Juan Areli Bernal

In northeastern Mexico, Juan Areli is promoting the revival of the Mixe culture among its young people through a community-based education model that reintegrates native traditions and values into the curriculum.

Soon after the United Nations proclaimed a Decade of Indigenous Peoples in 1995, Rigoberta Menchu, the Nobel prize-winning Guatemalan indigenous activist, said that the task of generating respect for such cultures lay in the hands of the indigenous peoples themselves and that it would never successfully be accomplished by governments. Juan Areli is leading a drive to preserve and revitalize his native Mixe culture in northeastern Mexico. The Mixe are one of Mexico's 56 indigenous groups who together comprise about ten percent of the country's population. According to an official 1990 census, there are about 95,000 Mixe, most of whom are poor and rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. Their communal identity has been weakened by the departure of many of its young people who migrate to the cities and suppress their ethnicity.Juan is demonstrating that the Mixe culture can successfully be reinvigorated through a system of education that nurtures cultural appreciation and pride in its children while consciously preparing them to succeed in the outside world. If native cultures are to be preserved, their youth must not be forced to choose between success and their heritage, and that insight is fundamental to Juan's work. Only by providing education and opportunities for advancement can communities prevent their youth from fleeing to pursue their dreams in the city. Juan focuses on the school as the setting for his work, and he has developed a curriculum model for Mixe students that provides instruction in their community's values, traditions, language and agricultural techniques while it prepares them with the practical skills and professional training they need to participate in the Mexican economy. His goal is to educate students to become confident professional adults with strong cultural identities, who will simultaneously promote the region's economic and cultural development. By demonstrating that economic and social progress is possible within the Mixe culture, Juan is building a model for the long-term promotion of indigenous cultures everywhere.

The problem that the Mixe community faces has affected all the indigenous communities in the country. The predominance of mainstream Mexican culture has brought about a devaluing of the indigenous culture and the mother tongue, as well as racial discrimination by the majority population in Mexico. Since most of Mexico's successful development has been centered in the cities, where the influence of mainstream culture is strongest, indigenous culture is frequently associated with backwardness and poverty. This causes indigenous peoples, and especially the youth, to feel ashamed of and hampered by their heritage, which becomes something to escape in order to achieve the success that others have.

In its attempts to resolve these problems, the government has created bodies such as the Department of Indigenous Education and the National Indigenous Institute. However, these have failed to intervene effectively. Though the Department has stated an intent to provide bilingual and bicultural schooling, its teachers are not adequately prepared to provide this kind of education. The Institute has not served the educational sector but has become another member of government bureaucracies that have failed to make meaningful connections with the indigenous populations they were theoretically organized to serve.

Juan Areli has created the Kong Oy Mixe Community Institute, which acts as a teaching, research and service center and attends to the educational challenges of the Mixe community. It is staffed by twelve professionals, who volunteer their teaching services. Mixe-speaking teachers create a bicultural and bilingual setting where Mixe cultural themes are introduced into the school curriculum, beginning at the primary education level, so that even before children begin considering future career choices, they have the benefit of learning about their culture in an environment that is committed to their success. Young people from all over the region, which includes more than 100 settlements north of Oaxaca, can come to study at the center and acquire the skills needed to begin technical careers and prepare for future professional training. Although the curricula are suited to a number of fields, special attention is given to those professions that are most needed for the region's development. In addition to educating students, Juan has developed a training process to prepare a corps of teachers who can apply the bicultural model to indigenous education throughout Mexico.

Perhaps Juan Areli's greatest achievement is having motivated the entire community–including the municipal and traditional authorities–to support him in all of his petitions. After a great struggle, the state government and the Secretary of Public Education permitted the Mixe community to adopt a program which includes Mixe reading and writing, human development, Mixe music and sports within the formal, official schooling. The entire community participates in designing the curriculum, proposing their own plans and study programs. The school seeks to provide a service to the community, which responds by lending its expertise in areas of agricultural, philosophical and artistic technique.

While in the short term Juan Areli is continuing to improve the current instruction, his long-term vision is focused on the establishment of a university for both Mixe young people and youth from other ethnic groups. The institute already has the needed land and the classrooms will be built with funds raised by the Board of Trustees. The list of proposed careers to be offered includes teaching, ethno-linguistics, health, community law, traditional medicine and branches of alternative technology.

Juan Areli is a determined fighter for the rights of indigenous peoples. He has great respect for his people and stresses the value of community traditions.

From an early age, upon seeing the poverty of his family and his village, he became determined to do something to help his people progress when he became older. Through years of successful education, he never abandoned the idea of returning to the country and his Mixe land, and he directed all of his studies toward solving the agricultural problems faced by his community.

Just before graduating, he suffered an accident, which permanently placed him in a wheelchair. Despite that, and despite two years in the hospital, he graduated as an agricultural engineer and decided to work in the village in a governmental office dedicated to rural development, using his degree and teaching young people different cultivation techniques. However, he soon realized that the most serious threat to his community was cultural, and that this problem could only be solved once the relationship between economic development and cultural preservation was understood.