Marhoátspekua

P’urhépecha Worldviews and Western Education in a Transnational Context

Maria Gutierrez de Jesus

Introduction: Being P’urhépecha in a Transnational Context

In 2006, my mother, sister, and I migrated to the United States to reunite with my father who migrated to California in the 1970s as a young man. In August 2006, my sister and I attended our first class in the United States as high school students. At a young age, I did not have the words to name the process that my sister and I were going through as immigrant students in an English-as-a-second-language (ESL) program facing a cultural and linguistic clash that marked our high school experience. This process born out of my migrant experience impacted how I related to institutional education in the years to come. As a P’urhépecha woman learning to navigate U.S. academia, through the stories of my mother as a first-generation rural teacher from Huecorio (Michoacán, Mexico), and the journeys of other educators I have met during my higher education path, I know that my journey in institutional education is not separate from a larger process of colonial and epistemic extraction in schooling in the Western University (Grosfoguel 2013; Garzón López 2013). This process of colonial and epistemic extraction does not only commodify Indigenous knowledge but also erases the presence of Indigenous scholars in academia.

Growing up in Huecorio, Michoacán, Mexico, I have seen and been part of other forms of relating to knowledge outside of State-led institutional spaces. In the P’urhépecha culture, there are epistemic pillars that are present to help guide the communal structure of who we are as P’urhépecha People. These pillars include Kaxumpekua (honorability), Ánchekorheta (collective work), Jurhamukua (order), Jurhimpikua (rectitude), Jarhoajpekua (mutual aid), Jánhaskakua (intellectual/practical knowledge) and Marhoátspekua (communal service), to name a few (Felipe 2016). These principles are elements of the P’urhépecha Sési Irékani, a concept silimar to the Good Living of Andean Indigenous communities. Attaining such principles cannot be done by the person alone, as knowledge of the P’urhépecha ethical, moral, and cultural codes are lived and felt through the practice of communal life. The exercise of such principles is enacted in relation to the community, understanding that communal well-being encompasses a spatial dimension that surpasses the conception of the human individual alone (Franco 2001). These principles of the P’urhépecha culture, such as Marhoátspekua, which is the focus of this chapter, and other principles, are primarily discussed in relation to being in the community^[1] (Cortés 2019; Franco 2001). I also acknowledge that P’urhépecha communities do not comprise a homogenous entity. Each community and individuals that make up those communities in the ancestral territory and in the diaspora, are the result of historical, social, and cultural processes that are always transforming, including knowledge production. Therefore, it is worth exploring how these pillars look outside of communal settings. In this chapter, assuming my positionality as a first-generation, P’urhépecha migrant in U.S. higher education living in a transnational context, I reflect on how Marhoátspekua offers a possibility to envision my work in academia in relation to who I am as a P’urhépecha woman, the multilinear and historical processes that have impacted my identity in the diaspora, and Marhoátspekua^[2] as a possibility to envision my work as a P’urhépecha scholar in the Western University.

Marhoátsperakua: Serving and Knowledge in P’urhépecha Community Contexts

Growing up in Huecorio, I witnessed the principles that community members value as part of the P’urhépecha worldview in my community. These values are named in the P’urhépecha language in those communities that still speak the language, while other communities name them in Spanish. As someone who grew up with little to no knowledge of the P’urhépecha language in a community that registered around 11% percent of speakers of the language by the late 1960s^[3] due to language displacement in the Lake Pátzcuaro region where my community located (Rico Lemus 2015), there were terms in P’urhépecha that were unfamiliar, but their practice has been very much present in the community’s social and political organizing structure. Marhoátspekua is one of these concepts.

Marhoátspekua comes from the verb marhoátspeni,^[4] which translates in English as “to serve.” In his study on solidarity in Nahuatzen, Michoacán, in the P’urhépecha Highlands, Roberto Cipriani discusses two terms that allude to service in the P’urhépecha culture: jatsipeni and marhoátspeni. While jatsipeni refers to serving others (other individuals), marhoátspeni seems to have a broader notion of service that refers to serving the larger community and society (Cipriani 2009). Marhoátspeni is practiced in relation to and with the community, which denotes a collective aspect to the principle of marhoátspekua as community-engaged service. Marhoátsperakua moves between multiple dimensions, from serving in traditional cargos (communal socio-religious positions that are renewed annually) to serving in civil and political administrative positions, helping family and community members in the organization of fiestas, participating in collective tasks, attending community assemblies, and contributing economically to the betterment of the community, among other forms of service (Cortés Máximo, 2019).

