Day 17 - Identity

We started this week doing the Social Issue Activities (SIA) and Civic Engagement Workshops ((CEW) as you might have read in one of the other blogs).The group I´m facilitating is about the Mexican National Identity. In many ways it is a very difficult topic, firstly because it is a very ambiguous and subjective topic. Nevertheless, it is very interesting. The other day, for example, we were talking about how language is a part of a national identity, and we talked about traditional Mexican languages.  The focus was on Nahuatl, as a creative activity all the participants had to create a poem existing for 25% out of Nahuatl words. It was nice to see, as I´m from Europe I can mainly derive Spanish words, but these words … they could have been Hindi and I wouldn´t have known! We also tried to do something creative in every session, this ended up in amazing mural! In the first activity they had to draw the map of Mexico its borders consisting of words (aspects of a national identity). Subsequently the participants wrote down words that would define regional cultures in Mexico, as Mexico is quite diverse. This was followed by the workshop of westernisation where they cut out pictures of typical Mexican things and things that were influenced by the West. The things that were typically Mexican were close to the map and the others were further away. The other workshop of today was gender roles in the Mexican national identity. With this they created a drawing visualising their aspirations for who the relation should be; all in all a lot of discussions, and a lot of creative exercises where they could apply what they had learned before. All the participant seemed to enjoy these creative parts thoroughly as they even stayed to finish their mural in breaks, we had to make them have breaks, which was very rewarding! Because there is no solid information about the Mexican national identity that we could teach, it turned out more of an exploration which was very interesting for the facilitators too!

Sadly I was not very much involved in the CEW´s, although I did do democracy on the first day. Where I had to, again, confront the language barrier. This was especially apparent in this workshop because my democracy workshop was very discussion based, although I did try and explain some things (the concepts of equal representation and the district system in democracy), I really noticed that my Spanish wasn´t sufficient for such terminology. Despite the fact that there is still a language barrier there definitely has been a lot of improvement (even from the last time I wrote the blog).

I cannot believe it is already the third week! So, unfortunately, I will have only one time left to write on this blog. They say time flies when you´re having fun, and I think, in this case, this is most certainly true!

Hans van Deursen (The Netherlands, AC 10-12)