2). The workshop suggests that when trying to find this self:
don’t think about what you could have done, or what you would do, but about what you did that was not what you were supposed to do, feel, believe in a situation where part of the violence is being told what to do, what to say, what to believe, what to be. That’s her, the one who in some way or another, big or small, hidden or for all to see, said “no.” (2)
As a way of both representing and honoring these resistant selves, the workshop asks the participants to build an altar that contains “both things that remind you of the violence in the situation but also of what helped you to negotiate the situation, anything that helped you not to accept the situation as good and what you deserved” (2). One altar, for example, had a bottle of beer that signified the role alcohol played in the violent situation, and also a key that she had made without her girlfriend’s knowledge that would help her escape to a neighbor’s house if she needed a place to go in the middle of the night.
All three of these workshops have as their central focus people’s everyday resistance to power in their lives. In EPN’s framing, coalitional political movement is built from an intersubjective recognition of such resistance. Such a move is in keeping with traditional popular education’s emphasis on the importance of people’s experience of, and knowledge about, oppression, but moves it even deeper: it assumes that people also have valuable experience in resisting that oppression. This resistance, of course, is often obscured by power. In Lugones’s words: “As the understanding of our own resistance is heavily veiled by the strategist’s plans, and by the deployment of his power and authority, it is important to clear the air so that to be able both to understand the space where we are actively resisting as worldly—mundano, an emancipatory, complexly voiced sense of ‘public’—and to take up its possibilities” (TSC 210). These three workshops are geared to be spaces where these possibilities can be taken up.
In addition to working to see, understand, and value the ways that people resist multiple forms of oppression, another key component of a coalitional approach to popular education is generating collective analysis about ways that people’s resistances might connect to one another and how people might support and back up each other’s different resistant practices. For example, the workshop Coalition: Linking Contexts of Resistance is geared toward forging “enduring, changing, and complex coalitions among people who are subjected to and resist different oppressions … [by] developing isolated resistances into collective and diverse resistances towards emancipation” (Graciano et al., n.d., 1). The workshop emphasizes that coming together in coalition is an active process that requires two crucial steps: getting to know each other as resistors and working to build connections among our resistances (1).
Toward getting to know each other as resistors, Coalition, like The Map of Oppression and Complex Unity workshops, asks participants both to share and listen to accounts of instances in which they resisted oppression. This workshop emphasizes the process of learning about another’s resistance; in it, groups closely analyze resistance in terms of the context in which the resistance takes place, the resistor’s intentions, and the relationship of the resistance to various structures of oppression. In particular, participants are asked to pay careful attention to the oppressive structures that “backed your oppressor and made his/her behavior acceptable, condonable, ordinary, invisible, and made your own objections not able to be voiced, unintelligible, not actionable in court, etc.” (Graciano et al., n.d., 7). They also look closely for ways that a specific resistance may collude with or reinforce one structure of oppression while also working to subvert another. As the workshop explains: “[A] certain activity, for example, may be liberatory in gender terms but racially, it colludes with oppression. A situation may resist class divisions, but it reinstates ageist assumptions” (7). In doing so, the workshop encourages participants to develop an eye for the complexity of resistance in a situation of interlocked oppressions as well as the way that power relations structure which actions and intentions can be readily seen and those that are made more difficult to countenance.
Next, participants analyze ways that they could connect to each other’s resistant practices across their different contexts, and work to amplify and help sustain them. The guiding question of this moment in the workshop is, “What does the protagonist need to keep herself or himself alive as a resistor?” As the workshop explains, “this question is not just about validating the act as a resistant act … it is also a question of understanding that act as one step in a life of resistance to and under oppression” (8). In other words, the workshop asks participants to move beyond thinking of a particular resistant act and think about what it might mean to live a life of resistance to oppressive structures. How can we become companions in resistance to each other? That is, how can we back up, encourage, and sustain each other in moving our lives in a resistant direction? What changes in our own lives would we have to make in order to make such a commitment to each other? The workshop asks participants to consider these questions as they take up the challenge of forging coalition together, examining ways that such a commitment to each other might require a “rethinking of our analyses of oppressions,” a “redistribution of our political energies,” and an alteration “of the paths we cross in everyday life” (9).
