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“The teachers were racist, they discriminated against their students, they said that they had learning problems, that they didn’t study because they missed a lot of school, and that the parents didn’t insist on them because they didn’t care about anything. “They had a contemptuous attitude.” This is how teacher Mónica Zidarich sums up what happened in the 1980s in El Sauzalito, a small town in the Chaco region of northern Argentina, inhabited mainly by Wichí indigenous people.
Back then, children repeated first grade several times or dropped out of school for a simple reason: their teachers spoke Spanish and they spoke Wichí. “Nobody had thought about learning the language because their mission was for the children to learn Spanish,” explains the 60-year-old education graduate.
At 22, she moved with a husband and a baby from the city of Córdoba, a thousand miles away, to teach in the place she knew as a teenager. He arrived not knowing exactly what he would find or imagining that he would be laying the foundation for bilingual education years before it became mandatory.
Mónica Zidarich with Daniel Palacios, one of her first students and now a bilingual teacher. SEBASTIAN SALGUERO
Zidarich says that he learned Wichí “the hard way” and that he was confronted with prejudice, resistance and great loneliness. Twenty-eight years later, he believes it was worth it: the children who failed in school are now bilingual intercultural teachers and even ministry officials trying to change the fate of a historically dominated people.
El Sauzalito is located in El Impenetrable, the second green lung of South America, in the middle of the mountains, on the banks of the Bermejo River. It is one of the three Chaco cities inhabited by Wichís, an indigenous community also located in parts of Bolivia, Paraguay and the Argentine provinces of Salta and Formosa. According to the 2010 census, more than 50,000 Wichis live in Argentina and about 10,000 in Chaco, a multicultural province where Qoms and Moqoits live alongside Creoles and whites.
When Zidarich arrived in 1985, Sauzalito had 800 residents, well water and small amounts of energy. “It was a completely different reality than mine,” he says. He made his debut in a multi-grade school, in an old Anglican temple with a dirt floor, tree trunks for benches and a peeling blackboard. “It didn’t fit the mold of what I thought of as a school,” he explains.
Agustina Lorenzo’s house serves as a lounge for the children. SEBASTIAN SALGUERO
Their students only spoke the Wichí language and many had to repeat the first grade up to four times because of difficulties with reading and writing skills. “I wasn’t warned. I knew I was coming to the Wichí community, but I didn’t realize that they were monolingual when they entered the school and that they would have children aged 5 to 14,” he says. According to the 2005 Complementary Survey of Indigenous Peoples, 90.7% of the 50,000 Wichi regularly communicate their own language, making it one of the most widely spoken in the country.
The teacher didn’t know a word in Wichí and didn’t know the context. Therefore, their Western teaching method was ineffective. He explains that there was no point in drawing a train with the days of the week written on the carriages because the children had never seen one. The same thing happened when he doodled a stuffed bear that looked nothing like the local anteater. “I felt very disoriented because I realized I had developed a bond with them, but I felt like I wasn’t able to teach; “I played teacher,” she admits.
Clash of cultures
Daniel Palacios, a 36-year-old Wichí, says the rejection of indigenous children at school is very strong. “We suffered greatly from the oppression of the authorities. They even forbade us to speak our language, not only in the classroom but also during breaks, and if they heard us, they sentenced us to repentance. I lived it,” says the former student of teacher Zidarich. “Many were left on the streets due to the language conflict, which resulted in injuries,” he added.
Palacios is now a bilingual teacher and has a degree in education. He explains that cultural domination and indigenous persecution, from colonial times to the military campaigns of the last few centuries, remain embedded in the collective unconscious.
Mónica Zidarich, when she was director of the school in Paraje Onholo Vizcacheral (between 2002 and 2005). With kind approval
“In our families they told us that they said negative things about us and that they could treat us as beings without abilities. Since childhood, you have the responsibility to learn to take care of yourself and take care of the community,” he recalls.
Mirta Aranda, 46 years old, Wichi, a graduate of educational sciences, teacher and head of community management in the Secretariat for Multilingualism and Interculturality of the Ministry of Education in Chaco, knows what her partner is talking about. He says that when he was a child he had to learn Spanish or leave school. “It was very difficult for me because I didn’t understand what they were telling us and the teacher, who came from outside, didn’t know a word of our language,” he says. She repeated the first grade three times. Sometimes people in the community wondered why they weren’t loved. “I think some are due to ignorance; And those who know see you because of racism, because they don’t see you as a human being, but as someone who is inferior. We still suffer from it to this day,” he says.
