TILANTONGO Program 16 (2025 Series 2 #4):  Marcos Leyba of EDUCA

In Tilantongo – Conversations from Indigenous Mexico; Conversaciones desde el México indigena, Phil and Kathy Dahl-Bredine bring perspectives and insights from Oaxaca, where they have lived with and learned from indigenous Mixtec people since 2001. This bilingual program features interviews with villagers, educators, environmental advocates, historians, and more.

Today we have with us Marcos Leyba from the Services for an Alternative Education (EDUCA) founded in the early 1990’s. EDUCA works closely with the indigenous communities of the state of Oaxaca. In the times of its foundation at the beginning of the “free trade” era the Mayan community of Chiapas rebelled under the leadership of the Ejercita Zapatista de Liberación Nacional EZLN, declaring that “free trade” means the death of indigenous communities. We talk about the present state of the indigenous peoples of Mexico after some 30 years of free trade. Are government programs in indigenous communities still obsessed with the aim of destroying indigenous autonomy and its concomitant communal culture, called “comunalidad,” in order to replace it with Western individualism as has been attempted in the U.S.?