Popular Education in the Ends and Means of Empowerment: Peasants in Indigenous Mexico

Abstract

Empowerment holds a special appeal for organizations and funders involved in rural development, but its meaning and long-term usefulness for target communities remain unresolved theoretically and inconsistent in practice. This article proposes that empowerment be rooted in the daily language and life experiences of target communities if it is to realize its potential significance as an ongoing, individual and shared process that reaches beyond the short-term, goal-oriented rubric of many development projects. Rural perceptions of empowerment are explored and a locally resonant language is adopted for participatory group discussions of community development, capacity-building, and human dignity in an indigenous community of Oaxaca, Mexico. Integrating local understandings of empowerment with ethnographic descriptions of local reality as seen by community residents, a set of dimensions and indicators of empowerment is designed through community participation, in order to provide a snapshot of the subjective and objective processes that impact daily life in the community of El Oro. The authors suggest that such a tool can be put to service by the community as a self-assessment in order to graphically depict one moment in the empowerment process and consolidate collective and individual efforts to promote reflection on the nature of social change.

Keywords:

• popular education
• empowerment
• perceptions
• participation
• social change

Acknowledgements

This research was carried out with complementary grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, TAD-Wageningen University, and the Fondos Mixtos-Chiapas (FOMIX CHIS-2009-09-18) from CONACYT. The authors are very grateful to Dr. Paul Richards and Dr. Conny Almekinders of Wageningen University for their revision, feedback and support in the development of this article.

Notes

^†Pitfalls and Possibilities for Understanding Empowerment in a Community of Oaxaca.

¹The identification was done as follows: listing as the identification of elements or ideas from a brain storm; clustering as the defining of small groups or bunch out of a big list of elements; scoring as the number of points or votes given to each element of a group; ranking as the process of positioning (placing) items such as individuals, groups, or businesses on an ordinal scale in relation to others. A list arranged in this way is said to be in rank order.