The official Mirta Aranda and the bilingual teachers Vilma Coria and María Lorenza Miranda.SEBASTIAN SALGUERO
The civilizational model
Argentina legally recognized the pre-existence of indigenous peoples in the 1994 reform of the national constitution. The passage of the Chaco Aboriginal Act in 1987 promoted bilingual and bicultural education. The regulations required the training of Aboriginal teaching assistants to form “pedagogical pairs” with white teachers. That is, it encouraged local youth to enter the education system to work in the classroom with a teacher.
Zidarich trained the assistants with the advice of Marta Tomé, an academic who had worked in El Sauzalito during the military dictatorship. The work was not easy because inequalities were reproduced. “I sat in a corner and it was like I didn’t exist. It was a struggle, they didn’t let you do anything, they told you to do the job. [mate] cooked or to clean the terrace,” says Wichí teacher Lorenza Miranda, 50, about her experiences as an assistant to a white teacher. “If you analyze what happened in our country and in Latin America, we have to talk about a civilizing model in which the school was tasked with erasing the traces of this cultural and linguistic diversity,” says Zidarich.
Children play in the children’s room of Agustina Lorenzo’s house.SEBASTIAN SALGUERO
The key: good treatment
Zidarich began teaching first grade at School 811 in Sauzalito in 1997. She was accompanied by Wichi relief worker Ambrosio Rosario. The teacher says those were the best years of her career. She called each student by their affectionate name, the Wichí have one on their ID and a family name. There was a boom and school enrollment numbers exploded: almost all indigenous children went to school. “Mónica has found the strategies that support us in the learning process. What I remember is being treated as students, as important people. We never had that. I felt like she was the most beloved aunt. “I think he loved us very much,” Palacios says.
The teacher hugged her and let herself be hugged. Some remember that she was the only teacher whose white overalls were always dirty because of the small children’s hands. “The first thing he did was learn to say hello in our own language. We like to listen to a person who is not from our city speak in our language because we say, ‘We conquered someone who is not from our community,'” Palacios says with a laugh.
Working with both languages at the same time worked: the school achieved the best results in the language area in a national assessment and even received an award. “That legitimized the experience,” says the teacher.
Break ethnocentrism
That was the seed of a quiet revolution that is now showing its fruits. Zidarich believes that there is a gap between the beginnings and the present. During the transition, he states, many Wichí completed primary school, two secondary schools were opened, one for adults and a tertiary institute to train indigenous teachers. It was only in 2006 that bilingual education was institutionalized throughout Argentina through the National Education Law and consolidated in 2010.
Adults receive bilingual education at Secondary School No. 1. SEBASTIAN SALGUERO
Wichí teachers are currently teaching in schools where they have been discriminated against. The Ministry of Education in Chaco has indigenous supervisors and officials, regulations to protect them, and a classification board for intercultural bilingual education, unique in Latin America, that ensures equal access to teaching positions for indigenous teachers.
“I feel like our work has influenced what El Sauzalito is today. It gives me a lot of joy. I know that I am part of this process. When you consider how little it is for the world, it seems enormous to me,” thinks Zidarich. According to official information, 505 bilingual teachers work in schools in various indigenous communities of the Chaco: 20.2% of them are from the Wichí people. Eight out of ten are primary school teachers, the rest are preschool teachers. There are no positions in secondary school.
The still neglected and poor Wichí communities also began to know and defend their rights, says Marcelo Luna, 37 years old, bilingual teacher and supervisor at the Ministry of Education. “Today, non-Indigenous teachers are more afraid because the Wichí demand respect from them,” he says. Their language also gained prominence in state authorities, it is used in official documents and even the city was given back its original name: Sipohi [lugar del manduré, un pescado].
But there are outstanding debts. In Wichí there is almost no teaching material and some children stop speaking it when they grow up out of innate shame. “Puberty comes and this happens. I see it with my children: They don’t want to speak Wichí, and when they were children they did so of their own free will. “It makes you want to challenge them,” says Vilma Coria, the first bilingual teacher there.
A worker from El Chaco goes to work at dawn in Formosa.SEBASTIAN SALGUERO
Official statistics show progress in education in recent decades, but we are still a long way from full school education. 59% of Aboriginal students attend primary school, while only 18% attend secondary school because they do not have bilingual education to accompany them. Zidarich agrees that there is a lot to do, but says that the path is open: it just needs to be expanded and improved. Meanwhile, Mirta Aranda summarizes: “In almost three decades, we have moved from a system of domination to one of liberation.”