Gabriela Pischedda and Cristina Larrain

Project on Women and Popular Education of Centro El Canelo de Nos

Gabriela Pischedda is executive secretary of Centro El Canelo de Nos and coordinator of the Southern Cone subregion of the CEAAL Women's Network. Cristina Larrain is responsible for the Cultural Outreach and Human Development Program of the center.

Setting the Scene

What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a woman in Chile? How can I take part in the struggle for the liberation of my people, my class, my gender? Over the last fourteen years, the women of Chile have raised these questions and many others. Many of the programs that are working today for and with women have arisen from efforts to answer these questions, for ourselves and others.

This has been and is a process of exploration: long, slow, difficult, but also energizing and full of hope. We know that we are taking the first steps, that there are many questions without answers; yet all the while we are certain that we are moving ahead, that every day "we are greater." We are a greater number of women who are determined to play an active role in social transformation, eliminating all forms of subordination: by class, gender, ethnicity. From this perspective the Project on Women and Popular Education of Centro El Canelo de Nos* was born in 1983 as a part of CEAAL.

Before describing the program itself, let us set the scene for the political, social, and economic context within which it operates.

Chile is a long and narrow swath of land located in the Southern Cone of Latin America. On September 11, 1973 the country's signal progress toward democracy was brutally interrupted by a military coup. The coup had serious consequences for every aspect of national life. It unleashed a wave of repression harsher than anything known in our history, gutting every type of social movement. Organized groups and political parties were persecuted, dissolved, isolated. A profound process of structural transformation disrupted society at every level. The popular movement and its organizations were crushed so effectively by these transformations that they entirely lost their character and strength as historical subjects.¹

The regime imposed a liberal economic model whose efforts were directed toward creating a society dominated by the marketplace, in which the people—fragmented and divided—were reduced to the status of a mere labor force, functioning only for the reproduction of capital. Channels for political representation and participation no longer existed². Power was concentrated into the hands of the few, their strength secured by the repression, dismemberment, and silencing of every type of organized voice.

The consequences of this model have been disastrous. As a few have become rich, many more have become impoverished. The slightest manifestation of democratization or political participation has been flattened. Economic, social, and psychological life have deteriorated and the very survival of broad sectors of the population is in danger.

During this period, development organizations, the Catholic Church, other churches and surviving social organizations came to play a crucial role in civil society, as they were practically the only spaces where people could come together for reflection and social and political action.

Other organizations have slowly begun to rebuild themselves, although their public and political voice is minimal. Questions of daily life that previously were not even considered have become crucial. Emotional survival and the most basic needs have taken center stage. In this context have arisen projects, programs, and organizations that have begun to reflect on our national life, embracing concerns that range from basic living conditions to the current political situation.

During all of this, what has been happening with women? It would be misleading to trace the history of women's programs in Chile only back to 1973. The women's movement in our country is no new phenomenon. From the early years of the century, from the establishment of the Belen de Zarraga Centers in 1913 to winning the vote in 1949, Chile's feminist movement has been a strong one. Many groups were formed, including a women's party founded by Maria de la Cruz. After 1949, for many reasons, not least the intervention of progressive political parties, there followed what Julieta Kirkwood has called a "period of silence."³ During this period, the particular demands of women were silenced, as gender issues were overridden by issues of class.

In that era the goal was seen as universal liberation of society. To preserve that goal, new issues and new demands were excluded, and so the liberation of women came to occupy a secondary position. Women were subordinated and subsumed in the project of universal liberation.⁴

In 1973, the breakdown of the democratic process brought us face to face with authoritarianism—already a concrete daily experience for women. In the words of Julieta Kirkwood, "women have always lived in the face of authoritarianism inside the family, their assigned domain of work and effective action." They have always been subordinated to the authority of the father, the husband, the lover—the man through whom they acquire their position in society. Daily life, the private sphere—these are the world of women, a world that begins at the door of the house, that exists in the kitchen, in a woman's tedious and wearisome relationships with her children and her mate. It is a closed-in world, emptied of social relations, of participation in public spaces, the spaces where changes are engendered. This world speaks of nothing save what occurs within the four walls of the home. From a social perspective, this situation naturally pushes women into emotional and material dependency. Women exist only to serve and to please, in self-denial. Women are valued only for their traditional roles: mother, wife, "queen of the hearth," and guardian of the social order—a situation that has not changed substantially over time for the great majority of women.

