Introductory Talk with Slides
Ruta de las Haciendas en el 
Corazón de México tour
Ricardo Navarro and Angelica Vega
Mon, Aug 17, 3pm 
Teatro Santa Ana
Free

Touring haciendas in the heart of Mexico

“Ruta de las Haciendas en el Corazón de México” tours promote local development; rescue the cultural, historic and community-spiritual heritage; and create opportunities for sustainable economic and social development.

You will get to know the “Hacienda de las Monjas” from the Sautto family clan. It has an area for breeding cattle, with a workshop where they recycle all the materials of the neighborhood and with the warmness of the master’s house.

From there we go to the marvelous “Hacienda San Juan Pan de Arriba” to explore the diverse objects collected by the family for many generations. We then have a gourmet experience of true mole made locally with an ancient recipe.

For a great finale, we go to the “Hacienda la Jaula” property that belongs to the Vertiz Peña. In every charming corner you feel the warmth of this great family. They treat you to an excellent meal prepared with traditional recipes, then we go to the tuna factory where they process prickly pear cactus.

Free tickets are available at the theater; limited space.







Lecture
Educational Philosophy 
of Paulo Freire
Tue, Aug 18, 11am–1pm 
Teatro Santa Ana
Biblioteca Publica
Insurgentes 25
60 pesos

Sinners, saints and streetkids
By Peter Lownds

Paulo Freire Desnortear, a Portuguese verb meaning to turn from the north, is what Paulo Freire would have called a “generative word” which brings the world into focus. It also means to mislead, bewilder or confuse. If you refer to people as desnorteado, you call their sanity into question.

Paulo Freire was forced to leave Brazil in 1964. The charge: subversion. The crime: teaching the oppressed to read and vote. Desnorteado, he wandered west to La Paz where the rarefied air did his smoker’s lungs no favors and then south to Santiago where he reunited with his family and a mobile “think tank” of exiled Brazilian intellectuals.

He wrote two books at the time, Education as the Practice of Freedom and Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which put him back on the world education map and headed him north again—first to Harvard and then to Geneva and the World Council of Churches where he worked for the next dozen years.

Freire’s stint as Secretary of Education of the São Paulo Municipality (1989-91) excepted, he spent much of his time on the road. He encountered the key question of what happens when the language of the educator is not the same as that of the oppressed?

Freire’s theoretical language is polysyllabic and his writing is discursive and demanding. He is also a poet and a storyteller with an eye for telling detail and an ear for common speech. When he started working at SESI (Social Service for Industry) in Recife in the late forties and early fifties, he collided with the culture and language of poor and non-literate people, just as he would later in São Tomé and Principe and Guinea-Bissau, where the residue of colonial Portuguese is mixed with tribal tongues.

Northeast Brazilian folk culture is a hybrid, at once fatalistic and mordantly humorous, a culture of survivors whom the vicissitudes of life without a net have made tough as leather. The 300 peasants in the interior village of Angicos, Rio Grande do Norte whom Freire and his research assistants taught to read in a month in 1963, are now the grandparents and great-grandparents of unlettered children. Sugarcane sharecroppers do not have much time to read.

The border consciousness of a self-styled “pilgrim of the obvious” like Freire provides balance. The party he helped found 25 years ago has managed, finally, to put a man with hybrid, peasant roots in charge of the hemisphere’s second largest nation. Their widespread hunger for social justice comes from 500 years of the rich riding unselfconsciously on the backs of the poor.

Freire tirelessly stressed that teachers are also learners. The periphery, traditionally cast in the role of grateful recipient of the superior knowledge of developed nations, has dared to talk back to its “teacher.” Our future may depend on how well we listen and whether we decide to participate, as learners and teachers, in the progressive and life-affirming work begun there.



Peter Lownds has a Ph.D. in social science and comparative education and co-founded the Paulo Freire Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles. This article is from a presentation at the Comparative and International Education Society conference in New Orleans on March 13, 2003.