Let’s start with the basics. Can you tell me about Jocotenango?
It’s a city in the south of Guatemala. A dot on the map, 9 square kilometres and about 40,000 inhabitants. It has an interesting history: it was established 300 years ago by indigenous slaves who built the nearby city of Antigua Guatemala, an important centre of power to this day. Today Jocotenango is a dormitory town, most of the inhabitants work outside its borders. So the problem is that kids and teens are alone all day long.
In the 1980s and 1990s, during and after the war [the civil war lasted from 1960 till 1996, and 200,000 people died], criminal groups dealing with drug smuggling, kidnapping and human trafficking began to appear. As there are many drug consumers among the people of Antigua, we, the people living around the city, were supposed to play the role of intermediaries and distributors. As there were no other prospects on the labour market, we began to familiarise ourselves with this type of occupation. We’ve also got used to violence as an integral part of life.
Jocotenango has become the antimodel of development, a city pervaded by domestic violence, drugs, alcohol, and high unemployment rate, which has now been exacerbated by the pandemic. Moreover, the city grew rapidly at the expense of nature. Today, there are practically no green areas, the rivers are polluted.
After your studies, you returned to Jocotenango and you were struck by what you saw: many schoolmates were either dead or in prisons.
As a teenager, I was not so interested in the environment. I was primarily precoccupied with music because it allowed me not to think about everything around me. But when I looked at my home, I didn’t like what I saw at all. I began to remember everything I saw as a child that no child should see, which then – as it was considered normal – seemed to me nothing out of ordinary. I also realised that the institutions that should support and protect us fail miserably. There are schools, but they don’t do their job. The police exist, but they are corrupt and so is the government. Latin America is a land of great utopias, a land of people who fight for these utopias. We worship people who are almost considered the gods of revolution and the left. But if these great points of reference are involved in violence and death, then there is something wrong with them.
This is how the idea emerged to create a space for children and teenagers in which we could reflect upon the world together, learn to understand politics, radicalisms, wars, discrimination, inequalities – all the topics we haven’t talked about before. And above all, give the children dignity and hope.
I was looking for a place in which the paths of art, social action, dialogue, respect and creativity would converge, a place which would be inclusive, where everyone would be welcome, without any questions or preconditions.
You left your teaching job at a private school and opened the garage of your family home for the kids in the neighbourhood.
From an early age, I had problems with concentration. I was that kid who would be removed from class for bad behaviour. I was hyperactive, sometimes aggressive. Lost. I learned the best through play and action, and my only salvation was music. The university seemed to be a waste of time to me too. And I was a waste of time to the university. The system had nothing to offer me. So I wanted to create a place where children like me would feel at home and have their own creative space.
When I opened the door to my house, amazing things started happening, which I don’t fully understand to this day. But I also felt all the pain that is out there and that I hadn’t been aware of.
Your garage was the place of creation of the educational movement El Patojismo and a school in which about 400 children study today.
My parents still lived in the house for the first few years. They are both approaching eighty years of age and have not had a chance to rest in retirement. But it was them who instilled concern for others in me. For as long as I can remember, our home was full of people. My father was a teacher and trade union activist, and in 1989 he was imprisoned. My mother, although not a feminist, has long been supporting other women and defending their rights. She is a true warrior, my source of faith that the world is sensitive. My three older sisters are teachers, my brother is a writer, he lives in Spain. Our parents raised us in love and discipline, in the spirit of democracy and freedom.
This love was the main reason I decided to open my home. To give other kids a similar chance for development and growth. What was only an idea, today has become an institution where dozens of people work, but the essence remains the same. “Los patojos” are kids in Guatemalan slang.
What are your methods?
After 15 years of work, the simplest words come to mind. El Patojismo is simply something that we are all looking for in life: a space where you can feel good and safe. We all need it today.
It’s all about very simple things. We started by changing the conditions in the toilets. In many Guatemalan schools, water was only available in the bathrooms for teachers, and not in those for children. Only these for adults had lockable doors. And these are the basics.
Today, many schools have started to do the same: they keep the bathrooms clean, they plant flowers and paint walls using many different colours. The latter is our hallmark: we make sure that the space is as aesthetic as possible. Poverty is also a state of mind: the feeling that you are invisible, that you deserve nothing good or pretty. To change this, you need to create conditions that allow children to believe that they have rights, that they deserve something. I used to be very critical of Guatemalan schools. I criticised teachers, but never asked what they needed or what conditions they worked in. I was a typical young revolutionist for whom everything was wrong.
Today, I prefer to focus on creating practices and specific activities that can serve as inspiration for others.
Art is as important as maths, you say.
This is a quote from Ken Robinson, the father of creative education from Great Britain. We’re not saying anything new, but we’ve adapted the idea to our context. Music, dance, and literature are the key elements. Through art, we express ourselves and our emotions in the fullest possible way. It sounds cliché, but developing artistic expression is really important from a pedagogical and psychological point of view.
So is good nutrition.