Nevertheless, since 1973 women have faced a contradiction that is important to examine. For while the authoritarianism and official discourse of the regime have emphasized women's traditional roles, women themselves have begun a slow process of consciousness raising, of revaluing their own liberation, of seeking a way out of their situation of subordination. This process is one of recognition or consciousness raising; understanding or the analysis of cause and effect in the forms of oppression; and doing or taking action to achieve liberation.⁵

During this period women have seen their life circumstances alter dramatically. Unemployment, the never-ending attempt to face daily crises, grief for a son or companero who has been imprisoned or "disappeared," seeing one's children grow up in poverty and hunger—all these have changed the traditional role of women, their degree of consciousness, and their self-perception. For women, these factors have opened the door to new forms of expression and participation, new ways to meet basic survival needs and to address their specific condition, that of being women. Fourteen years of dictatorship have left women suspended between traditional discourse and new forms of being and living. In this context, groups and organizations have arisen in which peasant and urban poor women play an active role. Such groups take off from the need women feel to work in common to face the problems of nutrition, housing, education, and health, for themselves and their children. Parallel demands emerge that relate to women's rights. Small groups come together to dialog, work, fight, cry, work through their differences, and learn. In so doing they are creating their own spaces, with a common language, places where they feel comfortable and supported. In Santiago and also in the provinces, there are women's groups beyond number, all with similar goals and activities. The most common concerns are raising consciousness on women's rights, learning job skills, obtaining support to improve family relations. Women, in short, are seeking a space that is their own, that this democratic, autonomous, and flexible, where they can meet all of their needs in an integrated manner.⁶

Below, we look more closely at a single such project, offering a description and analysis of the Project on Women and Popular Education of the Centro El Canelo de Nos.

A Birth

The Project on Women and Popular Education, founded in 1983, was initially housed within CEAAL, the Latin American Council on Adult Education.* CEAAL includes people, organizations, and institutions that are concerned with adult popular education of every description in Latin America and the Caribbean. Since 1986 the project has been part of the Centro El Canelo de Nos, a nationwide institution affiliated with CEAAL. El Canelo is defined as a meeting ground for everyone who is interested in fostering the processes of collective popular autonomy. This concept is the foundation of our approach to the construction of a society that is democratic, just, free; and egalitarian.

* The project was coordinated through 1985 by Gabriela Pischedda. Since 1986 the coordinator has been Berta Zuniga.

For groups at the grassroots to be able to take control of their own future, simultaneous and coordinated action must be taken on three fronts, which together embrace the range of human experience. First is the domain of work, action, production; second the domain of public life, politics, social organization; and third the domain of the personal, the emotional, of daily life.⁷

The Centro EI Canelo is primarily aimed at rural communities, working with peasant women. For such women, problems of gender and of class intersect tragically. Their lives are characterized by subordination, isolation, marginalization, and devaluation. "The men don't know what I do or even that I exist." Such women are imprisoned in their homes, often burdened with a double workday in the house and in the fields. To be born a woman, it seems, means resigning oneself to this fate: "That is why God made women." Those who do not see their situation as the will of God believe it is the expression of a natural order: "That's how things are, you can't change them."

Peasant women also suffer all the problems of their class: unemployment, lack of decent housing, poor health care, lack of educational services, fear, repression, and no job security. In most cases such women have no organizations that can back them up. Their only access to organized activity is through groups sponsored by the church or workshops like the state-sponsored Mothers' Centers.

In the face of this reality, and seeking to address work, organization, and daily life in a unified fashion, the Centro El Canelo de Nos has adopted the following goals:

• To support women to become aware of their social reality and of gender issues.
• To support processes of integration and organization among peasant women.
• To encourage income-generating projects that aid in family subsistence and in the integration of women into the world of work.
• To support all types of actions that can lead to a more decent way of life and the construction of a society based on justice and equality.

Methods of Work

One of the many questions that arise in work with and for women is whether the methods for such work should be different from those used in doing similar work with other groups. In working with women, two strands of thought are (or should be) woven together in order to support a coherent process of action and reflection that can lead us to our goal of the liberation of women.

One of our strands is popular education, which may be understood as educational work that is characterized by its commitment to integrating the creation of collective knowledge at the grassroots with political practice based in daily life and aiming toward social transformation.⁸ Popular education takes political practice as its starting point; this practice is analyzed and enriched with new understandings in order to return to action at a higher level. Thus popular education is a process of action-reflection- action whose most basic function is to strengthen organizations and social groupings that seek to redistribute power and resources to the benefit of those at the bottom of the societal heap.

