Mexico

Colonial Complications 

San Miguel de Allende is overflowing with charm— cobblestone streets, churches on every corner, music and food to match. It’s a delight.  Just off the main square is Canal street, named after the wealthy Spanish family whose mansion is preserved there as a bank and a museum. They made their fortunes mining silver, though I doubt any of them ever touched a pickax. Elsewhere in Mexico, mining followed a familiar pattern, roughly modeled on Hernán Cortés’s ransoming of indigenous royalty in exchange for gold, receiving the gold, and then killing his prisoners anyway. 

So here we are, enjoying these potentially ill won gems of architecture. 

As a visitor, it leaves me conflicted. If I were among the >95% of Mexicans with mestizo ancestry, I might feel even more conflicted to be a descendant of both the European aggressors and their Indigenous victims. 

And then I think of the US, which followed a similar path in becoming the wealthiest country in the world through genocide of the indigenous people and slave labor. Should we feel conflicted about enjoying our riches today? Many Americans, too, are simultaneously the descendants of both aggressors and victims. 

Sometimes it’s in visiting another’s home that we come to see our own more clearly.  

Crafting Mexico 

After the mines were depleted, San Miguel de Allende was largely a ghost town until a local art school put the town back on the map. Today, the village is dotted with cultural centers in each neighborhood which offer state-subsidized art classes in traditional Mexican arts for about $5 USD per month. I took a wood carving class a few hours each day and Rio and Luca took painting after school. We all loved it. 

As the only gringos in our classes, we were struck by how locals of all ages immersed themselves in the creation of Mexican  music, dance, sculpture and painting— enjoying state sponsorship to literally craft their culture. 

While these cultural centers may foster pride in Mexican culture, economic reality is extremely challenging for most of the Mexicans we met. Long lines formed at the banks on Fridays to receive payday remittances from relatives in the US. Most families had an immediate family member in the US, and many of my classmates in my wood carving class (mostly retired men) had spent decades in the US working in construction or manual labor before returning to Mexico to spend time with their grandchildren.  

The stories I heard over our chisels and wood chips followed a familiar pattern. These men had left San Miguel de Allende in their 20’s, and hired a guide to smuggle them into the US, typically via a treacherous multi-day trek through the desert. They often arrived with nothing more than the clothes they carried.  They’d meet up with other young men to find jobs in casual labor, and would send money home each month. 

The men in my carving class said they returned 10-20 years later with little English language mastery, but a family who was very grateful to be able to make ends meet in Mexico. 

While bribes and smugglers’ fees were within reach in years past, recently, drug cartels have begun charging their own “taxes” on human trafficking, demanding payments of tens of thousands of dollars. Most people I talked to felt that going to the US now is barely a break-even (albeit life-risking) endeavor, but many feel they need to try their luck because there is so little economic opportunity at home. The pattern repeats, only worse. 

What do kids need to learn in school? 

Abby found the boys a Waldorf school in a rural area 30 mins outside town. The school, which enrolls about 120 students K-8, was remarkably open to taking our boys for a month. 

The day we arrived, we got a brief tour and learned that knitting, cooking, and flute were foundational to the curriculum.  Luca, who has been knitting since he was four, had spent years preparing for this moment and marched into class carrying the needles and yarn he’d brought with him from California.  Little did he know that plastic needles were not allowed; the first few days were spent whittling a new pair from wood. 

Science class was conducted via walks in the desert where kids would ask and answer questions about the natural world. A week in, Rio remarked that there didn’t seem to be any “academics” in the format he was used to, but that he was learning a lot everyday. 

 I, too, was perplexed by the contrast with the schools I have known.  I asked myself why this looked so different from Oakland public schools where kids sit in neat rows to observe the blackboard and copy things into their notebooks.  It brought me to a question Abby has spent decades asking and trying to answer: what do our kids need to be learning in school anyway? 

Luca’s newfound ability to cook pizza from scratch and Rio’s pride at knitting a plush puppy seem unlikely to help them pass California‘s standardized tests; but if the goal of school is to build a kid’s confidence and their ability to learn and do things in the real world, this seems like invaluable curriculum.  

The learning model in most US public schools, by comparison, seems rote and divorced from reality.  Are there arguments in favor of how we're doing school beyond economies of scale and….inertia?!

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