mullets of the mind

A review of Universidad de la Sierra Juarez by a coworker

"I’ve been working at the university for 4 months now and I really enjoy it. marsha is right in saying that the university is not in Oaxaca, but is in a small town of 2000, about an hour and a half away. It really is a lvoely little town. i’ve never felt so safe or experienced ssuch a strong sense of community before. Clearly this isn’t going to be a party town, but its still very social. theres often fiestas here or in the neighbouring village, basketball is big if you want to get involved and us teachers always eat together and get together a couple of times a week. And oaxaca is fantastic for a weekend trip. with hardly any expenses in the town, you’l have plenty money left to enjoy.
the univeristy is still small, and we only teach 3 hours a day. Wyou’ll never have work to take home with you which is a big bonus. you’ll always be paid on time and our holidays are guarenteed. the students are great too. I will be honest and say thart disipline is quite strong here, on both the students and the teachers. this is sometimes hard to ajust too, but i still think the students, collegues, town and location outweigh this.
So if you’re thinking about working here and are prerpared for small town life, i would most definately recommned it."

My Response:
As there are more than sufficient apologists for the Oaxacan Sierra, the innate nobility of its indigenous people and the idyllic comunero culture, I thought some grumpy and glaringly absent criticism should be added. While trying to make an informed decision regarding the job offer from UNSIJ and sifting through the interminable blogs of those who had come to the wooded hills to pet the locals, this was the only teacher's comment I found. There is now also this repetition on Dave's ESL cafe:
Skewed View  (this post has been deleted)
Its few hints at trouble are hardly sufficient to permit a meaningful prediction of the town's plodding ennui and prejudices, or the inefficient silliness of the university's authoritarian beauracracy. I was certainly fooled.

The mountain area of Ixtlan is a pleasant enough day trip from Oaxaca City for trout and vistas. Teachers, however, quickly move beyond the delights of the regular tour. Despite the mountain beauty, the town itself is a colorless smudge of unexceptional buildings and exceptional noise on the side of an often cold and rainy mountain. Fittingly, the central value of this gray existence seems to be privation: the opportunity to prove one's communal chauvenism by suffering nobly for its central narratives. The north's individualism sees society and its governance as having some responsibility to its members for their well being, failing which it is appropriate to question one's loyalty to that collective. The comunero cosmovision, contrarily, proposes that one has obligations to the community through which one earns their rights. Granted, northerners' privileges can be egocentric and consumer driven, but it is difficult to point out just what “rights” the locals actually earn. It quickly becomes clear that mythologies of personal freedom and the right to a certain degree of comfort are not part of the local constitution. Rather, the strong sense of belonging and duty conflict personal desires and their expression and, subsequently, the benefits of community such as accommodation, food and transportation, are all obediently suffered as frustratingly limited and unreliable resources. After all, one should not ask what their community can do for them, but what they can do for their community.

But more importantly, here as everywhere, the community's defensive homogeneity renders interpretations of outsiders and their differences essentially absurd. Gringos are seen through a blurred lens of condemnation and jealousy as rich, selfish, all consuming juggernauts. The subsequent derision of foreigners, despite the kindness of a few locals, ranges from paranoid aloofness to outright staring and scoffing. “Jennie speaks quite a bit about the sense of community and belonging. However, I think this is a very personal experience for her and not a universal. There are some truly friendly folks up in the mountains, but overall the people are cold and suspicious and noted to be so. This is only the surface of very deep and complex cultural conflicts that one should be prepared to confront. To say that everyone is coming to a friendly little Mayberry is absurdly misleading. “

However, as discomforting as the town might be, the real disappointment in this adventure is the Universidad de la Sierra Juarez. The workday is 8 hours with only 3 of those spent in class. This leaves 5 – 7 hours a day, depending on whether you include the 2 hour lunch, to fill with whatever you can come up with, the expectation being a project within your field of expertise. English teachers are left somewhat alone, but that is more a reflection of the meaningless inconvenience English is seen as by the overburdened students, back stabbing, competitive professors and psychotically delusional, meglomanical administrators. In fact, the experience of an English teacher is akin to that of a pet dog, chained in the back yard where it remains possessed, but neglected.

To add to the campus's confusion as to what it is that English teachers are doing there, most modern language facilitators are trained in the touchy-feely concepts of the communicative methodology which emphasizes the fragile second language personality; comfortable, fun, student-oriented environments; and topics of personal importance to the students. These ideas are in complete contradiction to the apparent rote, memorize and regurgitate under-threat-of-the-whip methodologies of the university, whose antiquated vision is that education should always be painful and burdensome and all progress should be quantifiable. How else can you enculturate people into a cruel spirited and combative system of winner-loser hierarchies?

This focus on evaluation over real learning is completely in concert with the appearance over content imperative of the university. In fact, to be seen to be in blind submission to the anti intellectual doctrines of the place seems far more important than any real teaching or learning. Hence, a bevy of rules, regulations and inefficient tasks are given that seem to have no bearing whatsoever on any interpretation of education and more to do with whittling down the intrusive foreign decadence of individualism in favour of depersonalized and obedient workers. Jennie advises us to laugh it off.

Part of the general disrespect for the department, as well, is the expectation that few English teachers will stay past their initial 6 month contract. Apart from deciding to get out at the first opportunity, teachers are too often let go for running afoul of the school's many unforeseeable pitfalls. Expressing or asking for an opinion may go against the University's demand for mindless obedience, but surprisingly can also go against what the students have come to expect education to be. Student complaints were frequently leveled against English teachers (a la Khmer Rouge or Invasion of the Body Snatchers) during my stay and 6 university teachers were not offered a second contract. No official reason is ever given for not renewing contracts and in fact the departing teachers must actually write Orwellian letters of resignation in which they thank the school for giving them the opportunity to share their knowledge. When called to the office to be told that I would not be offered another contract, the vice rector thought it unimportant to have my file on hand or to be able to give me any idea as to why I was not to continue. He simply kept repeating that he didn't want a scene and that he would give me a letter of reference if I complied. Unofficially, I was fired for teaching swear words in response to a class request, though one suspects that there was more to it than that. I was told that the majority of my students had complained about me, but upon further investigation it seems that the complaints were actually forced corroborations from students who had been hauled in and questioned at random. My immediate superior made little effort to protect me and sided quickly with the administration as his most prudent course of action, continuing to insist that the students that had been pulled aside to be questioned were truly complaints. None of us are really of any importance to the university and it is easiest to throw one deserving trouble maker to the wolves and avoid an administrative confrontation. And I clearly have troubles with authority. But, in the nasty subterfuge of UNSIJ one could never know from what direction attacks might come. When asked in a secret vote, only 2 of around 50 students said that they did not want me to continue teaching them. That I really can't trust what the students said in this informal survey anymore than I can trust the whispers given as reasons for my dismissal only demonstrates how bent things in the university can be.
There is so much more to say, but all of this surely sounds already like mere whinging about the realities of the world. Prejudice exists and work sucks. Nonetheless, Ixtlan is a special case that will definitely not appeal to all. If you are a complacent and obedient person, if you have no exaggerated respect for your individuality or comfort, or perhaps want to deeply challenge your bourgeois needs, you may do well here. Some people do. But the tourist blogs that are so predominant are misleading, and you should be warned that Ixtlan is a challenge that requires more than a romantic notion of community, or being prepared for a strict work environment and life in a very tiny, very rustic town. You should be very honest with yourself about your ability to cope with so little. When there are much more pleasant options for teaching in Mexico, one should be be very thoughtful in deciding whether or not to go to the culture shock and deprivation of Ixtlan de Juarez.