Page:Historia Verdadera del Mexico profundo.djvu/101

 ''our belongings, have destroyed our temples, the land, the status of men. They have turned us reserved, “said the elder, with a special intonation on the last word”... Being an indian —said the wise man during the conversation— in the land of our fathers is to live disinherited. Nothing belongs to us anymore and, yet, we still retain everything that was ours... Do you mean that living in the interior of the world is to preserve the rites, customs and traditions of your ancestors? “Not only that —asserted the old man— taking back his seat and his pulque container. There are many indians who are faithful to the traditions and are already more dead than alive.” Then? Children and adults made a circle surrounding the sage seemed as expectant as the reporter to hear the answer. —The important thing is that the ritual is alive in the heart of the Indian. Even though their altars have been destroyed, their priests burnt, their customs covered with the ashes of their dead, Earth exists and is open for he who is able to find the opening or slit, the path to his heart—.” (Fernando de Ita. 1985)''

Colonizers when trying to destroy the Anahuac civilization and keep their children in a perennial exploitation condition, have tried for five centuries to dismantle, prohibit and demean the education structures and education institutions of the invaded people. Not just public institutions, which at the time of the conquest became one of the first targets of barbarism, as well as teachers’ persecution, but the non-formal institutions that held family, work and social spaces. The colonizer knew that to the extent the colonized loses their public and private education spaces, they shall become helpless and vulnerable. Ignorance is the mother of all injustices and the fundamental colonization basis. ____________________