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Walking in the Footsteps of Paolo Freire

Dr. Arturo Ornelas, now assistant to the President of the State University of Morelos, Mexico (UAEM), has a life story worthy of a great script, and from it he is able to draw stories, experiences and inspiration enough to keep a group of people enthralled for hours.

His beginnings were not so auspicious, as he grew up as a semi-orphan on Mexico’s streets before being sponsored by a priest who ran a private school he had started. In the weeks leading up to the Mexico Olympics in 1968, students at universities in Mexico City, including a young Arturo Ornelas, gathered to protest conditions and to demand more say in the choice of the board of governors. Demonstrations in Mexico City are commonplace, but with then-US President Nixon scheduled to visit President Diaz Ordaz and with security high in preparation for the Olympics, this demonstration was different.

The tragedy unfolded on the night of October 2, 1968, when a student demonstration ended in a storm of bullets in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco, Mexico City. The extent of the violence stunned the country. When the shooting stopped, hundreds of people lay dead or wounded, as Army and police forces seized surviving protesters and dragged them away. Although months of nation-wide student strikes had prompted an increasingly hard-line response from the Diaz Ordaz regime, no one was prepared for the bloodbath that Tlatelolco became.

Thirty years later, the Tlatelolco massacre has grown large in Mexican memory, and lingers still. It is Mexico’s Tiananmen Square, Mexico’s Kent State: when the pact between the government and the people began to come apart and Mexico’s extended political crisis began.

Arturo was forced to flee into exile, and after some years, found himself in Geneva, where he met and studied with Paolo Freire. Eventually he received a Bachelor of Arts, a Masters of Education, a Masters of Economics and a PhD. He gained his first field experience working for Freire in Guinea Bissau, Angola, and Sao Tome.

As well, Arturo worked for the United Nations, developing education plans in various Latin American countries from offices in Washington, DC.

He returned to Mexico early in the 1980s and determined to re-Mexicanize himself by living with the campesinos in communities near Tepotzlan, Mexico and working on community development projects. Eventually, he moved to Cuernavaca, where he became the Principal of the school where he had been educated from age 12-19, a very formative time in his life. The priest who had taken him under his wing had willed the school to Arturo and two others.

His first trip to Alberta came around 1987, when the Christian Farmers’ Federation toured him around the province. Since then he has been back many times as a conference speaker, as the international resource guest for the Summer Institute in Global Education, and most recently in connection with a project of Augustana University and the State University of Morelos, where Arturo works. In his role as Director of International Relations, he has made many agreements with other countries, and travels regularly, particularly to Germany.

Arturo believes in linking the Ivory Tower to the realities of the community, and to this end has worked especially hard to make the Faculty of Nursing oriented towards community health. He is very committed to working with Mexicans at a community level. It is not uncommon to see, amongst deans of foreign universities and department heads of the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, a campesino waiting to meet with Arturo to discuss issues of equal concern. Through building connections to rural Mexico, the university students are able to learn about their own culture at the village level. They learn about alternative medicines and develop strong relationships with their clients.

As well, Arturo’s home, once relatively isolated on top of a hill in Cuernavaca, is now a learning classroom for approximately 200 people who come every weekend to learn to grow and prepare alternative medicines, under the tutelage of a curandero, or local healer. Participants can receive certification for their work, and the program teaches them to be scientific about the efficacy of these remedies, many of which have been passed down from the Aztecs.

Rather than seeing university graduates prescribe solutions for Mexican communities based on theories learned in the university, Arturo would like to see graduates living and working together with community members creating new knowledge through the synthesis of university and popular knowledge.

Arturo believes strongly in a transformative model of education, where teachers and students learn together in order to create something new and better in the service of all. Those who have met him and have heard him speak never forget the power of his words and the depth of his character. Just ask the many Alberta teachers who met him in Kananaskis at the 1991 and 1992 Summer Institutes in Global Education, or those who visited him at his home in Cuernavaca, Mexico as part of the Mexico Study Tour in 1996 and 1997.

Thanks to the following for background information about Dr. Arturo Ornelas:

• Dr. Hans-Dittmar Mündel, Augustana University, Camrose Alberta
• Karsten Mündel, Coordinator, Augustana-Morelos Exchange
• Susan Smith, Editor, Nurtured in Knowledge

Submitted by Louella Cronkhite, President Global, Environmental and Outdoor Education Council