With Gratitude for Gustavo Esteva

by Tomas Madrigal

“’Autonomy,’ said Don Gregorio, an old Yaqui Indian, ‘is not something we ought to ask for or that anyone can give us. It is something we have, despite everything. Its other name is dignity.’” Lines penned by the late Gustavo Esteva in 2003 after having walked with humble intellectual giants that changed Mexico forever after an uprising in 1994, an experience that led the Mexican activist to take on the identity of a, “deprofessionalized intellectual.” His brilliance, as an academic wasn’t that of an intellectual in isolation, but of one that had the ability to listen to those in community around him and had a willingness to weave the different strands into stories meant to create a cognitive dissonance enough for anyone that was reading to take a moment to pause, and reconsider what was taken for granted or as a given.

I have the honor of acknowledging this elder, with all of his patriarchal faults, as someone that also helped lay a foundation for action to research to action so that we may get just a little bit more free, even if it had to do with the way that we managed our excrement. Don’t believe me, take up the task of reading the dense Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the soil of cultures (1998). These works, were among the first that I read as a graduate student who was part of forming the first satellite Universidad de la Tierra in the United States. It was in these formative engagements with his grappling with his own deep patriarchy, that I began to challenge my own as a necessary step towards humility to be able to walk with the people. The first time was during the Other Campaign stop in Tijuana, hitching a ride with Joel in Los Angeles, who would become a lifelong friend, we went to Mitín after Mitín, in preparation. Shortly after, we would end up as part of a brigade that walked with the Cúcapa in Baja California, as they struggled for fishing rights that were diminished due to dams on the US side of the border that shriveled a river that was their ancestral lifeblood and had to venture further into the Gulf of California, an ecological zone to survive. A couple years later, after standing up the UniTierra Califa’s Santa Barbara satellite that supported facilities for workers of color to take their union back, we were called once again to form a brigade, this time to Vicam, Sonora to witness the Congreso Nacional Indigena make pacts about defending territories and water, several years before Standing Rock and a few years before several battles in Mexico for Indigenous Autonomy.

Gustavo Esteva, in his writing, and example was a seed, justly so, unitierra refers to it’s workshop as a semillero; whether in Chiapas, Puebla, Oaxaca, Califas, or Seattle. I remember that he was very sensitive of being remembered as the founder of the UniTierra movement. For him it was important because the Unitierra model was built on the idea of apprenticeship, where “students learn the skills of the trade or field of study as apprentices of someone practicing those activities” without having to pay a university to gain those skills. The UniTierra model isn’t alone in this method, in fact prisoners in Washington State, use the Each One, Teach One principle from Black organizing to create the T.E.A.C.H. program inside prison walls precisely because lifers and those without citizenship status were structurally denied the ability to improve their education through university programs. I like to think of Esteva’s founder syndrome with UniTierra as the last great battle he had with his own patriarchy, as the apprenticeship model was the common wind among different, diverse and global liberation movements as we can now see with recently published scholarship about struggles across the world.

I have nothing but gratitude for those like Gustavo Esteva, whose shoulders the next generations stand upon, just a little more free than we started.