The other strand in work with women is feminism: the contributions of feminist theory and feminist movements to women's attempts to define our own identity. "Recognizing ourselves as women means recognizing the multiple logic of domination."⁹

Both popular education and feminism stress the importance of reclaiming the value of women's lives, starting from the basic experiences of domestic work, women's right to control their own sexuality, and their integration into the world of paid work. All these are elements of liberation and not of oppression.

Such a stance, which recognizes that work with women requires that their lives be understood in terms of gender as well as class, poses a major challenge: to formulate an educational approach that reclaims and emphasizes the lived experiences of women as women, in order to determine how these experiences may be projected into the larger arena of social action.

Like other projects in Chile, the women's program at El Canelo de Nos is working out an approach to educational work with women. Much remains to be discussed, thought over, refined, but the work of the last fifteen years has not been fruitless.

Certain elements have emerged as key to our work. Our work is centered around periodic meetings, weekly or biweekly. We work with groups in preference to individuals in order to foster a process of dialog. We believe that it is in the encounter of diverse individuals—each one with her own strengths, her own problems—that women can realize the potential for active participation, critical reflection on social reality, and the genesis of joint actions to meet basic needs and solve problems.

The topics of the actual workshops are chosen by the participants themselves to reflect their needs and interests. Daily life, the personal and emotional issues that they face as women: these are the focus of our educational work. It is in these daily matters that women can best recognize our own experiences, where we can give a voice to our thoughts, where we can take control of our lives and transform what was private into the collective, the personal into the political.

Our workshops begin with a "self-diagnosis" by the participants. The results are grouped according to topic, and these topics are then discussed with the help of educational material and group activities.

It is crucial for the self-diagnosis to reflect all of the aspects of human experience: work and production, organization and social life, daily life and feelings—all seen from the perspective of women. We believe that a unified treatment of all these areas, using popular education methods and a feminist perspective, is the only way that personal and social development can advance toward liberation.

Most popular education programs suffer from a serious problem in that information is not set down systematically, and so it is necessary to reinvent the wheel for every project. Currently, our women's program is trying to write up its workshops systematically so that we can review and improve them, with the aim of developing a complete design that other groups could use for work with women. A group of specialists is working on this project together with the monitors or grassroots leaders and the participants in the groups, so that the finished design will not reflect only the insights of a few but rather a just and democratic distribution of knowledge. Knowledge is power and power can be used for domination. The philosophy of popular education, especially with women, is that power does not have to be a tool for domination—it can be understood instead as the capacity to take action to transform the world.

Where Do We Work?

From 1983 to the present our program has been held in various regions. In September 1983 we began in Osorno, then went to Concepcion together with INPRODE, a regional nongovernmental organization (NGO). Next we were in Curanilahua to work with women who had been through the educational program of CIDE, the Center for Research and Educational Development. More recently we have been working with peasant groups in Region 6.

At this writing our programs are coordinated directly by El Canelo in Talca and San Juan de la Costa, while we work in conjunction with regional NGOs like CREDES in Rancagua and AURORA in Puerto Montt. As our work grows, it becomes more and more important for us to overcome our isolation. Thus along with other organizations working in the provinces we decided to form a network of educational centers. This body, while respecting the autonomy of each institution and of the grassroots communities themselves, brings together groups that are working along similar lines. Likewise, our women's program is working in cooperation with other groups in the women's division of the local Network of Development Centers.

Each area has its own idiosyncracies. In Talca we were working through two regional institutions, CRATE and PEHUENCHE. These were peasant women's groups that had come together through income-generating projects or craft workshops. Their members were small landholders of the most impoverished groups in the region. In this region, the programs have emphasized consciousness raising about women's issues and the importance of organizing around production. It has been a slow process. At first the women, all of whom had some experience of the Mothers' Centers, would participate only in activities that were already familiar to them in their lives as wives and mothers: cooking, sewing, and the like. Today there are twelve organized groups, each with a very clear understanding of their situation and its overall social context.

Things are very different in San Juan de la Costa, where we work with Huilliches, an indigenous people, or Puerto Montt, where we work with shantytown dwellers and union groups—women who have a tradition of participating in organizations and in paid work. Yet although it may be easier for such women to address the problems of organization and participation, still they continue to live out the problems of breaking the cycle of subordination and oppression. The process is not a simple or mechanical one. It is a mistake to think that greater self-awareness automatically leads to a higher level of organization, or vice versa. Many factors influence such developments, especially individual and collective reflection and action. This work is a developmental process, and one that requires educational support.

