Women That Do Not Stay Silent: Nahua Experiences of Decolonization of Knowledge in Mexican Architectural Education
摘要
Historically, in architectural, urban, and environmental education in Mexico, Indigenous peoples have been studied as the ‘great civilizations’ of the past, while their existence after the Spanish conquest has been marked by ethnic and cultural marginalization and influenced by modern colonialism and national ‘whitening’ policies. Eurocentric and ethnocentric paradigms, whether colonial, modern, or neo-colonial, have shaped the content of Mexican educational programs in various fields, reinforcing the exclusion of the environmental knowledge of the colonized ‘Indigenous others’ as scientifically invalid and primitive. In the colonial and patriarchal context of the Spanish colony, but also in that of the independent Mexican state, Indigenous women have been doubly ignored as environmental knowers, knowledge producers, and decision-makers. To help fill this void, this chapter discusses the role of Indigenous Nahua women in the community of Cuetzalan, northern highlands of Puebla, Mexico, as socio-territorial agents associated with the collective ownership of agricultural land and rural community-building in a spiritual relationship with Tlaltipacnantzin, Mother Earth. Here, Indigenous cosmology, pre-Hispanic complementary gender roles, and culture-nature linkages between the environment and humans are the fundamental ideological sources for Nahua women’s creation of habitable, productive, and communal spaces. In this chapter, then, we ask how we might work with Indigenous women to create environments that emerge from the gendered situated knowledge that responds to everyday life, memory, and culture-nature connections. And finally, how might we expand the ideological world of university students beyond Ethnocentric thinking and Eurocentric canons through face-to-face co-collaborative methods to trigger gendered, ethnically, and culturally inclusive community development within the framework of multidimensional sustainability and situated, gender-sensitive, and decolonial community development?