Laura Carlsen: Women in the Teachers' Movement Give a Lesson in Resistance Laura Carlsen - CIP Americas
go to original September 18, 2013

“We don’t have independence, justice or liberty. We only have a dictatorship of exploitation, misery and bloodshed.” (Upside Down World)

Mexican teachers have hit the streets in protests against education reforms that threaten their livelihoods and the quality and accessibility of public education in the country.

Among thousands of protesters who have set up a make-shift tent city in the downtown blocks of Mexico City, women make up the less visible core of the movement. More than a million women teachers – 61 percent of the education labor force – work in ill-equipped classrooms across the nation, often at wages of only several hundred dollars a month.

The rank-and-file democratic movement, known by its Spanish initials as the CNTE, has called teachers out to reject constitutional reforms that pin jobs and salary levels to the results of a standardized test and establish “operating autonomy” for schools to do their own fundraising, among other provisions. The teachers say this will destroy diversity, erode job security and lead to privatization of schools.

The media has whipped up public opinion against the teachers’ walkout, repeating ad nauseum that they are lazy and obstruct traffic. Many of the women and men here have traveled hundreds of miles from home to live under a tarp that scarcely provides protection from the torrential downpours of Mexico’s rainy season. They have to put up with little food, nowhere to wash clothes, grueling marches and the constant threat of eviction and repression.

Read the rest at CIP Americas

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