In a rural village located not far from the mining town of Rancagua we have had yet another experience, this time working jointly with CREDES, a regional NGO. Here the group came together through a very particular event, the 1985 earthquake. People worked together to address their immediate problems. The lack of housing and food, hoarding, and similar issues brought together thirty-five women of all ages, in a community that nothing and nobody had managed to organize previously. Today, the women's group is still meeting. The women have mobilized not only their children but also their husbands by organizing activities in which the entire family group takes part.

The work and its demands continue to grow. There are many of us who want to grow together, to gather greater strength and to change our society.

What Have We Learned?

The road to freedom is neither broad nor smooth. It is a zigzag path, full of pitfalls. To be a woman and a person at the same time is new: we do not have models. This, we think, is the first thing we have learned. It is an important lesson that teaches us to approach our work with patience and humility. We have gathered a store of experiences, information, and many questions that show us the next few steps on our way.

Some of our insights are not new: other women have already discovered them. Nonetheless it is worthwhile to repeat their lessons.

• History is defined and told by men. Women are all but invisible in history. It is important for us to remember that the work we are doing today is necessary and irreplaceable. We believe that today we are aware of our situation and are taking action to make ourselves visible.
• Knowledge is power, a power that has traditionally belonged to men. Women have always been marginalized in terms of both power and knowledge. Even though it is true that women have been included in the educational system in the second half of this century, it is equally true that the system focuses its energies on men, who are considered, without debate, as the workers and the leaders.

Today we see an urgency among women to educate themselves, to gain knowledge. Women take part in every program or course that is offered. They may not always be sure of their own motivations. But once they are involved, once they have stepped out of the isolation of their homes, they begin to reclaim their own voices. Here begins the slow journey toward articulating their own demands—which start from the most basic, the right to live, to eat, to have a house, and move on to the desire to be valued, to be recognized, to participate.

• At the risk of being repetitive, we stress that it is not possible to offer popular education programs for women unless those programs are designed from a feminist perspective. This means that such programs must take into account every aspect of human existence. Only in this way can such programs express the demands of women, as determined by women, with women, and for women.
• Finally, we must make it clear that we are not calling for partial processes, that stop, for example, with solving the problems of basic subsistence. Women are coming together to launch a political project which will have room for all the demands that arise from our gender and class.

Where will this take us? Very, very far. We will discover that we live in an oppressive situation that has to be changed. We will discover that we are worth something.

We want to know who we are, how we love one another, how we can organize ourselves. We want to know that we have civil and political rights, the right to organize—and that we can exercise these rights on equal terms. We want life, not a living death. We want democracy and freedom, "en el pais y en la casa," in the country and at home, in the words of the Chilean feminist slogan. We want to participate in the life of our communities: to have our own organizations, to feel that we have created a space that belongs to us, where women are valued as complete human beings. We want to change our families, replacing relationships of dependency with those of equality. We want to take our place in the community, the factory, the party, the union. We want to struggle alongside others, men and women, to question and transform all relations that are based in domination.

Quite simply, we want to create a new way of living, a new history, a new society.

Centro El Canelo de Nos
Avenida Portales 3020
Paradero 7
San Bernardo, Nos
Chile

 

Notes

1. Lopez, F., "Una aproximacion a la problematica de la Educacion Popular" [An approach to the problems of popular education], paper delivered at Second Conference of Popular Educators, Santiago, Chile, 1982.
2. Ibid.
3. Kirkwood, J., "Feminismo y participacion politica" [Feminism and political participation] in La Otra Mitad de Chile [The other half of Chile], Ang. Meza. Cesoc, Santiago, Chile, 1986.
4. Ibid.
5. Pischedda, G., "Crecer juntas: Una experiencia de educacion popular con mujeres campesinas" [Growing together: an experience in popular education with peasant women] in Agricultura y Sociedad [Agriculture and society]. No. 5, GIA, Santiago, Chile, 1987.
6. Ibid.
7. Vio Grossi, F., "La educacion popular: Una perspectiva educativa" [Popular education: an educational perspective], internal document, CEAAL, Santiago, Chile, 1986.
8. Ibid.
9. Rosero, R., "Feminismo y Educacion Popular" [Feminism and popular education], working paper, Quito, Ecuador, 1986.

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