Democracy Ateneo Announcement 09-12-15

Compañer@s,
We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, September 12, from 2 - 5 p.m. at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) to resume our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below.
More and more people in struggle recognize the importance of learning and research as they claim the future in the present. By learning we mean an effort to go beyond dominant institutions of education to self-organize and share the knowledges necessary to regenerate community. People are reclaiming "age-old competences" as well as sharing skills, convivial tools, and local knowledges that are vital to revitalizing our social networks and community institutions. Two examples are worth mentioning.
Over the summer Creciendo Juntos convened the second annual Programa de Verano. Designed as an alternative to the mainstream school system, the Programa de Verano facilitated a three week program that served over seventy local youth and twenty adults from San Jose's Mayfair district to advance their academic skills, access multiple knowledges of local families, and celebrate the cultures and traditions from several parts of Mexico. It is worth noting that the Programa de Verano is organized entirely by mothers and a few volunteers in a deliberate effort to confront the worst effects and expose the violent aspects of the mainstream school system. In this project, the women of the Mayfair community in conjunction with Somos Mayfair address the institutional indifference of the school system's district office that fails to provide adequate translation for Spanish speaking youth and parents, denies access to public space for families, and administers a school day that criminalizes local area youth while at the same time refusing to provide them the necessary skills in reading, writing, ciphering, and communicating either in English or Spanish. As an alternative, the Programa de Verano co-generated a "curriculum" drawing from the many skills, knowledges, and cultural practices of mothers who claim different parts of Mexico as well as volunteers who also shared expertise in several "content areas." The "learning outcomes" were articulated through a family literacy approach that draws from the everyday experiences of folks in struggle and revives the age-old competency of reading out loud. The Programa de Verano also became the opportunity for several partnerships to emerge as in the collaboration with Veggielution and the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA). Veggielution, a six acre community farm, served as the site for a variety of classes that combined literacy with folklórico and cooking as well as healthful eating through locally grown produce. 
A second related project also convened over the summer is eco-versities, a gathering of almost sixty people from close to twenty countries committed to share what each has learned about how politically potent and necessary alternative learning spaces and grassroots research has been and can be in the current moment. In August Eco-versities gathered a network of old friends and soon-to-be friends at Tamera, a long-standing healing biotope situated in southern Portugal. The eco-versities convergence at Tamera confronted a number of critical questions including asking how do we manage the tensions between honest efforts to reform and reclaim the educational system and those spaces that are prepared to abandon the formal system of education for its unquestioned commitment to colonial administration. How can spaces of learning confront the multiple violences, e.g. colonial, imperial, neoliberal, and racial, that impact communities reclaiming place-based knowledges while also fighting to protect commons?  Can alternative learning spaces be sites to construct an alternative to capitalist social relations? On a more practical level, we also asked ourselves to what extent are we an extended community of learners, a network of politically committed projects, and or an informal grouping of friends. To address these and other questions that emerged during the six day gathering, eco-versities attempted an "un-conference," an effort to collectively hold a space in the immediate moment and beyond as a space of reflection, care, and sharing to support the projects and communities represented in the space. Thus, we were able to share several "convivial tools" such as the taghmees social kitchen, a moment to dip deeper and immerse ourselves more fully into the social life around us to create a shared culture of struggle. (see, taghmees.org) 
Tamera and the eco-versities "un-conference" also became a critical moment of convergence for Universidad de la Tierra Oaxaca and Universidad de la Tierra Califas. As a network of friends and a community of insurgent learners, Universidad de la Tierra convenes alternative learning spaces to confront and supersede the intersecting violences of the current phase of capitalism, especially the urban and rural extractivism that currently threatens vulnerable zones throughout Greater Mexico. We recognize the high intensity of low intensity war and the impact it has in a critical moment of political decomposition that results from the "reign of impunity" as is the case in Oaxaca. The ongoing attacks organized against the CNTE and other voices of opposition are a pretext, or the "use of the law to establish illegality" as Gustavo Esteva suggests, to serve the violent and venal interests of corporations. (see, G. Esteva, "The Storm in Oaxaca") It is in the context of a war across Greater Mexico that we learn together how we can reclaim and put to use convivial tools such as asamblea, cargo, tequio, to confront the violences taking place in local areas. As we walk with struggles that claim local place based knowledges, how do we move from rural to urban zones as well as from the "global south" to the "global north" and still stay rooted? Can our efforts at "technology transfer," the circulating of struggles and tools across contexts, contribute to necessary intercultural dialogues required of us as we learn together and construct the alternative?
Both projects, Programa de Verano and Eco-versities, and by extension Universidad de la Tierra, take seriously the critical role of learning in our claiming political struggle. Together these insurgent learning spaces reclaim what Ivan Illich referred to as the vernacular. For Illich, the vernacular was an attempt to find a language "to designate the activities of people when they are not motivated by thoughts of exchange, a word that denotes autonomous, non-market related actions through which people satisfy everyday needs --the actions that by their very nature escape bureaucratic control, satisfying needs to which, in the very process, they give specific shape." More to the point, "by speaking about vernacular language and the possibility of its recuperation," explains Illich, "I am trying to bring into awareness and discussion the existence of a vernacular mode of being, doing, and making that in a desirable future society might again expand in all aspects of life." The vernacular works itself out in various convivial tools. Even the most basic convivial tool can help reweave the social fabric as was the case in the Programa de Verano where the family literacy program highlighted the age old competence of reading out loud. "Habitual reading in a loud voice produces social effects," insists Illich. "It is an extraordinarily effective way," he adds, "of teaching the art to those who look over the reader's shoulder; rather than being confined to a sublime or sublimated form of self satisfaction, it promotes community intercourse; it actively leads to common digestion of and comment on the passages read." (see, I. Illich, "Vernacular Values") It is convivial tools that we invent together and those that we reclaim that creates a new space outside of capital. “In our culture, in the political culture that we need today," Raul Zibechi adds, "the tequio (community work) and the tianguis (public markets), which were the hitching posts, must play an important role, because they are traditions, the political cultural traditions of resistance belonging to our continent, which have something to say in this history.” (see, Zibechi: "Emancipating the peoples is necessary for a change") How can we, to borrow a phrase from our friends Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Prakash, "escape education" and in the same movement reclaim learning?
South Bay and North Bay Crew 

NB: If you are not already signed-up and would like to stay connected with the emerging Universidad de la Tierra Califas community please feel free to subscribe to the Universidad de la Tierra Califas listserve at the following url <https://lists.resist.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unitierracalifas>. Also, if you would like to review previous Democracy Ateneo and Social Factory Ateneo announcements and summaries as well as additional information on the ateneo in general please see <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org/ateneo>. Please note we have altered the schedule of the Democracy Ateneo so that it falls on the second Saturday of the month.