Some authors have written about community service in Indigenous communities from Central Mexico from the perspective of socio-religious service, collective work (tequios or faenas), and communal participation in the community’s political life, thus highlighting and explaining its significance as central to comunalidad (communal practices) (Martínez Luna 2016; Maldonado Alvarado 2015; Padilla 2000). Cortés Máximo (2019) discusses marhoátspeni as a ritual that also has a sacred aspect to it. Cipriani (2009), for instance, explains the connection of service in socio-religious cargos[5] as engaging in a direct relationship with the divinity. While marhoátspeni is usually understood within the frameworks of communal settings that look at fiestas, religion, cultural and spiritual expressions, and local councils as central to the transmission of P’urhépecha epistemic thought, historical ruptures, continuities and discontinuities of traditions that reconfigure through time, and transformations impact how P’urhépecha communities exercise marhoátspekua (Cortés Máximo 2019). In Marhuatspeni (2019), P’urhépecha scholars approach the multiple dimensions of Marhoátspekua other than the cargo system to understand how community service works in other spaces. For example, the work of traditional medicine people is understood as marhoátspekua, even when they may not necessarily be a part of a specific cargo (Cortés Máximo 2019). Traditional medicine people, for example, care for community members, which comes with a deep knowledge of medicinal plants, treatments, and processes to cure the body, mind, and spirit. This shows how marhoátspekua transforms and walks through other spaces beyond socio-religious institutions, such as the cargos, alone. Building on the reflections of Cortés Máximo and the authors that have written about marhoátspeni, my contribution in this chapter reflects on another dimension of marhoátspeni: Marhoátspekua in the diaspora and Marhoátspekua in Western education.

Marhoátspekua Beyond the Geographical Community

What happens when families and communities are disrupted and displaced, whether by force or voluntarily? How do P’urhépecha people apply marhoátspekua while being away from the geographical territory? In a conversation with Marco Antonio Flores Quin, P’urhépecha elder from Quinceo, Michoacán (P’urhépecha Highlands) residing in the Seattle area of Washington state, he mentions that marhoátspekua includes all types of community-engaged service to the P’urhépecha communities and society that extend beyond what may be traditional conceptions or service, such as fiestas, collective work, or the participation in socio-religious and civil cargos (Padilla 2000). Flores Quin adds that, for those residing outside of the physical territory, marhoátspekua encompasses other aspects of being in community, which many times are linked to secular activities that feature collective well-being. Flores Quin is a founding member of Ireta P’urhépecha, a Seattle-based P’urhépecha organization that works with the P’urhépecha population of the area and builds inter-communal alliances with other Indigenous and Native communities in the region, such as Mixtec and Kichwa people. In the conversation, Flores Quin noted that with the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Ireta P’urhépecha organized to bring relevant health information to the P’urhépecha migrants in their language. While some information about the pandemic was available in Spanish, for Tatá Marco, it was important that the P’urhépecha population had access to it in the P’urhépecha language. The conversation with Tatá Marco was a part of a podcast series where I participated as co-producer in collaboration with Radio Uekorheni in 2021, a P’urhépecha-based radio where I collaborate with since 2017.^[6] Ireta P’urhépecha has also organized P’urhépecha language workshops to make language learning practices accessible to the P’urhépecha community and sessions that focus on Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and P’urhépecha traditional knowledge. For instance, in documenting these workshops with Ireta P’urhépecha, Moreno Villamar (2022) explains the importance of language learning from a culture-based perspective because the language brings in a dimension that is important to understand other ways of relating to and being in the world. This a central aspect of the P’urhépecha-knowledge system, and the work that Ireta P’urhépecha does by engaging with Marhoátspekua reflects that.

Through the “P’urhépechas en la Diáspora” series, we (Radio Uekorheni) also spoke with Olga Prado León (from Nahuatzen, based in Washington state, and a member of Ireta P’urhépecha) and Diana Morales (from Tanaco, based in California), who shared their journeys in U.S. higher education. Both Olga and Diana highlighted the importance of applying their knowledge to retribute back to their P’urhépecha communities. Their enthusiasm and their experience in social organizing (in the case of Olga with Ireta P’urhépecha) and through art (in the case of Diana), demonstrate how P’urhépechas in higher education in a diasporic and transnational context are responding to the Western University by engaging with P’urhépecha epistemic thought, such as Marhoátspekua, to serve their communities self-affirming their identity as P’urhépecha.

