I start this chapter with the faces of some of the main participants in the CEAR Project: the student teachers (Figure 3.1). As mentioned before, the photo is a friendly reminder for the reader, and myself as the narrator, that this book is about people and our stories. Moreover, our faces here represent the ownership that we all took in the CEAR Project. For us, it was much more than carrying out a ‘research’ project. It was about interacting with one another and with the teachers and children, and about finding new ways to teach and learn. The presence of Belem, my wife, in this picture works to emphasize that as participants in the CEAR Project, we were inherently connected to, and shaped by, other people close to us. This photo, taken at Claudia’s family restaurant as we celebrated Teachers’ Day on 15 May, also situates ourselves in our locus of enunciation, Oaxaca, the place where coloniality becomes experienced firsthand and in turn impacts our concrete lives and ideological positioning (Mignolo, 2009). It is from the colonial difference that we tell you our stories and the experiences we had with the children as we tried to resist, and renegotiate, our identities.

Los de la banda (the gang members) – as Pepe, one of the student teachers, called us – did not come together randomly or fortuitously. Pepe is my nephew. He was aware of the CEAR Project as I was planning it, since we had had conversations during family gatherings. ‘Uncle, los de la banda want to work with you in your project. They are excited’, he would tell me even before I met them all. Cueto, Juan, Chucho, Hugo and Laura were the ones who belonged to Pepe’s banda or clique. Pepe’s clique is not an unusual phenomenon at FI-UABJO. Clemente and Higgins (2008), who conducted a three-year ethnographic study there, used the different cliques they encountered at FI-UABJO as one of their units of analysis.