SATA Oaxaca
  • In the fall of 2010, Education Professor Michael James and History Professor Leo Garofalo led a group of 12 students to Oaxaca, Mexico, where they spent the semester learning about Mexican history and social movements.
  • The ancient mountain-top city of Monte Alban, high above the modern city of Oaxaca, provides a beautiful backdrop for cultural and historical exploration.
  • A weaver teaches Oceane Hooks-Camilleri '12 to use indigo as a natural dye in Teotitlan del Valle.
  • Elizabeth Ramos '12 and Katherine Shabb '12 help dye wool yarn.
  • In the mountainous countryside of Chiapas, the indigenous Zapatista movement has created autonomous zones where Zapatistas implement their own approach to development, government, education and production. This is a meeting hall at a Zapatista center.
  • Katie McGrail '12 writes in her SATA journal outside one of the student dorms at the Zapatista's autonomous middle school in Oventic, one of five Zapatista centers in southern Mexico.
  • Students meet outside to discuss readings on the origins and goals of the Zapatista Revolution, which burst onto the national and international stage with an armed rebellion in 1994.
  • History major Felipe Valencia '12 helped paint this mural when he visited the Zapatista autonomous center in 2009.
  • Students visit a pirate radio station used to spread alternative messages in the hills of Chiapas, Mexico. Antennas are hidden in the pines overhead.
  • Elizabeth Ramos '12 and Lianne Swanson '12 rest after carrying bags of sand to the top of a hill where a new radio tower and transmitter will be built. The sand will be used to build a cement base.
  • Students and professors pose with the owners of a restaurant that features pre-Columbian Zapotec cooking.