What is Nojolo'on?

Dear friends,

We are excited to share some news with you about the Nojolo'on Community Peace Center, an initiative that some of you know about and that is new for others. After years of dreaming about a way to work for change in her hometown (for Yazmín) and over a year of planning together (with Michael) we are joining with the community of Peto, Yucatan to work for indigenous rights, peacebuilding, and engage in community organizing around a wide array of issues.

The Nojolo’on Community Peace Center’s goal is to be a place of dialogue where everyone shares their knowledge, overcoming inequality by the strength of the community. 

The Nojolo’on Community Peace Center is located in Yazmín’s hometown, Peto, Yucatan. The center's name - Nojolo’on - means “We are South” in Mayan. “We are south” refers to geographic location but is also a metaphor for the inequality created by different forms of oppression. In other words, “the south” can be in any country or continent. Peto is "south" three times over: it is southern Mexico, it is southern Yucatan and it is south as a place of resistance. Just as is the case in many Mayan and other first nation communities, Peto faces many challenges while ironically being a reservoir of ancestral community wisdom. The Nojolo’on Community Peace Center’s goal is to be a place of dialogue where everyone shares their knowledge, overcoming inequality by the strength of the community. 

Our first project will be to build Mayan models of leadership with young people in Peto. In order to do this we will be camping out with a group of twenty youth every weekend for two months. Over each weekend we will collectively draw on the wisdom of Mayan women and men as well as peace leaders from other parts of the world, such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. The first step is for us to recognize our own power in order to understand what we can do to promote positive social change in our community and how we want to go about it. We have several other projects, but we want to keep this email short, so we will just point you to our website for you to read about the others.

We also want you to know that in these early days of this project we have felt frustration, encouragement, hope and joy and each of those emotions has given us a lot to think about. We look forward to sharing those thoughts with you through our blog. We will also be sharing about our life in Peto (where we will be moving full-time very soon; for now we’re still in Mérida), through social media platforms (Instagram,Facebook and Twitter: Nojolo’on).

We are motivated by faith and hope...

We close by reminding you that this work is motivated by faith and hope: faith in the power of citizen action and the hope that is found in building environments of justice and peace anywhere we are. The Nojolo’on Community Peace Center is an act of solidarity and needs the generosity of those who share its vision. We currently have three fund-raising campaigns to help us get up and running, we invite you to join us in supporting them in any way that you can. General donations can be made through PayPal, and specific support can be given through GoFundMe for our meeting space and well. To those who donated last year while we were in the U.S., our deepest gratitude; you enabled us to get our website up and running, design our logo, and take the first steps toward making the dream of a community peace center in Peto a reality.

From southern Mexico, with hearts warmed by the bright sun of the land of the Mayas, we send our warmest greetings and hopes of well-being for each of you. 

With love and solidarity,

Yazmín and Michael