NOJOLO'ON
COMMUNITY PEACE CENTER
NOJOLO'ON: WE ARE SOUTH
To live with dignity allows humans to develop their full creative potential for the benefit of both individual and collective well-being. This capacity is limited in environments where members of any people, nation or social group are forced to cease to use what gives them their essence: their language, knowledge, history, their ways of considering the aesthetic, the beautiful, or the profound.
Global north and global south are terms that refer to places that although they have a physical origin (in the West’s colonization of first nations and peoples) today are defined as symbolic places in which the tension between the colonial inheritance and the struggle for the right to be and think differently coexist. The global north represents a system that defines welfare from an exclusionary, capitalist, hetero-masculine and homogenizing perspective; those who fail to adapt to this system are marginalized, silenced and annihilated. The global south is made up of those who resist and defend their right to exist on their own terms and with autonomy: with their own education, their own language, recognizing diverse forms of love, relating to the earth not in terms of resource-exploitation but of exchange-care, among other manifestations of human diversity. Understood as ways of thinking, north and south are everywhere and can be anywhere. The south is all peoples who have been minoritized and forced to think within a single system but who today understand that as unjust and violent. The south resists and builds a world in which many worlds fit.
The Mayan people are part of that south that today faces a crisis of land
dispossession, loss of linguistic vitality, economic marginalization, lack of health systems and education respectful of their knowledge and ancestral wisdom. All of the above creates social problems such as depression, increased suicide rates, substance abuse, crime. social breakdown, etc. The loss of identity is the loss of personal and collective balance. In the attempt to be others and in the frustration of not being recognized as complete beings our spirits and bodies get sick, the community gets sick, the earth gets sick.
Nojolo'on (We Are South) is a point of departure, alert and action based on community action rooted in the principles of nonviolence and restorative justice. Our response to a violent environment must counteract the onslaught from outside, healing from within to influence our surrounding conditions. We believe that any movement for change must come from the community itself, in collective processes of reflection and re-appropriation of our Mayan values and for the reconstruction of our history told by ourselves, from the south.
PROJECTS
Training Leaders in Nonviolent Social Action
This program is provided for young people of high school level. The objective is to recognize, value and unleash the abilities of Mayan youth as key actors in the social transformation of their communities.
The curriculum includes sessions on re-signifying the term leadership, that is, it seeks to build a type of leadership that arises from the wisdom of the participants. The construction of an appropriate form of leadership will be nourished by the individual history of the participants and the collective history of the Mayan people. The program also includes learning from other experiences of resistance (the civil rights movement in the United States, Satyagraha, linguistic activism and Latin American and indigenous musical resistance, amongst others) in order to compare and contrast our own model with knowledge from other latitudes.
Collective Diagnosis of Community Health in Peto
As a final product of the leadership program for nonviolent social action, the participants will carry out a collective holistic diagnosis of the health of the community of Peto, Yucatán. Health here is understood as a holistic term that refers both to the optimal physiological conditions of an organism and to its spiritual, psychological and social equilibrium.
For the Mayan people, community health included the active participation of the members in the well-being of their neighbors through supportive attitudes (sharing work, food, maintenance of social spaces such as the milpa, the village festival, etc.). Health also meant recognizing humanity as a part of something more, involving spirituality, and respectful relationships with other people as well as animals, plants and other entities.
The foci of the diagnosis will be defined beforehand through the outline of a community life-plan that integrates the components that the participants define as essential for community health.
Sustainable and Environmental Building of the Community Peace Center in Peto, Yucatan
The Nojolo’on Community Peace Center is located on the outskirts of the municipal capital, Peto, surrounded by the Mayan tropical deciduous forest. Previously, it was a traditional milpa in which corn, pumpkins, chiles, cucumbers, papaya, watermelon, cantaloupe, and bananas were grown.
We currently have a palapa for training sessions and outdoor spaces for tents and a cistern for water. We currently need a rainwater collection system, a potable water source and electricity as well as sleeping spaces for program participants.
Our goal is to have a well and a solar energy system to feed the main house, the workshop palapa and five cabins accommodating a total of 20 people by December 2020.
ABOUT US
Yazmín Yadira Novelo Montejo
Yazmín is a sociolinguist, communications expert and Mayan singer, from Peto, Yucatan, where she got her start as a volunteer radio host on the XEPET indigenous radio station at age eight. After graduating with a degree in social communication she became the director of Yóol Lik’ Radio, the first commercial radio station to be produced entirely in Mayan. During this time the use of the Mayan language was strengthened considerably in Mérida (the capital of Yucatan). Yazmín is currently a producer at Radio Yúuyum, an online radio station that transmits solely in Yucatec Mayan. Yazmín is also a professor of Mayan Culture at the Autonomous University of Yucatan (UADY) and is the lead singer of Juumíl Moots (roots sound). Through all of these activities, Yazmín seeks justice and respect for the Mayan people and for them to be able to live fully in their language and culture. Yazmín has a professional master’s degree in Language and Identity Revitalization of First Peoples from the University of Mondragón (Basque Country) and a university master’s in Sociolinguistics from the Universidad Mayor de San Simón, Bolivia.
Michael Joseph
Michael has worked for peace, justice and human rights in Latin America for 17 years. From 2007-2019 he worked with the Prophetic Call human rights documentation program in Colombia which documented more than 10,000 human rights violations during Colombia’s internal armed conflict. From 2017-2019 Michael coordinated the Cafepaz Peace Studies Center based at the Baptist
University and International Seminary of Cali. An ordained Baptist minister, Michael is recognized as a Global Associate of Global Ministries of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and United Church of Christ. Michael has taught theology at both the Baptist University and Seminary in Cali and the Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Bogotá, Colombia. Michael has a BA in Latin American Studies from the University of North Carolina, an MA in Theology, with a focus in Ethics from Union Theological Seminary, in New York City and Doctor of Ministry degree from the Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond, VA.
