Calming the spirit and ensuring super-vivencia: rural Mexican women-centred teaching and learning spaces

Abstract

The changing social, cultural and economic conditions of transmigrant communities in rural Mexico require that women who stay behind, while their loved ones travel back and forth to the USA, create social relations that ensure their survival. From over five years of ethnographic research, this article explores the healing potential of women-centred teaching and learning spaces. By juxtaposing Ortega y Gasset's notion of vivencia – to live – with hooks' idea of collective healing and drawing on empirical data from Mexican rural women's convivencias (gatherings; coexistence), the author analyses the relationship between the mutual coexistence transpiring in women's gatherings and their survival (super-vivencia).

Keywords:

• Mexican women
• pedagogies
• social relations
• transmigration
• survival
• coexistence

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to some dear friends and colleagues, Doug Foley, Rick Meyer, Melissa Moreno, Ann Nihlen, Tryphenia Peele-Eady, Juan de Dios Pineda, Tracy Stevens, and Sofia Villenas for the insightful conversations and comments that led to the development of this article.

Notes

1. From The Oxford Spanish Dictionary (2003). Third Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 211 and 770. Note that sobrevivir is the verb and super-vivencia (also referred to as sobrevivencia) the noun – the act of sobrevivir. Throughout the article I choose to hyphenate the word super-vivencia, so as to highlight both the commonly understood definition of merely surviving and the literal translation and understanding of going beyond survival, which is the intent of this paper.

2. People's names and places have been changed.

3. A lengthier discussion of the communities' transformation and the effects of global restructuring on women who stayed behind appear elsewhere (Trinidad Galván 2008).

4. PLAMAC's aim, in their various projects, was the development and education of poor communities and its populace. Elsewhere, I discuss the effects the organisation had on the lives, community work and personal development of women who participated and led the SSGs (Trinidad Galván 2005). In that discussion, I address specifically the education and community work that resulted from this group of women's participation in the SSGs and with PLAMAC.