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Larry Goldsmith teaches English as a Second Language at Centro Presente in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Cetlalic School has a unique origin in the movements for social justice and solidarity with the people of Central America that emerged in the late 1970s.
"My thesis, still rather vague, is that we Mexican homosexuals today -- not necessarily those of yesterday or those of tomorrow -- having suffered the persecution, repression, and discrimination of an intolerant system, are necessarily living a marginality that despite being fucked over also has its benefits: the courageous benefits of the rebellious, which are not intrinsic to some sexual option but to a political one. Our struggle to survive has imparted a lovely sense of reason and emotion to our lives, and it would be a tragedy to trade this sense away for the tolerance of a consumer society that soon, predictably, will impose itself in Mexico in the realm of sex, through the economic and social processes of our middle class, so subsidiary to the capitalist "democracies.'" -- José Joaquín Blanco, "Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams"
Just nine months before José Joaquín Blanco penned his 1979 manifesto, Mexican homosexuals had taken to the streets for the first time in that country's history. There had been gay political organizations in Mexico as early as 1971, when activists came together to protest the firing of gay workers at Mexico City's Sears, Roebuck department store. But that was not a time for street protest. Three years earlier, ten days before the opening of the 1968 Summer Olympics, soldiers had opened fire on demonstrating students, killing hundreds, injuring many more, and imprisoning thousands without trial. Not until ten years later, on July 26, 1978, when leftists marched to commemorate the anniversaries both of the Cuban Revolution and of the Mexican student movement gunned down at Tlatelolco, did a 30-member contingent of the Frente Homosexual de Acción Revolucionaria (FHAR) join them in the streets.
FHAR had looked for inspiration not to the US, but to leftist gay movements in France and Spain, adopting the same name as the leading organizations in those countries. But in 1994 the North American Free Trade Agreement opened Mexico to a flood of US consumer goods. Today, the country's largest private employer is Wal-Mart. The US has dumped enough of its surplus produce in Mexico to eliminate 1.5 million farming jobs, and processed enough of it into fast food to cause an epidemic of obesity. Gay commerce has traveled south as well: rainbow flags, pricey discos, Gay.Com, and Pride marches have come to Mexico, along with additions to the gay political discourse, consumer culture, and cultural institutions modeled after their counterparts in the US. Mexico City outlawed discrimination on the basis of sexual preference in 1999, and this past March saw the first gay couple registered under the city's new domestic partnership law.
My introduction to these issues came in 2005, when I traveled to the Mexican city of Cuernavaca to study Spanish in an unusual program at a school called Cetlalic (an acronym for the Centro Tlahuica de Lenguajes e Intercambio Cultural, or Tlahuican Center for Languages and Cultural Exchange, Tlahuica being the indigenous culture of the area). A 90-minute bus ride from Mexico City, Cuernavaca is the state capital of Morelos, epicenter of the Mexican Revolution, where Emiliano Zapata led peasant farmers demanding "Land and Liberty" in 1910.
Cuernavaca has developed a singular cottage industry: the language school, of which Cetlalic is one of nearly thirty. Cetlalic, however, has a unique origin in the movements for social justice and solidarity with the people of Central America that emerged in the late 1970s. "Solidarity activism in Cuernavaca was fostered by the grassroots progressive Catholic Church, and also by the leftist political parties," explains Cetlalic's Director, Jorge Torres. In the 1980s Cuernavaca activists formed a group in solidarity with the people of El Salvador, and hit upon the idea of running a language school, both as an organizing tool and to raise money. "The idea was to educate Mexicans and foreigners through the Spanish classes," Jorge recounted recently in the office on an upper floor of the sprawling old house the school now occupies. "So, from the beginning we were a school that was something more than a school. We were a project -- an educational project, a political project, a social project, a project to create a new movement."
Lesbians and gay men were well represented at this time in Central America solidarity movements and large anti-intervention protests in the US, including the memorable Pledge of Resistance demonstration at the Boston federal building on May 7, 1985, in which more than 500 people were arrested -- including myself and a group of friends who had organized ourselves into a gay affinity group calling itself the United Fruit Company. Many of us participated in anti-intervention and solidarity efforts, and traveled to El Salvador and Nicaragua to learn firsthand about the situation and help with the coffee harvest. Learning Spanish was an important tool for such work, and many traveled to Cuernavaca for classes in Cetlalic's intensive language immersion program.