The Complex Unity workshop also follows a logic that moves from developing an understanding of people’s resistances in the face of violence to connecting and linking these resistances. The workshop underscores that the very act of sharing one’s own, and listening to others’, stories of violence and resistance is a tremendously important move toward solidarity, especially given the many different forces that keep people silent about interpersonal violence. The act of sharing our stories of resistance is itself valorized as an act of coalition, in that in hearing each other’s stories one might begin to think of one’s own resistance as linked to others, without erasing the differences between the forms that these resistances might take (2). Indeed, the workshop asks people to listen to each other very carefully, without presupposing that they know what each other’s resistance could or should be. As the workshop explains:
Keep yourself open to what she [the resistor] is saying. You are trying to understand her, well enough to speak to her and to be her companion in struggle. Avoid thinking “I know just what you mean, the same thing happened to me” and also avoid thinking “that doesn’t make any sense.” We are trying to recover together things that may be very difficult to understand, things for which society makes no space as part of the harm done to us. Ask her questions trying to keep the conversation going and trying to understand even if there is much that you don’t quite understand yet: give her room! Maybe there is a little detail you noticed and if you ask her more about it, she will tell you and that will help understanding and help becoming closer. (2–3)
Complex Unity concludes with each person making a liberatory gift to be put on another person’s altar in the room. This gift is something tangible; it is “a token of our understanding and commitment to her well-being and to joining in struggle together” (3). The gift, in the workshop’s framing, represents a transformation of our resistant selves in a coalitional vein, toward “growing as women in struggle that are open to hear what is not already in us, what we may have imagined” (3).
Several of EPN’s workshops are geared toward generating conversation and engagement about the barriers that keep communities isolated and fragmented from each other. The Map of Oppression workshop, for example, asks people to draw “roads” to other oppressed communities on the maps they created and think about both the possibilities and difficulties of traveling along these roads. In response to this prompt, one woman explained that what makes her road to others so difficult to travel is that “I don’t have any time. I have to take care of my children and work all day serving tables at the restaurant. I haven’t got the time to go anywhere other than the places that are obligatory” (3). This woman’s example speaks to the ways that oppressive systems (in this instance, the gendered division of labor and the structure of the American workday) create conditions in which it is very hard to seek each other out in and for solidarity. One straight man explained that he has difficulty traveling along roads that lead to nonstraight people because “I am revolted by seeing men kissing or embracing each other.” Another man living in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood said that what makes his road to Puerto Rican neighborhoods difficult is his perception that “the Puerto Ricans don’t want us in their neighborhoods” (3). These second two examples speak to the ways that negative evaluations and perceptions fostered by the dominant culture work as barriers toward building deep coalition with each other.
As participants consider a variety of barriers, the workshop asks them to imagine themselves walking on those rough roads toward other oppressed people on the map, bringing liberatory gifts to each other. These gifts, in the framing of The Map of Oppression, are “things you have learned that go against what the powerful want from you that work in undermining their power” (Lugones, n.d., 4). For example, one woman shared that her gift to others on her map was teaching Spanish to her kids, and speaking it at home so they “grow up proud of their culture” (4). Another woman’s gift to her family was modeling resistance to gendered roles in the family: “Everyone in my family expects me to do everything for them and I tell them that they are going to do their own wash” (4). In conceiving of her refusal to do the laundry, a refusal to be taken for granted, as a gift, she was turning the dominant framing of housework as a gendered duty or as an act of love for the family on its head: the resistant gift was not to do the laundry so as to model moving against such demands.
Coalitional solidarity can sometimes be blocked by issue-based politics grounded in self-interest. Indeed, a dominant conception of “political work” in the United States is that people come together on an issue that affects them personally. One of EPN’s workshops, Fragmentation: A Workshop on the Political Uses of Popular Education (Lugones, n.d.), takes up this problem directly. In its overview of fragmentation as a problem, the workshop notes that, often, when one is doing political work, it seems that “no one cares about what your group is doing except for people who are directly affected by the problems your work addresses” (3). It suggests that the problem is partly rooted in the fact that grassroots political organizing in the United States is so often grounded in an appeal to self-interest. Such organizing “defines the issues and the group very narrowly and a hostility or indifference is cultivated or simply allowed to foster with respect to other issues and other groups” (3). Organizations working on particular issues, such as police brutality, violence against women, or LGBTQ rights, often work in isolation from one another, with little sustained analysis of each other’s struggles (3).3 Given this mode of doing political work, the conditions in which coalition can be formed are limited, occurring only when the self-interests of different groups coincide. Further, these kinds of coalitions are often short-lived, ending when a particular goal or outcome is reached. This is especially true when group interest is conceived in a monolithic way, without considering the deep heterogeneity of groups along lines of class, race, sexuality, age, nationality, language, gender, and ability.
