Ageing of the Oppressed

A Personal Introduction

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal have shaped my ideological and professional life through all its twists and turns.¹²³

I was introduced to Paulo Freire’s work circa 1974–75 when, every afternoon after school, my friend Eva and I used to go to the small wooden school shack with its corrugated metal roof that an evangelist group had built in the shanty town, La Carcova, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Our mission, as part of our militancy in the Union de Estudiantes Secundarios [Union of Secondary Students], was to help children with their school homework. We soon realized that these kids couldn’t read and sometimes, they just needed something to eat. Often, their parents couldn’t read either. These children from the Villa Miseria (shanty town) were always at the back of the class in schools. They rarely got the teachers’ attention, except for disciplinary measures. Eva and I didn’t know how to help to make a difference, how to rescue them from the never-ending cycle of controlling behavior that instilled discipline and imposed punishments that these children were used to.

Our UES chief or team leader, El Gallego [the Galician; his militant nom de guerre], contacted a professor of early childhood education, a friend of his mother, so that she could advise us. For this connection, El Gallego gave us his real name. We never used our real names, but that is how this woman knew him: Horacio García Gastelú. The military took him by force from his girlfriend’s house and he “disappeared” a few months after the military coup of March 1976. His remains were found years later in the common grave of the Massacre of Fátima, the same massacre where 30 young people, including my friend Norma and The Paraguayan Oscar, were murdered and dynamited in Fatima, north of Buenos Aires, on August 20, 1976.⁴ Horacio was featured in the 2014 documentary El Futuro es Nuestro [The Future is Ours].⁵ His mother, one of the founders of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, passed away recently as I was writing these lines.

This professor commended our efforts and proposed we use corners of the shack for different activities as was done at the time in kindergartens. She gave us simple play tips. But this was not a kindergarten and we had no resources. This is when another schoolmate or compañero introduced us to Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire as an example of educational techniques used for adult literacy that could help us, as Freire himself had used his method with his maid and illiterate poor people.

We didn’t have much success with our educational enterprise. The task was clearly too ambitious for us, two teenagers. At the time, the work of literacy for poor people was a subversive activity and therefore a dangerous one. The violence of the months before the military coup, the military-led dictatorship that started in 1976, the disappearances, the persecutions, and the deep fear, not only drew me away from the Villa, but also from the country.

A few years later, during my studies in Social and Educational Theatre at Tel Aviv University, I deeply connected with Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, obviously building on Freire’s work. I wrote essays on his theories and used his techniques—the Forum Theater, Invisible Theater, and theater games—in the Community Theater Project I coordinated in a neighborhood in south Tel-Aviv and in the theater and puppetry workshops I ran for teachers and community leaders from Israel and developing countries.⁶ I wanted to make theater meaningful for everyone, to mobilize communities away from being just passive spectators to being spect-actors toward social change. Boal’s view of catharsis is not to create equilibrium, as normally understood, but rather to create a “disequilibrium” which prepares the way for action. Individuals, and by extension society itself, can be changed by a catharsis that is not the sole province of the controlling group; as a removal of blocks, the purification is in the action.⁷⁸

When I moved to Geneva in the late 1990s and started working with United Nations agencies and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), I continued to apply Boal’s approach to promote health and social justice. Making the voices of people in vulnerable situations heard has always been part of my life.

I have been a defender of the human rights of older persons for over 20 years at the UN, in its specialized agencies including several years at the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Human Rights mechanisms, mostly the Human Rights Council.