Writing saves us all / Poniatowska

My name is Domingo García Mijangos, I am from the Miahuatlán area of ​​Porfirio Díaz, Sierra Sur, Oaxaca. I was part of the State Coordination of the People of Oaxaca. We have been training for 35 years and we are in all regions of the state. What we do is promote leadership in the communities, give strength to women and men who have the makings of leaders, and now I am very fascinated with a group of Oaxacan women who have decided to be reporters, and we help them with great enthusiasm.

–How do they approach you? How do you know them?

–They are coming out in the Assembly and there we detect them. They are trained and strengthened little by little in each community. We have been doing this community organizing work in Oaxaca for three years now.

–How do you help, Domingo?

–We organize to deal with health situations, because ours are very marginalized communities; We have been opening access routes and roads, achieving benefits, improving schools and roads.

–How do they do it?

–We manage everything that is work for our communities. We have managed to overcome marginalization in several areas of the state with the participation of the people we taught to organize. As a result of our interventions, concern arises about achieving improvements. The idea was born to form a network of reporters, community journalists in Oaxaca, all indigenous. They only have a few community radio stations in the mother tongue of each area, Mazatec, Chinantec, Zapotec, but the reporters also speak Spanish; In another area we also have Nahuatl, Chatino in the Juquila mountain range, that of the sanctuary of the Virgin of Juquila. They are the languages ​​in which we work and from there a group of women has emerged who are training to form the Network of Community Reporters.

–How many are there?

–One hundred and fifty women and the group will grow, because each community has already named a representative. Ours is the first group. He leaves an assembly. The community appoints its reporters, they are trained; We want to make an army of native communicators, because that helps us reinforce our identity. Radio stations also have to speak in the mother tongue to strengthen it in the community, so that the language of each region is not lost. What we don’t have is the written part, we don’t have a newspaper, and that’s what we want.

The classmates already have a phone and upload videos to YouTube, make Tik Toks; They are training to improve their videos and upload, for example, health topics. We have already disclosed how children are born in the community through a midwife. We also explained how the community takes care of itself in the event of danger. We have organized ourselves to show the town’s festivals, what our music sounds like, what our bands are, what stewardship is like in the community. The abandonment of the school and the road that cannot be traveled because it collapsed in the rain will also be announced.

–Are those women the eyes of the people?

–Yes and they are going to say to the government and the nation: This is how our people are, we need help. We had an area very damaged by the hurricane John and the rains for 15 days. The communities have collapsed roads and the government has not come to clean them up. I am speaking from the area of ​​San Juan Otzolotepec, San Francisco, San Marcial. They haven’t come to clean us up. People are also organizing, but they are very big stones. Machinery has to come in, but it takes a long time for the government to receive the information. They go once and then they don’t, so, since there is already Internet in the community, with that video we are going to put pressure on the network to see if the government is embarrassed and sends people to clean the road, because there are communities whose routes are in very bad conditions. For example, in the Santiago Choapan area, people live very poorly because their roads are in terrible conditions and with the rain there is no passage.

–Are you a councillor?

–I am coordinator of a civil association, it is a union of people at the state level. We formed that space 35 years ago. With me is Estefani Palacios, a reporter, and she is, along with other reporters, the eyes of the people to get all the information about what our town is suffering. That’s why we made a movement of women reporters, reporters who are going to spread the word. There are many reporters from the state interested.

We want it to start in Oaxaca and little by little to grow in the country and for women to have greater participation. There are 150 women. In Oaxaca there are 1,2000 communities, we have 570 municipalities; Yes, Elenita, in Oaxaca there are many. We are seeing that each community nominates its reporter so that we can spread the word throughout the state.

–But, who trains the reporters? Where do women learn?

–In the offices of the State Coordination of the People of Oaxaca, CEPO, and here we are helped by Estefanía, who is sitting next to me, and a team of journalists and reporters, photographers,

A pretty and attentive girl speaks up and tells me:

–I studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, at the Aragón Faculty of Higher Studies, and I am responsible for the reporters in Oaxaca. Domingo invited me to visit a community and I met several. They are professional women, others are housewives and some are lawyers, even stylists, students who want to be reporters.

“The girls in these communities want to learn how to do journalism, how to make videos, how to write, what to ask. They are in this process because we already went to visit them and saw the place where we can train them. Afterwards, they want to teach other women who live in the community so that they become stronger and can reach other communities. We have already started to build a very large network of women, all determined to learn. There are many, many.

“We want women to learn to accommodate information and make it known throughout the country. We want to start in Oaxaca so that it spreads on a national scale. Now the enthusiasm of the women is very important, because before they felt very sad, and now they have changed and there are many who want to make known what their localities do: healers with plants, midwives and women who want to talk about caring for the environment. , even in very distant communities, six or eight hours from the capital, but that have radio and television, and with one click they are updated. Everyone can be reporters. There are girls who study law and want to help; They have already started a decalogue, a list of steps on how to file a complaint and they will now be able to teach them how to go to a prosecutor’s office, how to take evidence of things, because then they arrive and face questions like: ‘where do they have evidence?’, and well they don’t have them. So, this is the process to support them, to teach others so that they can have their rights, that they are not violated and that they feel safe in their communities.”

–You women are going to be like a very large network of journalism or information that is published in different newspapers, like an agency.

–Yes, information. Of course, what is also intended is that the material they use can be distributed in other newspapers or on an international scale, that it be made known in those spaces and that they make themselves known, because it is very important to give them a voice and name, and that publish it, I don’t know, New York Times oo a newspaper from Spain.

They are women from indigenous communities who are going to make known everything they have in their towns. So, there will be reporters from other newspapers who ask about these communities, and you can give them that material by giving credit to them, always respecting their authorship, that they took the material, wrote it, took their video, their photos. It is an agency of indigenous community reporters.