Leaving the community to enter institutional education takes many forms. In his study of P’urhépecha identity among bilingual students of secondary education, Roberto Janacua Escobar emphasizes that identity is dynamic. It is transformed by the relational experiences of people (Janacua 2017). For Janacua, who looks at how students who leave the community to study, identity persistence is not exclusively or rigidly linked to a community as a territorial entity. Being P’urhépecha and how we relate to the corpus of knowledge of what it means to be P’urhépecha transform and re-configure based on the experiences that shape people’s existence, our exsitance as P’urhépecha (Janacua 2017). This does not imply that people stop being P’urhépecha when State-led education processes recruited Indigenous, Western-educated teachers as agents of assimilation, or intermediaries between the state and the communities through the education system, as it happened in Michoacán throughout the 20^th century (Vargas 1994). Leaving the community, whether in Mexico or in a transnational context, leads to experiencing multiple forms of oppression, including in the university, such as racism and classism (Baltazar Téllez 2022). This is a common experience in the education system that questions, excludes, and discriminates against Indigenous students’ languages, cultures, and knowledges, or in other cases re-constructs Indigenous imaginaries as a form of Indigenous assimilation through institutional schooling (Gutiérrez 1999).

As a P’urhépecha woman in U.S. higher education, I have often been mislabeled with other identities that I did not initially acknowledged as mine. In one of the first meetings I had with an advisor in Indigenous Studies as an undergraduate student, my professor asked me how I felt about my identity as Chicana while discussing class material. While I felt that he was genuinely interested in my opinion about the material, I was confused about the question but not surprised that my identity was labeled differently from how I identify myself. As a young student at the time, with a recent migrant experience, the terms Chicana/Hispanic/Latina were unfamiliar. But these categories of identity were not unfamiliar because I did not know what they meant, but rather because the cultural and political context of these terms did not reflect my experience as a P’urhépecha woman and transnational migrant at the time.

Oftentimes, those of us who claim an Indigenous identity out of the U.S. colonial borders, are often automatically labeled as Latina/o/x, Hispanic, Chicana/o/x, or Latin American. When filling out college admission applications or writing diversity statements, I have always thought about how to talk about myself in those documents. As a P’urhépecha migrant, those are identities that I had not thought about before coming to the United States. When asked about my identity, I simply said I was P’urhépecha from Huecorio, pointing to my specific community as the place where my identity is rooted, or that I was Mexican, thus alluding more to a national category of identity than a cultural or ethnic affiliation. Navigating between using one or the other many times depended on context, interlocutors, and content of the conversations. As I reflected on my higher education journey, I have also thought about the knowledge that identifying as P’urhépecha brought with me to the Western university, including language, terms not found in either English or Spanish, knowledge, and a whole epistemic thought, such as Marhoátspekua. The conversations I had with Olga, Diana, and Tatá Marco revealed other ways in which Marhoátspekua can work beyond what I had experienced and witnessed in my community. As a P’urhépecha woman in academia, I have asked myself whether the work I do in higher education can be considered Marhoátspekua. I contend that, as P’urhépecha scholars, we have to work to make our work part of Marhoátspekua and other principles that have historically guided communal life.

Marhoátspekua in the Western University

Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira call the Western university the “imperial university” (Chatterjee and Maira 2014). As a P’urhépecha scholar, I acknowledge that my training as a professional—in this case, as a researcher and educator—came from a Western university. Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith also notes that academic research and the Western university are inherently colonial practices and spaces (Smith 2012). Historically, Indigenous communities in the Western hemisphere have entered into convoluted relationships with academia, driven by asymmetrical interactions that have resulted, more often than not, in epistemic extraction (Garzón López 2013). For Indigenous peoples south of the U.S.-Mexico colonial border, this epistemic extraction has come from both U.S. and Mexican academia. With some members of the Indigenous diasporas entering U.S. universities, and as a P’urhépecha scholar, I ask: what is our role and our duty as Indigenous scholars in academic spaces in relation to our communities?

