Walking the Red Road –– How Cultural Education Has Encouraged a Culture of Educating

Macedonio Arteaga, executive director of Izcalli, an indigenous educational and support network for adolescents, describes the organization’s annual men’s gathering, Círculo De Hombres, as a rite of passage. But for as long as he’s been doing this work, he said he’s never had a young man know what a rite of passage is. When they start to understand the concept, they often associate it with negative experiences – the first time they got arrested or were sent to prison, their first alcoholic drink, or the day their father left.  

So, Arteaga asks them to imagine a bridge. “You’re on one side of the bridge and you’re going to cross over and when you come to the other side there’ll be men there to guide you, to support you, to teach you something different,” he said. “Like ‘it’s okay to cry, it’s okay to talk about your feelings, it’s okay to go to therapy,’” he continued.  

For nearly 30 years, Izcalli has worked to educate largely indigenous, immigrant and Chicano at-risk youth about their cultural heritage and help them deal with trauma by finding new ways to express themselves. But it’s turned out to be an incubator for a new generation of educators. 

Izcalli started as a Saturday school for students in San Diego County but has since run restorative justice and healing circles in schools throughout the region. The organization also formed Teatro Izcalli, a nationally recognized comedy troupe meant to educate people about issues affecting the community through comedy. But over the years they’ve developed new traditions, like the annual gathering for male-identifying people. Many of their events in schools are coed, and in the past, they’ve done gatherings specifically for women as well.  

The three-day ceremony during which attendees camped out on Kumeyaay land about an hour east of San Diego, consisted of activities like a healing circle and a sweat lodge. Arteaga stressed that the ceremony isn’t something he and the other founders of Izcalli created, but rather traditions passed down to them from their elders, who came from several different tribes and traditions. It’s something of an amalgam, weaving together practices from tribes originating from both sides of the border. 

The attendees reflect that mix. Some are Mexican immigrants, some Chicanos and others are members of specific tribes.  

“You look at the crowd and there are folks in here who have been to jail, folks in here who have been to college,” said German Gurrola, a teacher in Los Angeles, who attended this year’s gathering. “Some folks have Ph.D.s, some are educators … some folks are working class, some are coming from middle class or affluent backgrounds. Some folks are new to the movement, some folks are third-generation activists. But you can’t tell who’s who just by looking at them.” 

But one of the most striking things about the gathering is how many members of the group work in or around education. Arteaga does restorative justice work in schools, for example. And many of them grew up with Izcalli in their lives, like Gurrola, 41, who’s been attending the organization’s events since he was 17. 

Gurrola grew up in Tijuana but crossed the border each day to attend school. Growing up, he was angry at the world, at the injustice he saw and at the system that had created it. Despite knowing it wasn’t necessarily in him, he wanted to be a gangster, he said, “because I felt like the outlaw was the only way to really destroy (the system).”  

When he was a sophomore at Sweetwater High he took a Chicano studies class with Joe Lara, another educator and founder of Izcalli, and one day Arteaga was a guest speaker. His talk about indigenous ways, culture and healing intrigued Gurrola, who approached the pair after class and said he was interested in learning more. A year later he attended his first sweat. 

Gurrola said his introduction to Izcalli, indigenous practices and Chicano studies focused the trajectory of his life. These new outlets were political and addressed the inequities he’d seen crossing the border each day, but also spiritual, and not in the indoctrinating way of his Catholic upbringing. 

“This provided an alternative … and it was a path that critiques this system,” he said. “A lot of us, because of our exposure to these ways, tend to gravitate to roles of healers of the mind, healers of the heart – counseling, teaching, education, mentorship,” he continued. 

Luis Gomez, another of Izcalli’s founding members, is also an educator and a former vice principal. He describes education as his version of “walking the red road,” a phrase that broadly means to move through life in a spiritual way, with purpose and an intent to grow. 

Gomez said that he’ll keep coming to the circles until he’s physically unable to. “But until then I will always be supporting, teaching, sharing,” he said 

“It’s not a coincidence that a lot of people that you see here are educators,” Gomez said. Knowing less than 50 years ago people could be persecuted for practicing some indigenous traditions makes Gomez feel an even deeper need to share what he’s learned from his elders, many of whom have already passed on. “I’m going to be gone and what I know has to continue, whether that be through my children or my godson, or my relatives,” he said. 

