An experience of popular education in Guatemala The Ochoch Hik`eek Institute: An indigenous, campesino and community-based institution of intercultural bilingual education

Abstract

In Guatemala, after the Peace Agreements reached in 1996, after 35 years of the wrongly named armed conflict (genocide committed by the different military leaderships of the Guatemalan State that killed 200,000 people belonging to the Mayan indigenous communities), bilingual educational models are beginning to be implemented in an intercultural context made up of 24 ethnic communities, already officially recognized by the new democratic State that assumes itself as multiethnic, pluricultural and multilingual. Different civil associations are promoting these new educational models to promote and strengthen the development of indigenous peoples, based on their own languages and cultures, and are able to give concrete expression in the field of education to the historical demands that indigenous peoples and their movements have been making, mainly in defence of land, territory, indigenous health and justice systems and autonomy, among others. In this way, the Ochoch Hik'eek Mayan Institute was born in the north of the country, as a community educational center and Mayan cultural relevance, aimed at indigenous youth from rural communities that historically and geographically had been excluded from formal educational processes. This article aims to bring together the educational reality and the pedagogical model of continuous work during 12 years of this Institute thought, shaped and developed for the indigenous peasant communities of northern Guatemala.