P’urhépecha and other Indigenous Peoples across the continent have self-affirmed, navigated, contested, appropriated, and engaged with other spaces, and academic spaces are not an exception to this. The Mexican education system has historically focused on assimilating Indigenous populations into mainstream Mexican society (Giraudo 2005). This has been a part of a larger agenda focused on building Nation-State imaginary (Gutiérrez 1999). For the Mexican State, assimilation and Spanish-language literacy would come from Indigenous peoples themselves, whom the State saw as cultural brokers or as intermediaries, as in the case of bilingual teachers (Vargas 1994). In the P’urhépecha region, for example, some of the most representative assimilation projects through institutional education include the Proyecto Carapan, the Proyecto Tarasco, and the bilingual education programs (Giraudo 2005; García Segura 2004; Dietz 2017). The 1970s led rise to a group of P’urhépecha ethnolinguists and other professionals, who were first trained in government-led programs. At the same time, the teachers’ movement (Dietz 2000) and the struggle for autonomy and self-determination by the P’urhépecha community of Santa Fé de la Laguna (Zárate Hernández 1993) led an era that marked that re-configured the politics of ethnicity among the P’urhépecha communities of Michoacán and a landscape where Indigenous educators contested the State. This is important because this chronology highlights the long history of P’urhépecha communities with institutional education.

In her work about what it means being P’urhépeha in academia, Marianela Baltazar Téllez (2022), native to the community of Tarejero in Michoacán, revisits the processes she went through to navigate higher education, from leaving her community to study in Morelia, questioning academic spaces that extract epistemic knowledge from Indigenous communities, to seeing academia as a place appropriated by Indigenous women to engage in a dialogue that constructs ethical relationships towards Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous communities The university, then, becomes a space of contestation, negotiation, and agency for Indigenous peoples, an extension of a territory to revendicate who we are as Indigenous Peoples (Llanes-Ortiz 2020). In envisioning community-engaged education in the University, I take Marhoátspekua and other pillars from the P’urhépecha epistemic thought as frameworks that guide my academic work, which may look “less” academic to some academic standards and not as “traditional” service to some understandings of communal service in P’urhépecha communities.

How I relate to Marhoátspekua in my work as a P’urhépecha scholar is not necessarily in the traditional sense that academic service may be understood in academic institutions.^[7] More than concrete examples, thinking about Marhoátspekua from my positionality in academia as an Indigenous academic should lead to uncomfortable but necessary questions about how I can, through academia, engage in marhoátspeni from its conceptualization of “serving others” (Cipriani 2009). In 2017, I was invited to be a part of a nascent radio project in my community (Huecorio) called Radio Uekorheni.^[8] While working with the radio collective, we also questioned what it meant to engage in community service, while not being part of the traditional cargo structure that is well known in the community. As a community with a large migrant population residing across California, Nevada, and other states in the United States, Radio Uekorheni envisioned the radio as a platform to build connections with other P’urhépecha people in the U.S. diaspora. Through this media project, Radio Uekorheni has engaged in multiple projects, such as producing series, organizing workshops with community members, and building relationships with other collectives in the P’urhépecha region of Michoacán and in the United States. My participation in community-based media redirected my academic interests in ways that I had not imagined before and the spaces the radio has allowed me to navigate as an alternative space for the reproduction of knowledge has made me question what it means to walk through spaces that interweave my work within academia and my relationship to Huecorio as a community member. Introduced earlier, Tatá Marco’s testimony shows that Marhoátspekua is not an encapsulated concept that is present only in communal settings, but it also travels to other spaces as P’urhépecha people engage in other forms of relating to their culture and identity and as we move physical spaces. I see in Marhoátspekua a way to rebuild just and inclusive collaborative relationships with my Indigenous community through my academic work. I contend that one of the ways in which we can engage our academic work in Marhoátspekua as P’urhépecha scholars is through the accessibility of our work, whether through the writing, dissemination, research processes, and, most importantly, collaboration.