That commitment to guiding was present throughout the weekend. On the first day, renowned muralist Guillermo “Yerma” Aranda, whose work adorns some of the freeway supports of Chicano Park, guided attendees in erecting a teepee. As men added poles one by one, a teenager ran in circles around the teepee’s frame, whipping the securing rope upward to keep it tight as it secured each new piece of wood to the last. Aranda checked in on his work frequently. 

“Each teepee is an individual,” Aranda said. “You get to know them and what they need.” 

In the healing circle, and throughout the weekend, the leaders and adults sought to teach by example, sharing their trauma, their pain, their weaknesses, all to show the next generation that it’s not only okay to do so, but necessary to thrive and grow and move forward. 

“We live in a society that has taught us that as males, we shouldn’t tap into those feelings because it’s just wrong,” Gomez said. “A lot of these kids come here and for the first time they see their fathers, they see their cousins, older brothers or uncles and go ‘wow, they’re talking, they’re sharing, they’re crying,’” he said.  

In Arteaga’s view, decolonization, which to him means reintegrating indigenous knowledge into people’s lives, is a key teaching of the gathering. He believes that knowledge, long buried by colonization, can help alleviate much of the undue gendered pressures and expectations put on men, and that unwillingness to freely share their emotions. “When we’re challenging toxic masculinity we’re not reinventing ourselves,” he said. “We’re going back to our original selves.” 

During breakfast, over a plate of nopales con huevos, Arteaga told me a story. “There was a time evil spirits came to a nation, and they said they were going to take happiness away from men,” Arteaga said. For months the men searched for happiness. They asked the animals, looked in the rivers and lakes, in the caves and on the tops of trees but they simply couldn’t find it. And the men were sad.  

In desperation, the nation’s medicine men went to the evil spirits and told them “we sent our strongest warriors to find happiness, but we cannot find it. Please, tell us where it is” Arteaga said. The evil spirits told the medicine men “we hid happiness in the one place we knew man would never find it,” Arteaga said, “the heart.” 

We sat there quietly for a moment. Chewing. Thinking. “So, is that what all of this is?” I asked Arteaga. “A way to teach men how to look into their hearts?” 

“Exactly, bro,” he said. 

The Content Bouncing Around My Mind Palace  

• School started on Monday for many college students (including myself), and San Diego Unified starts classes on Monday. But as we continue to slowly extricate ourselves from the COVID-related limitations placed on schools – SDUSD for example announced last week that they wouldn’t be requiring masks district-wide — the memory still looms large and is still animating some. I’m going to be paying special attention to whether some of the enrollment decline seen before the pandemic, but which increased during it, will continue now that school has returned to the classroom. 

• San Diego State University welcomed its largest freshman class ever this year, and it’s increasingly made up of locals. But, as they return to campus they’re partying. Hard. After a couple of years of pandemic life, that hardly seems surprising, but neighbors are frustrated. Speaking of SDSU: Snapdragon Stadium, the new football stadium that seemed to go up overnight, opened this week. 
• Over the years, bond measures that raise property taxes put on the ballot by the San Diego Unified School District that raise funds for facility and infrastructure construction and renovation have often sailed through. The board recently approved a motion to put a measure that would allow the district to borrow $3.2 billion and raise property taxes six cents for every one hundred dollars in value on the ballot and the spending priorities bear a striking similarity to a bond measure passed a couple of years ago. One candidate for the board, conservative Becca Williams, has come out in opposition.  

What We’re Writing  

• We’ve begun to roll out profiles of all four candidates for the San Diego Unified School District board that have advanced to November’s general election. Here’s a helpful overview of the District C race. 
• The Democrat in the race, Cody Petterson, is a longtime environmental activist and an educator who views schools as the last, best chance to prepare future generations to “pick up the pieces and build a new world.” Read more about Petterson here. 
• The Republican in the race, Becca Williams, is the co-founder of a Texas-based network of charter schools and a self-declared outsider candidate who wants to push back on some school board policies. Her opposition to SDUSD’s pandemic response has endeared her to anti-mask and vaccine mandate activists. Read more about Williams here.