The Miguel Angel Asturias Academy is a non-profit school in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala that breaks cycles of poverty, racism and sexism through popular education. These are stories from the ground. Although a school in Guatemala isn't directly related to US politics, our stories touch on themes of immigration, education and economic justice.
Many thousands of refugees fled Guatemala to Mexico and the United States during the Guatemalan Civil War. Miguel Angel Asturias Academy founder Jorge Chojolan was one of many refugees—he needed to flee because the government deemed his work in education subversive. What did Jorge do that was so "subversive"? What did he do during his time in exile? Why did he return to Guatemala? I’ll answer these questions and more on the flip—the first of three diaries presenting Jorge Chojolan.
The Guatemalan Civil War, lasting between 1960 and 1996, killed over 200,000 people. Central America’s longest war was violent and dirty. Entire towns were wiped off the map. During the war the army would entire a town, ask for the rebel sympathizers, and then kill randomly. No mercy was shown. The tools of war: torture, rape, destruction of property were employed to scare the people into accepting a violent dictatorship.
During the 1980’s Jorge worked in the Ministry of Education. His job primarily entailed looking for funding to buy desks and chairs for public school students. In these times education meetings would take place secretly and at night, for fear of the army. Employees would leave in pairs at odd times so that if they were killed there would still be a Ministry of Education.
Why was the Ministry of Education scared? The army was infiltrating schools to recruit child soldiers. It was also killing students—some as young as middle school—for so-called subversive activities. At that time nobody felt safe, especially educators.
One day Jorge found someone who was killed in front of his house. Attached to the body was a note threatening Jorge’s life. He gathered some money and fled for Mexico, eventually ending up in Mexico City.
In Mexico City, Jorge worked for human rights and in street theater. He learned about popular education (students and teachers working together to use education as a tool for liberation/equality) and became enamored with using education as a tool for freedom. He attempted to return from exile in the early 1980’s when there was a deal that protected politicians. Jorge then ran for and won a seat on the Quetzaltenango City Council. Shortly after election the deal fell through and he needed to go into hiding within Guatemala.
What kept Jorge going throughout all of this? In short, patriotism—the love of the Guatemalan people, culture, land etc. He knew he had the skills to bring transformative education to his people, and has been fighting hard ever since to ensure that poor indigenous children (like he grew up) would have the opportunity to go to school and improve their society.
In 1996 Jorge founded Miguel Angel Asturias Academy. Since then, we’ve expanded to a Pre K-12 school and have taken many steps to realizing Jorge’s dream.
Jorge’s dream is a bold one though—that ALL children will have access to this education, and to do that we will need to expand and build a network of schools like these. While we’ve got one school we’re proud of, we have a ways to go and we look forward to being in community with those who want to help us out. In that spirit I encourage questions/suggestions/critiques in the comments section.
NEXT TIME: Today we talked about some of Jorge’s formative experiences in exile, tomorrow we’ll focus on Jorge’s childhood and how it brought him to education.