Own education and struggles for autonomy: organizational experiences of the indigenous peoples of the CRIC, EZLN and CAM

Abstract

This article is the result of a doctoral study that addressed three indigenous communities in Mexico, Colombia and Chile: the Zapatistas, the Nasa and the Mapuche, together with their political organizations (Zapatista Army of National Liberation, Indigenous Regional Council of Cauca, and Coordinating Committee of Communities in Conflict Arauco-Malleco). Its approach was carried out, methodologically, in the light of the experimentation called situated epistemology, a qualitative and theoretical-analytical convergence structured on three critical-analytical axes: translation, the expanded present, and the widening of the gaze. The article focuses its attention on two convergent processes that  are part of  the constant struggles of these indigenous communities: the struggle for autonomy, which translates into self-determination and self-government, and the exercise of territorial sovereignty, which translates into exercises of self-education. This type of education does not only refer to bilingual education (Spanish-indigenous languages); it is fundamentally a process of liberation-recovery by recovering what lost from the beginning of the invasion of 1492 to the present.