Indeed, in contemporary politics in the United States, deep coalitional solidarity is tremendously difficult even in the midst of grassroots political movement. Popular education in a deep coalitional vein works to change this direction in political culture by asking, in the words of the Fragmentation workshop, “What keeps us from each other? What do we know about each other? Who fed us that information? How can we get to know each other better? What can we bring to the meeting in terms of knowledge of resistance?” (3).
A central aspect of the coalitional approach to popular education is close collective attention to the issue of how people treat each other within communities and in everyday relationships, with the aim of fostering new and better ways of treating each other in the face of homophobic, racist, sexist, and economic oppressions. Such an approach draws on popular education’s tradition of highlighting the importance of transforming our everyday modes and practices of relating to one another. For Freire, for example, undercutting hierarchies between teachers and students in classrooms and elsewhere holds the possibility of deeply transforming our social and political life. In Tennessee, Highlander challenged segregation and Jim Crow laws in the South in the 1950s and 1960s by establishing the school as an integrated space where blacks and whites ate, lived, talked, and thought together in a non-hierarchical space (Horton 1998, 134). EPN shares with this popular education tradition a commitment to such resistant relationality and to creating environments in which non-hierarchical relationships can be enacted and sustained. While popular education in the Freirian and Highlander traditions primarily emphasizes fostering non-hierarchical relationships between groups and communities (for example, between teachers and students in Freire’s case and between blacks and whites in the Highlander model), a coalitional approach to popular education addresses how to foster transformational relationships within communities complexly shaped by multiple lines of power.
Exemplifying this approach, the Un Nuevo Camino workshop begins with the assertion that “communities are only as strong as the relationships that we build with each other” (Lugones and Benfield, n.d., 1). The workshop proceeds by asking people to discuss the question, “What is it to treat another person well?” At one iteration of the workshop that took place with Latinas in the Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago, participants responded to this question with a wide range of thoughts and insights. Some focused on the importance of challenging hierarchy in relationships as a component of strong relationships, with responses such as “he or she treats me as an equal”; “we share responsibilities everywhere: taking care of the children, in the house, doing politics, on the job”; and “he or she asks for my opinion and takes it seriously.” Other responses highlight the importance of care, appreciation, and fun in being treated well: “He or she treats me to little things, like bringing me a cup of coffee”; “We take care of each other in ways that are not demeaning”; “We do not take each other for granted. We appreciate each other and what each one of us does”; “We have fun together, we are playful and know how to relax with each other” (2). Also, for some, being treated well meant that there was space to be different, as well as space to change. As one participant explained:
When someone treats me well, I can explore, experiment, and change without fear of the relationship ending. That we both change is a part of the relationship, for example, I can go to school to get my High School diploma or for other studies; [t]here is room for agreement and disagreement between us. There is room and enough trust that we can criticize each other in a well-meaning way, instead of not saying anything when we see what appears to us as a mistake. (2)
Finally, people noted that being treated well means not being oppressed or abused. After discussing what it means to be treated well, the Nuevo Camino workshop moves to collective analysis of ways that participants are actually treated in their lives, as well as to the consequences of being treated well and being treated poorly. For example, several people mentioned that their husbands did not help out with responsibilities at home, which meant that they were solely responsible for all the housework and the childcare. Further, they talked about being seen as people who take care of other people and not people with their own individual needs. Others discussed not being listened to or being controlled, battered, and abused (2–3). As one participant noted: “When we compare how Latinas are treated in our community with what we believe it is to treat someone well, the situation seems very sad. There is such a great difference!” (4).
The workshop also explores the impact on people’s lives of being treated well or being treated badly. When a person is treated poorly, in the words of the workshop, one may become “someone who lacks self-respect, a person accustomed to take beatings and insults or someone who is destructive of herself or those who have less power than her” (4). Further, one may become less creative, accustomed to obeying orders, or constantly angry. In contrast, the workshop notes that being respected, appreciated, and treated well often leads people to be more creative in their lives. Under these relational conditions, “life becomes something good and happy, worth living. One feels active, a person with dignity. One takes care of oneself and one’s ideas, growth, health, physical appearance because one has self-respect and one is appreciated. One thinks of nice things to do” (3).
In the workshop, participants, most of whom were members of community organizations, considered what it would look like if their community organizations directed political energy to working toward strong and caring relationships among its members. For most groups, it would mean a significant shift in political direction. Reflecting on his popular education work, Myles Horton writes: “I believed in changing society by first changing individuals, so that they could then struggle to bring about social changes” (1997, 184). In EPN’s workshop, the emphasis is on exploring what it might take to transform relationships so as to effect social change. Structures of sexism, racism, homophobia, and economic oppression, among others, have conditioned us to treat each other badly; the work of becoming companions in resistance requires that we need to unlearn this training and practice treating each other well.
