7 principles

Saturday, November 15, 2025

Zapatista Seed Pedagogics:

Beyond Rights, Creating a Decolonizing Co-education

Charlotte María Sáenz*

Abstract

This article inquires into a pedagogics that seeds a larger co-educational

process outside of the Zapatista movement’s autonomous territories. A

Zapatista Seed Pedagogics (ZSP) is theorized as an educational, political, and

ethical process that confronts oppressive power relations at all levels, growing

a collective political and educational subject. While still asserting the need for

Indigenous rights within a neocolonial context, a ZSP transcends a human

rights education framework to insist on the inherent value of all beings and

their birthright to a dignified life. Drawing on a qualitative transgeographic

study conducted through interviews with pro-Zapatista interlocutors who are

themselves involved in processes of social change in their localities, the author

explores how this ZSP provokes a learning to learn and listen differently,

contributing to a larger mutualistic political-ethical education that in turn

grows Zapatismo itself.

Keywords: Zapatista epistemology, liberation pedagogics, Zapatismo,

pedagogies of social movements, decolonization

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Here they are as Gustavo explained them:

To serve others, not self. For Zapatistas, the goal of life is the common good, not the accumulation of money or power.
To represent, not supplant. The Zapatista model of revolution is not the seizure of power (supplanting one government with its mirror image), but the representation of the majority without reproducing old relationships of domination.
To construct, not destroy. The new order cannot be built upon violence.
To obey, not command. However, the Zapatista model of obedience is not that of servant to master or of soldier to comandante, but of mother to her infant child.
To convince, not to win. The Zapatista way centralizes respectful dialog based not primarily on logical argument, but supplementing logic with intuition derived from the experience of life.
To propose, not impose. Imposition represents the violence rejected by Zapatismo.
To go down, not up. For Zapatistas the geography of social discourse and action has changed. Old categories of left and right, conservative and liberal are no longer applicable. The new more relevant topography directs our gaze up and down, north and south – to recognize the gap between the one-percent and the rest of us.