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“The teachers were racist, they discriminated against their students, they said that they had learning problems, that they didn’t learn because they missed a lot of school and that the parents didn’t insist on them because they didn’t care about anything. “They had a contemptuous attitude.” In this way, teacher Mónica Zidarich summarizes what was happening in the 1980s in El Sauzalito, a small town in Chaco in northern Argentina, inhabited mainly by Wichí aborigines.
At that time, children repeated first grade several times or dropped out of school for a simple reason: their teachers spoke Spanish and they spoke Wichí. “No one had thought about learning the language, because their mandate was for the children to learn Spanish,” explains this 60-year-old graduate in Education Sciences.
At 22 years old, with a husband and a baby, she moved from the city of Córdoba, a thousand kilometers away, to teach in that place she had known as a teenager. She arrived without knowing well what she would encounter nor imagining that she would lay the foundations of bilingual education years before it was mandatory.
Zidarich says that he learned Wichí “the hard way” and that he faced prejudice, resistance and great loneliness. Twenty-eight years later, he believes it was worth it: those children who failed in school are today bilingual intercultural teachers and even ministerial officials who seek to change the destiny of a historically overwhelmed people.
El Sauzalito is located in The Impenetrable, the second green lung of South America, in the middle of the mountains, on the banks of the Bermejo River. It is one of the three Chaco towns inhabited by Wichís, an indigenous community also settled in part of Bolivia, Paraguay and in the Argentine provinces of Salta and Formosa. According to him 2010 National Censusmore than 50,000 Wichí live in Argentina and about 10,000 live in Chaco, a multicultural province also populated by Qoms and Moqoits, as well as Creoles and whites.
When Zidarich arrived, in 1985, Sauzalito had 800 residents, well water, and energy was coming in dribs and drabs. “It was a completely different reality from mine,” he says. He debuted in a multigrade school, in an old Anglican temple with a dirt floor, logs for benches and a peeling blackboard. “It didn’t fit into the schemes of what I considered a school,” he explains.
![Agustina Lorenzo's house functions as a holding space for the children.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/7DiIljudCN7oTd93NYUr62_Xy9U=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/66CZP4ZIQBCGTEOBNWGV5VMKY4.jpg)
SEBASTIAN SALGUERO
His students only spoke the Wichí language and many had repeated first grade up to four times due to difficulties in initial literacy. “I was not warned. “I knew that I was coming to the Wichí community, but I was not clear that they were monolingual when they entered the school and that there were going to be children from 5 to 14 years old,” she says. According to 2005 Supplementary Survey of Indigenous Peoples90.7% of the 50,000 Wichi people regularly communicate their own language, making it one of the most spoken in the country.
The teacher did not know a word in Wichí and did not know the context. Therefore, her Western method of teaching was ineffective. She explains that drawing a train with the days of the week written on its cars made no sense because the children had never seen one. The same thing happened if she doodled a stuffed bear that looked nothing like the local anteater. “I felt very disoriented because I realized that I established a bond with them, but I felt that I was not being able to teach; who played the teacher,” she admits.
Clash of cultures
Daniel Palacios, a 36-year-old Wichí, says that the rejection of indigenous children at school was very strong. “We suffered a lot from the trampling of the authorities. They even prohibited us from speaking in our language, not only in the classrooms but also during recess, and if they heard us, they put us in penance. I lived it,” says the former student of teacher Zidarich. “Many were left on the road due to the clash of languages, which caused injuries,” he adds.
Palacios is today a bilingual teacher and has a degree in Educational Sciences. He explains that cultural domination and indigenous persecution, from colonial times to the military campaigns of recent centuries, remain engraved in the collective unconscious.
![Mónica Zidarich when she was director of the school in Paraje Onholo Vizcacheral (between 2002 and 2005).](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/s9cFDl3vLYkpEnrIP35Rx9OkPR0=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/DSPKL5NO4NAXPNJNVHCUPIZL3U.png)
“In our families they told us that they said negative things about us and that they could treat us as beings without capacity. Since I was a child, one has been carrying the responsibility of learning, taking care of oneself, and taking care of the community,” she reflects.
Mirta Aranda, 46 years old, Wichi, a graduate in Educational Sciences, a teacher and director of community management at the Secretariat of Plurilingualism and Interculturality of the Ministry of Education of Chaco, knows what her partner is talking about. She relates that in her childhood she had to learn Spanish or leave school. “For me it was very difficult because I didn’t understand what they were telling us, and the teacher who came from outside didn’t know a word of our language,” she says. She repeated first grade three times. Sometimes in the community, people wondered why they weren’t loved. “I think some due to ignorance; and the one who knows, because of racism because he doesn’t see you the same, he doesn’t see you as a person but as someone inferior. To this day we continue to suffer from it,” she says.
