Throughout the past few weeks, several Spanish classes at Carleton have focused on the “El Buen Vivir” unit. The unit centers on learning about and understanding the Nahua community of Amatlán de Quetzalcóatl, located in Morelos, Mexico.
At the beginning of 2024, Carleton College was awarded a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. The grant was provided to fund the Indigenous Engagement in Place initiative, which aims to connect Carleton’s campus with Indigenous communities across the world.
The initiative is run by co-directors Professor Meredith McCoy and Professor Michael McNally, along with Indigenous Communities Liaison Marcy Averill. According to its website, the program “aims to expand curricular and scholarly collaborations with Indigenous partners to enliven learning, teaching, and public scholarship in the humanities and across the liberal arts.”
The grant caught the attention of Carleton Spanish professor Fernando Contreras Flamand, who reflected on the members of the Nahua community he had met on a Carleton trip to Morelos last year. He hoped to deepen his relationship — and foster Carleton’s relationship — with the community through the initiative.
When Contreras Flamand and his colleague in the Spanish department, Professor Vera Coleman, traveled to Morelos, they met with Ignacio “Nacho” Torres Ramírez and Lisanne Morgan, members of the Nahua community. Contreras Flamand recalled that he “came back and heard about the Mellon Grant,” and thought “we could do something bigger.”
“I want to bring other perspectives to class and give them a voice,” Contreras Flamand said. Through the initiative, the entire Spanish department was connected with the community, aiming to learn “how to be open minded,” as Professor Claudia Lange put it, and explore “the different realities that we can learn to understand different worldviews.”
When asked about the main takeaways from the unit, Coleman noted that “it’s easy to forget in a monolingual society that there are real compelling and powerful solutions outside of what is immediately visible.” She posed a question for her students that reflects the core insight of the unit: “What other perspectives and bodies of knowledge can I turn to?”
Professor Beatriz Pariente-Beltran was also an instrumental part of the team. Her main point for the significance of the project is that “learning [Spanish] is not just about learning the preterite and imperfect, it is about learning the culture… [and] going beyond the study of the language.”
Last week, Nacho Torres Ramírez and Lisanne Morgan Náhuatl spoke with Carleton students about their core philosophy of “El Buen Vivir,” translating to “good living.” In a video shared with the classes, Ramírez explained, “El buen vivir es más que una filosofía; es nuestra guía para resistir,” translating to “good living is more than a philosophy; it is our guide to resist.”
Resistance is one of the main reasons that Carleton’s Spanish department was first drawn to the Nahua community. The Indigenous community has faced years of oppression and efforts to force assimilation and modernization, but the Nahua have resisted. As Lange said, “Preserving their origins in the way that they are doing is a sign of hope.”
A core aspect of Nahua life is gratitude and respect for the environment that surrounds the community. Lange reflected on this message: “We have everything from Mother Earth, so we need to take care of our land in a meaningful way.”
These are the lessons and outlooks on life that the professors hope students will take from the “El Buen Vivir” unit. As Pariente-Beltran emphasized, the unit is “a way for Carleton students to expand their views. Their reality is not the reality for everyone.”
One of Contreras Flamand’s key takeaways from his experience is that “[we] don’t need to say that we are going to ‘save’ them; instead, what we can do is learn from them.” The initiative helps sustain this meaningful relationship. Pariente-Beltran added that what “we can learn is to foster curiosity and empathy, in an open-minded way.”
The project doesn’t just end with the “El Buen Vivir” unit — it is a relationship that continues to grow. “We are going back in December, and part of the trip will be to go to Amatlán [de Quetzalcóatl],” Pariente-Beltran said. “It will be nice to have a long-term relationship with this community.”
In addition, the professors have aspirations for extending and deepening the initiative’s impact. Contreras Flamand hopes that it “could really be a possible future expansion of this project to connect with Indigenous, or people of Indigenous descent of Morelos in Carleton’s home state.”
The team expressed immense gratitude for the grant support received through the Indigenous Engagement in Place Initiative and from their community partners. Coleman noted that “the community partners also receive part of the grant, which reflects the commitment of the people at Carleton to be a part of this work in underrepresented, especially Indigenous, communities.”
The initiative aims to create long-lasting, positive relationships with Indigenous communities, and the Spanish department’s connection with the Nahua community is already demonstrating its success.