Key to the praxis of popular education is a rejection of top-down modes of political analysis or movement-building. In focusing on people’s resistance to oppressive ways of being, these EPN workshops work against the tendency in much political organizing to provide the “answers.” Indeed, by conceiving of movement toward social change as grounded in people’s everyday acts of resistance and leaving the concept of resistance open ended, participants can take it up in ways that make sense to their own lives and situations. For example, instead of explaining what “resistance” might mean, the workshops give concrete and extremely varied examples of things that other people have identified about their own resistant ways of being.
In EPN, Lugones and the other collective members worked to develop a coalitional approach to popular education grounded in sustained and radical rethinking and a redoing of our relationships with one another. This approach pivots on the possibility of learning to see and appreciate ways that people resist inequitable power relations, even if these resistances might seem mundane, nonpolitical, or even criminal. Further, the approach invites us to think closely about the specificity of each other’s lives and contexts, and to look for ways we might keep each other’s resistant selves company, a company that can encourage, amplify, and sustain the possibility of deep and lasting social change. Finally, such an approach entails figuring out ways to treat each other well in our relationships and communities in the face of oppressive institutions and structures that would have us do otherwise.
Although this chapter has focused on the workshop setting as a place to learn and practice a coalitional approach to popular education, the practice is by no means restricted to such settings. Indeed, it is in our everyday lives—in our conversations, in our work with each other in a variety of settings, in our relationships—that such resistant companionship is lived. Popular education is a mode of political engagement that takes up the tremendous cultural and political power of collective analysis and turns us toward each other rather than to movement leaders for the possibility of change; coalitional popular education in particular turns us toward each other in a way that takes up the complexity of our lives and our communities and affirms the transformative capacity of our resistant practices.
1.See Scott (1990) and Kelley (1996) for more on the politics of everyday resistance. In Wild Garden, Dian Marino calls such resistant practices “cracks in consent” (1998, 22). Those in the dominant position often want to downplay these cracks.
2.Paulo Freire, for example, discusses the use of codes as a tool for collective analysis in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000).
3.For example, the work of the violence against women movement and the movement against police brutality often work and have worked in isolation—and sometimes at odds—from and with one another. One of the important interventions of the Incite! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence collective has been to link these two organizing efforts (Incite! Women of Color Against Violence 2006).
Beltré, Mildred, Cricket Keating, Laura DuMond Kerr, María Lugones, Rafael Mutis, Joshua Price, and Julia Schiavone Camacho. 1999. Politicizing the Everyday. Workshop prepared for the Escuela Popular Norteña.
Beltré, Mildred, Maria Benfield, Julia Schiavone Camacho, Laura DuMond Kerr, Aurelia Flores, Marta Garcia, Sarah Hoagland, Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz, Cricket Keating, Suzanne LaGrande, María Lugones, Rudiah Primariantari. n.d. Complex Unity. Workshop prepared for the Escuela Popular Norteña. EPN archives, Valdez, NM.
Escuela Popular Norteña. n.d. Mission Statement. EPN archives, Valdez, NM.
Escuela Popular Norteña. 1994. Popular Education Seminar Overview. EPN archives, Valdez, NM.
———. 1998. Complex Unity. Workshop prepared for the Escuela Popular Norteña. EPN archives, Valdez, NM.
Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury.
Graciano, Hector, María Lugones, Joshua Price, and Ricardo Santos. n.d. Coalition: Linking Contexts of Resistance. Workshop prepared for the Escuela Popular Norteña. EPN archives, Valdez, NM.
Horton, Myles, with Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl. 1997. The Long Haul: An Autobiography. New York: Teachers College Press.
Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. 2006. The Color of Violence: Incite! Anthology. Boston: South End Press.
Kelley, Robin D.G. 1996. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: The Free Press.
Lugones, María. n.d. The Map of Oppression: A Workshop on the Creation of Liberatory Awareness. Workshop prepared for the Escuela Popular Norteña. EPN archives, Valdez, NM.
Lugones, María, and Dalida María Benfield. n.d. Un Nuevo Camino. Workshop prepared for the Escuela Popular Norteña. EPN archives, Valdez, NM.
Lugones, María, Hector Graciano, Joshua Price, and Ricardo Santos. n.d. Fragmentation: A Workshop on the Political Uses of Popular Education. Workshop prepared for the Escuela Popular Norteña. EPN archives, Valdez, NM.
Marino, Dian. 1998. The Wild Garden: Art, Education, and the Culture of Resistance. Toronto: Between the Lines Press.
Scott, James. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.