"Renaciendo esperanzas" /"Reviving hope": Popular educator perspectives on literacy, development, and social transformation in northern Mexico

Abstract

This study explores the perspectives and practices of literacy, development, and social transformation of popular educators in the northern desert region of Mexico. The focus of the study is one group of practitioners who founded a non-governmental organization (NGO) known as the Centro de Educación al Apoyo de la Producción y al Medio Ambiente-Parras (CEP-Parras) and who have been involved in grassroots adult education and social action in the North of Mexico since the early 1980s. Their community-based work is situated within a context of policy discourses about international education and development where more than half a billion adults are classified as functionally "illiterate," and where widespread literacy education is portrayed as a key factor in stimulating economic, social, and political "development" among so-called "underdeveloped" societies. ^ Based on oral histories with the CEP educators combined with data collected during nine months of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, I found that CEP educators enacted a complicated, multi-layered stance on literacy that emphasized reading and writing centered on the life practice and experience, or the "literacies of life," of the people with whom they worked. They also placed emphasis on small-scale economic development practices that were situated within the everyday lives of participants and that involved a learning-by-doing approach that integrated oral reflection, writing, and concrete action. Their approach to community-based development was closely linked to their approach to social transformation, where they emphasized the search for "coherence" between theory and practice and where they worked to organize communities across the region, not only through commercial networks but also through the construction of desert-based identities using music, photography, and poetry. At the center of the CEP educators' work was a process of participatory research or sistematización (systematization), where they methodically analyzed, wrote about, published and disseminated accounts of their activities, in collaboration with the people involved in their projects and programs. The findings of this study have implications for researchers and practitioners in literacy, adult education, and community development, both in international and U.S.-based contexts. ^