In the early 1990s, changes in the political situation in Latin America began to affect Cetlalic's mission. "In 1992 we began to talk in our classes about NAFTA, and then about the Zapatista uprising in '94," Jorge says. "Those were the first programs, and the women's program. And little by little we've expanded them, still maintaining the Spanish teaching."
It was also in the early 1990s that Cetlalic first began to face issues of sexual politics raised by some of its students. "There were confrontations with people who came here and started to have conflicts in classes with the traditional ideology we had," Jorge recalls. "They began to say, look, there's more than just heterosexuality, there's also homosexuality, lesbians and gay men, and so we began little by little to understand the situation." Another issue had to do with living arrangements. An important part of the language immersion is that students live in the homes of local families. In 1991, Tatiana Schreiber, a lesbian journalist and activist from Boston, asked Cetlalic to find her a family where she could be out, and the school placed her with a local lesbian.
The language classes included oral presentations by each of the students. "So they asked me to give a presentation on gay men and lesbians in the US," Tatiana recalls. She talked about lesbian and gay history; feminism and separatism; the development of different political tendencies among lesbians and gay men, from civil rights approaches to Gay Liberation to the lesbian/gay left; about AIDS activism; about the development of political and cultural institutions like gay and lesbian speakers' bureaus and Pride marches. "I think it was sort of eye-opening for them to realize that it wasn't just gay and lesbian civil rights -- that there were all these political tensions and conflicts within the community. It helped them to see that there was a range of ways to see homosexuality and that one of those ways was connected to the liberation struggles they were involved in."
In 1996, Cetlalic began a special program for lesbians, and followed it in 1998 with one for gay men. It prepared for the program with a workshop for all the teachers and staff. "The first three minutes nobody said anything," Jorge recalls. "I was the one who started. "Let's see, if you're gay, and I touch you, is it contagious?' Because there were those kinds of prejudices, no? "If I hug you, will I get contaminated if you have AIDS?' Things like that." Antonio Ortega, who later coordinated some of the programs and hosts lesbian and gay students in his home, remembers a meeting with homestay families. "Jorge said, "We're going to have gay and lesbian homestays, and if you all agree, we're going to have gay- and lesbian-friendly homestays.' And some families said, "You can send us gays and lesbians, but we don't want to know.' But that's not a friendly homestay. . . . It has been a long process with teachers, families, and staff."
By the time I first participated in one of the programs, for two weeks in January 2005, that process had come a long way. Transgendered students had also begun to arrive, bringing along a new layer of issues for the school to address in an ongoing process of self-education. There were half a dozen of us, men and women, college students to seniors, and we all stayed either in lesbian or gay homes or with families that were unquestionably friendly and accepting. We went to language classes from 9 to 2 every weekday, returned home for lunch (the main meal of the day in Mexico -- the family meal), and then returned to school in the late afternoons or evenings for presentations, discussions, or activities in and around Cuernavaca, often with local lesbians and gay men and organizations. We met with members of the Metropolitan Community Church, with the lesbian mothers' organization Grumale, and with CD4, a local AIDS organization. There were presentations and discussions about Mexican gay language and culture, and we met one evening, in separate groups for women and men, with local lesbians and gay men to share coming out stories and talk about our respective cultures.
One of the distinctive, and impressive, aspects of Cetlalic's programs is their basis in a model of education as a process of cultural exchange that works in both directions -- an idea with roots in the philosophy of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, which the school has consciously incorporated into its mission. It's not just language classes with some culture and politics thrown in; the language instruction and the two-way cultural exchange are inseparable.
"People on both sides have learned a lot," says Antonio. "I've learned about voluntary work, a concept that doesn't really exist in Mexico. A lot of students come here who have worked in AIDS organizations, in lesbian groups, there are a lot of activist gays and lesbians. Another thing that impressed me a lot was that there were couples with children, because in my mind, well, if you were gay you were going to be single or in a couple, but you weren't going to start a family.
What the Cetlalic programs have promoted in a unique and innovative way is an opportunity to learn firsthand about gender, sexuality, homosexuality, and lesbian and gay identity in another culture, and to consider questions like these that other cultures suggest about your own.
Further information about Cetlalic is available at www.cetlalic.org.mx [5].
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