Anahuacalmecac - A practice of dignity

Education, Autonomy and Anahuac (www.semillasdelpueblo.org)

The continuity of the government sanctioned, publicly funded, community-based Native charter school first established in 2002, by Semillas del Pueblo, is in jeopardy of dissolution by a failed government bureaucracy.  Stopping this travesty requires coordinated, sustained and strategic intervention by all members of our community. We are students, educators, parents and elders of the original peoples of this continent Anahuac. Our school, Anahuacalmecac, International University Preparatory, is the fruit of a multigenerational struggle for social change led by students and workers, mothers and fathers, masses and movements. We are rooted by this social struggle as an organic institution dedicated to continual social transformation for the betterment of our community and the world. Anahuacalmecac is a vision of autonomy and dignity cultivated through inquiry and consciousness. Clearly, the best defense of our dignity is a strident assertion of our autonomy, both as citizens and as Indigenous Peoples.

Semillas mobilization at LACOE HQ

When our self-determined assertion of dignity and autonomy contradicts their mythic conceptions of Indigenous Peoples as insignificant relics to be toyed with by boy scouts in backyard campouts, those who oppose our continuity reengage in the politics of invasion. Concretely, a single, undemocratically appointed member swings the balance of power to the right on the Los Angeles County Office of Education Board of Education (LACOE BOE). As a widely recognized, extremist, right-wing reactionary on the Board of Education, Doug Boyd serves to stigmatize progressive policies and their proponents.  Led by yet another, undemocratically appointed Superintendent, Dr. Arturo Delgado, the bloated bureaucracy of LACOE disconnects its divisions of constituent services from its moral obligation to serve in the best interests of the children of the County of Los Angeles.  Supported by a hydra-headed division of Educational Services that in turn manages the Charter Schools Office (CSO), the bureaucratic dysfunctional incompetence functions exactly as it should to serve the ideological needs of its leadership. Under the reign of negligence of Yolanda Benitez, Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services, the CSO favors only the ideologically aligned incompetence of free-market inspired, libertarian designed, cookie-cutter, teach-to-the-test Bush-era educational enterprises. Semillas del Pueblo, embodied by the autocthonous aspirations of a future of freedom for our seventh generation through the practice of freedom now. Anahuacalmecac is to continue to be a practice of dignity for the dignified in contradiction to the destiny others would have tracked our youth into.  

As indigenous peoples and persons, self-determination is by definition relative and in practice, brokered within the contexts of reality. Anahuacalmecac International University Preparatory is a practice of self-determination dedicated to social transformation through the strategic advancement of our youth beyond the barriers of higher education typically found in public schooling. The autonomy of Anahuacalmecac assures the community it is responsive to that the pedagogy of the curriculum and school culture will yield graduates conscious of our shared obligations to each other, community, Mother Earth and all our relations. Those who seek our demise are among the most anti-democratic and politically exclusionary individuals in the world today. Opponents of Anahuacalmecac’s continuity indeed seek to disrupt our collective memory, mute our collective voices, and bury our collective existence – even as we live and thrive under the oppressive reality of normalcy in public schools. To them, our conscious existence as a demographic majority is an anguishing reminder of our successful resistance to genocide at the hands of their ancestors, and of the future empowerment of our children as the masters of their own destinies. Indeed, Anahuacalmecac is about the future, as we see it, as we build it.

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