Cohabiting in a southern Zapotec enclave: approach to community territorial education

Abstract

Based on our experiences in our communities of origin, we have had a special motivation to establish a community dialogue with the people who live there, through journeying and understanding their realities. This has involved approaching people's common thinking based on an ethnographic methodological approach and community orality, which is historical and territorial, with a community and critical epistemological framework.. The objective of these notes we share is to provide an analytical approach to ancestral territoriality, symbolic constructions, communal learning, and notions of good living, within the Zapotec territorial context, as an enclave in the perspective of learning and configuration of being and existing in the world in the Southern of Oaxaca, Mexico. We will address, in general, two micro-regions: the Loxicha and the Coatlanes, and, in particular, Candelaria Loxicha and San Jeronimo Coatlan. In this sense, we propose to bring in a narrative not bound by academic standards, which allows us to put our experiences into dialogue.