People must eat before they can think and act. This is especially true in a country like Guatemala, where malnutrition rates are very high. This is why we started to look at the project participants holistically, taking care of their nutrition and regularly monitoring their health. We have run a small clinic for several years. Today, it has been replaced by an integrated health and nutrition centre, in which we also use traditional methods and herbal medicine. There are 20 Maya ethnic groups in Guatemala. We are a country of indigenous peoples, so processes and traditions that have been in place for thousands of years are our reference point.
Our dream is to create a model that could be replicated in various places, not only in Guatemala, just like Montessori and Waldorf school. Good food, concern for mental and physical health, inclusiveness and diversity when it comes to gender and sexual identity, freedom of expression, including bodily expression, creativity, but also discipline – these are our pillars. El Patojismo is not a charity, we are against building toxic dependencies. We focus on questions, critical thinking, discussions, and listening to each other. Thanks to this, the problem of school violence, discrimination and disrespect has disappeared.
The question we are puzzling over is how to make our projects self-supporting financially.
Is it possible?
We are trying to create a business model based on restaurants and other services related to farming and food production. We have managed to establish strategic cooperation with the city hall and foreign partners who do not sponsor, but invest in our activities because they believe that they will bring about changes in the entire community, also in the economic sense. We are building a campus that will include an employment centre for young people and adults. We will develop business projects there that will offer stable employment to the beneficiaries of our projects. Last year, in the midst of the pandemic, our first class graduated [the school has been operating officially since 2015]. We managed to ensure that most of them found a decent job right away, despite a severe crisis.
And how do you manage to operate in the pandemic?
Nobody knows how to face it, so imagine what must be happening in a country as chaotic and desperate as Guatemala. Avant‑garde projects like ours have to be ten times more creative than usual to survive at all. For a year now, we have been constantly creating new strategies to organise the next month, term or the entire school year. We have been supporting families, supplying them with food products and medicines. When the restrictions are loosened, we stop humanitarian aid because that’s not our role. However, we are also forced to do this because we are dealing with a humanitarian crisis and we cannot ignore it.
Every two weeks we give out printed educational packages for those who do not have the Internet, and we teach the rest of the children remotely. Sometimes teachers conduct classes directly at their homes. And imagine that compared to 2020, we have more students this year. Nobody dropped out of school. The crisis has turned out to be our opportunity.
One of your latest and most important projects is to create a safe space for girls and women. Why right now?
This place, headed by my wonderful colleague Melissa Miranda, is being created because in recent years we have had 12-, 13- and 14-year-old girls at school who became mothers. Three of them gave birth this year, so they have experienced abuse already in the pandemic. Isolation and the crisis have led to the exacerbation of a number of worrying phenomena, including violence against women and children.
It is to be a home for girls and women only, where they can feel safe, where they will receive the support of psychologists, social workers, educators, as well as legal assistance and, if necessary, access to safe abortion. It will also be a space for discussions about machismo and feminism, open to sexual diversity and safe for people from the LGBT community. El Patojismo is the only place in Jocotenango that accepts people in all their diversity.
There are plans to establish a women’s cooperative, which would allow the participants of the project to gain economic independence.
Guatemala, like many other Latin American countries, is at the global forefront in terms of the number of feminicides.
We start with working with our school community: students and their family members. First of all, we took care of girls who were sexually abused because that is the most urgent matter. We hope that our home will help them get back on their feet, feel that they are not alone. We will gradually expand our activities so that to engage all schoolgirls, we will deal with reproductive rights and prevent period poverty. Ultimately, we would like to create a clinic for women.
But these are all plans. We cannot take on a responsibility that is beyond us right away. This project is risky due to patriarchy and machismo in Guatemala. I have survived three assassination attempts. I had to move out of Jocotenango.
Why would someone want to kill a school principal?
We have become a threat to this hidden power who we cannot really identify: it might be narcos, politicians, big business or somebody else. In any case, they are representatives of a system that wants countries like Guatemala to remain in a state of eternal backwardness and subordination. Therefore, at the level of local communities, we must create solutions that will allow us to build step by step a different, democratic path for the society.
It is neither easy nor safe in an extremely religious, conservative country that is full of superstition and inequality. But at El Patojismo, we are ready. I am sick of machismo. We, Latin men, are the product of a patriarchal system. It would be irresponsible for me to declare now that I am a feminist or an ally of women because it is a struggle that I am still learning to understand and respect. My task is to listen, cooperate and unlearn what I have been taught.
Does such thinking have a chance to break into the mainstream as in Argentina or Mexico?
Our misfortune are governments that believe in God, in God portrayed within the constitution. Completely new political figures are needed. And these need to be built at the most local level. Until a few years ago, I was furious and thought that anger was the best fuel for fighting. The only thing I managed to do was ruin my health. Today, I want to believe that from our safe space there will emerge future female leaders, councillors, deputies and ministers who will be able to build a true democracy in Guatemala. Only this way, by joint effort and step by step, will we manage to find the way to peace and security.
Aleksandra Lipczak talks to Juan Pablo Romero Fuentes, the founder of El Patojismo
Photo: Tatiana Jachyra
The text was published in „Wolna Sobota” a magazine of „Gazeta Wyborcza” 17 April 2021
