“Fight, Resist, Our Agreement Is to Live!” Learnings from the Feminist Student Occupations at UNAM, Mexico

This communication is part of a research developed during the last five years, as a professor at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and as doctoral researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid. The objective is to reflect on the link between feminist movements and their pedagogies, proposing a theoretical framework based on decolonial, feminist, anti-racist and popular pedagogies, observed through case study: the feminist student mobilizations in 2019 and 2020 in Mexico.

I understand pedagogy “as the methodologies produced in contexts of struggle, marginalization, resistance and what Adolfo Albán has called ‘re-existence’; pedagogies, as insurgent practices that crack modernity/coloniality and make possible very other ways of being, being, thinking, knowing, knowing, feeling, existing and living-with” (Walsh 2013:29). This idea dialogues with those who, like Paulo Freire (1968) or Claudia Korol (2007), understand education as a practice of freedom and advocate for a pedagogy of hope (Freire, 1992; hooks, 2024). From these approaches, I develop the concept of “social practice of re-existence”, observing the virtuous circle existing in educational spaces emanated from collective action and the creation of other ways of living. Specifically, I explore some of the methods (un)learned during the organizational process at UNAM and observe its potencies.