![The civil servant Mirta Aranda and the bilingual teachers Vilma Coria and María Lorenza Miranda.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/SVN9EDhoigBPW8hBigiLUtXQHG4=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/74SJQ7W5OVETPEV5YMNENA4WGM.jpg)
The civilizing model
Argentina legally recognized the pre-existence of indigenous peoples in the reform of the National Constitution of 1994. The sanction of the Chaco Aboriginal Law in 1987 promoted bilingual and bicultural education. The regulations required training Aboriginal teaching assistants to form “pedagogical couples” with white teachers. That is, it encouraged native youth to enter the educational system to work alongside a teacher in the grade.
Zidarich trained the assistants with the advice of Marta Tomé, an academic who had worked during the military dictatorship in El Sauzalito. The work was not easy because inequalities were reproduced. “I would sit in a corner and it was like I didn’t exist. It was a fight, they didn’t let you do anything, they told you to do the job. [mate] cooked or to clean the patio,” says Wichí teacher Lorenza Miranda, 50, about her experience as an assistant to a white teacher. “If one analyzes what was happening in our country and in Latin America, we have to talk about a civilizing model in which the mandate was for the school to erase the traces of these cultural and linguistic diversities,” says Zidarich.
![Children play in the nursery of Agustina Lorenzo's house.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/CF5zJ6d5c98_Ajg9bhBVMqvGWNY=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/ODGDBLYYYNAKTNJFCTPGHS4OJM.jpg)
The key: good treatment
Zidarich began teaching first grade at school 811 in Sauzalito in 1997. She was accompanied by the Wichi auxiliary Ambrosio Rosario. The teacher says that those were the most beautiful years of her career. She called each student by her affectionate name, the Wichí have one on their ID and a family name. He was a boom and enrollment exploded: almost all indigenous children went to school. “Mónica found the strategies to help us with the learning process. What I remember is the treatment as students, as important people. We never had that before. I felt like her dearest aunt. I think she loved us very much,” says Palacios.
The teacher hugged them and let herself be hugged. Some remember that she was the only teacher who always had her white overalls dirty because of the children’s little hands. “The first thing she did was learn to say hello in our own language. We like to listen to a person who is not from the town speak in our language because we say: ‘We conquered someone who is not from our community,’” Palacios says, laughing.
The simultaneous work with both languages worked: the school obtained the best results in Language in a national evaluation and was even awarded. “That legitimized the experience,” believes the teacher.
Break ethnocentrism
That was the germ of a silent revolution, which today shows its fruits. Zidarich believes that there is a chasm between the beginnings and today. In the transition, he lists, many Wichí finished primary school, two secondary schools were opened, one for adults and a tertiary institute for training indigenous teachers. Only in 2006 the National Education Law institutionalized bilingual education throughout Argentina and in 2010 It consolidated.
![Adults receive bilingual education classes at Secondary School #1.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/bf7MIGh-3e9uCTcuCGpbQ0wPQ0k=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/P55LZGRZBZHBNCJC2OF3IARGNU.jpg)
Currently, there are Wichí teachers teaching in schools where they were discriminated against; There are aboriginal supervisors and officials in the Ministry of Education of Chaco, regulations that protect them, and an Intercultural Bilingual Education Classification Board, unique in Latin America, for equitable access of indigenous teachers to teaching positions.
“I feel that with the work we did we were able to influence what El Sauzalito is today. It gives me a lot of joy. I know that I am part of that process. Given how little it is for the world, it seems enormous to me,” Zidarich thinks. According to official data, 505 bilingual teachers work in schools in different indigenous communities of Chaco: 20.2% in the Wichí people. Eight out of ten are primary school teachers and the rest are preschool teachers. There are no positions in secondary school.
The Wichí communities, still neglected and poor, also began to know and defend their rights, says Marcelo Luna, 37 years old, bilingual teacher and supervisor of the Ministry of Education. “Today non-indigenous teachers are more afraid because the Wichí ask that they be respected,” he says. Their language also gained space in State agencies, it is used in official documentation and even the town recovered its original name: Sipohi [lugar del manduré, un pescado].
But there are outstanding debts. There is almost no teaching material in Wichí and some children stop speaking it when they grow up due to inherited shame. “Adolescence comes and that happens. I see it in my children: they don’t want to speak Wichí and when they were children they did so freely. That makes you want to challenge them,” says Vilma Coria, the first bilingual teacher there.
![A worker from El Chaco goes to work in Formosa at dawn.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/6W-k9_Pf_bGz1-9G4JhGP--TkGw=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/MZLVVXVPU5G5HMY65XWUINUEZA.jpg)
Official statistics show progress in education in recent decades, but we are still far from full schooling. 59% of Aboriginal students attend primary school, while only 18% attend secondary school, since they do not have a bilingual education to accompany them. Zidarich agrees that there is a lot to do, but thinks that the path is open: it just needs to be expanded and improved. Meanwhile, Mirta Aranda summarizes: “In almost three decades we went from a system of domination to one of liberation.”
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