Conclusion

Marhoátspekua is impacted by multiple processes that that the P’urhépeha population has gone through, such as migration, language displacement, institutional education, and others. In this chapter, I approached Marhoátspekua from my positionality as a P’urhépecha woman, migrant, and scholar in the U.S. diaspora engaging in U.S. academic settings. Being in the diaspora has led me to find other ways to reciprocate back to my community through the system of Marhoátspekua. Sometimes it has been by being physically in my community where I can engage in communal practices. Many others, it is by extending Marhoátspekua to other spheres. I see the University as another dimension where I can exercise Marhoátspekua. I do not suggest that being P’urhépecha in academia automatically means engaging in Marhoátsperakua. Rather, I write it as a reflective exercise to think about how as P’urhépecha, our work in academia can and should engage with Marhoátsperakua.

Being a P’urhépecha scholar in academia makes me think about how to reconcile my work in Western institutions and the commitment to my community. As Beals, Kidman, and Funaki (2019) state, sometimes being an Indigenous researcher is not taking an insider or outsider perspective, but walking on the edges, as “edgewalkers” (5). I think of Marhoátspekua as a concept that bridges my predicament between working in a higher education institution and being part of my community. In her work about oral narratives, Beeds (2013) highlights that Indigenous oral and written narratives are a way of “finding a place to stand” in the Western university” (38). In my work, I envision through Marhoátspekua my “place to stand” as I navigate Western education in the U.S. diaspora.

References

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Interviews

Marco Antonio Flores Quin (in conversation with author via Zoom. June 7, 2021).

Olga Prado León (in conversation with author via Zoom. June 4, 2021).

Diana Morales (in conversation with author via Zoom. March 22, 2021).

Notes

1. When I refer to community, I do not imply that the P’urhépecha People constitute a homogenous entity. In the case, I refer to communal principles that the P’urhépecha authors cited here note as epistemic principles found in P’urhépecha communities. However, I understand that these principles are not applied, perhaps not understood, in the same way by all communities or all individuals that make up those communities, including those who live in the diaspora and non-P’urhépecha-language speakers. In other cases, when I speak of my community in this chapter, I refer to the specific community where I grew up (Huecorio, Michoacán, Mexico) and the community members I work with, and provide examples to make this distinction clear. ↑

2. In this chapter, I am capitalizing Marhoátspekua to highlight this term as a framework and principle that guides the ideas discussed in this text through a P’urhépecha lens. ↑

3. In his study on Huecorio, economist Michael Belshaw notes that around 11% of Huecorio’s population speak P’urhépecha. Belshaw’s study was framed within the Fundamental Projects of CREFAL (Regional Center for Fundamental Education in Latin America) to bring development through education in the Lake Pátzcuaro region, where Huecorio is located.↑

4. As an adult learner of the P’urhépecha language, my learning process has been impacted by the debates on the standardization of the P’urhépecha language and the multiple alphabets that are currently in use. In the case of this chapter, I follow the teaching methodologies and alphabet by Márquez Trinidad and Lemus (2020), which have guided my P’urhépecha language learning process in past years. Therefore, I decided to use “marhoátspekua/marhoatspeni.” In other works, such as in the studies edited by Cortés Máximo (2019), it can be found as “marhuatspeni.” ↑

5. A system of rotational social, religious, communal, and political positions that renew every year found in many Indigenous communities of Mexico, including in the P’urhépecha communities of Michoacán (Padilla, 2000). The selection of cargo holders varies from community to community. While in some cases people are elected by the Communal Assembly, in others people volunteer to take on a cargo position. In the case of Huecorio, socio-religious cargos are voluntary positions, while for communal (overseeing communal land) and political (administrative structure) cargos, individuals are proposed and some volunteer, but the Communal Assembly elects amongst those who are proposed/volunteer who will be the next person to serve. Regardless of the selection process, these positions constitute part of the community’s service structure. ↑

6. The podcast series is called “P’urhépecha en la Diáspora,” which docuements the narratives of twelve P’urhépecha people in the U.S. diaspora. It was aired through the Radio Uekorheni podcast from 2021 to 2022. The series can be accessed through this link: https://uekorheni.org/category/migrantes/. ↑

7. I refer to how professional/community service may be measured in higher education institutions, serving on committees, in professional organizations, and so on. ↑

8. Uekorheni means “to fall from above” in P’urhépecha. The radio is named after uekorheni as a recognition of the oral narratives about a version of the creation of the community, which tells that Lake Pátzcuaro was formed from a meteorite that fell in Huecorio. Huecorio means “the place of the fall” in P’urhépecha. The name of the radio as well as the formation of the radio collective were ratified by Communal Assembly in September 2017. ↑