Jeanne Simonelli, Erin McCulley, and Rachel Simonelliof continued conflict between the official organs of the Mexican gov-
ernment and the Zapatista rebels (Earle and J. Simonelli 2005 ; Sim-
onelli and Earle 2003 ).
Begun by Kate O’Donnell of Hartwick College in Oneonta, New
York, the Chiapas Project was built on her years of inquiry into ru-
ral poverty, years of activism in sociology and women’s studies, and
semesters of taking students out of the classroom and into the com-
munity (O’Donnell 1993 ). I joined her, first as a consultant and then
as faculty representing the State University of New York at Oneonta,
bringing to the new program the lessons learned in the Southwest. Pre-
liminary trips to Chiapas laid the groundwork, allowing us to make
program connections and begin to ask questions about Maya struggle
and continuity that linked back to our own work and the goals for the
project (J. Simonelli and Earle 2003 ; Earle and Simonelli 2005 ).
We used a full semester preparation course to help our students gain
an understanding of what they would see and experience, and place
the Chiapas conflict into a global perspective. Our months together
before departure helped us know and judge each other’s strengths and
weaknesses; in fact, a full day’s Challenge Workshop culminated in a
contract for cooperation. As program directors we had a good sense
of what group interactions would be like even before we arrived in
Mexico. Upon arrival, the class combined on-site lectures by visiting
local scholars and experts with the chance to witness and/or apply
what we were learning in the field.
The first year’s program, in January 1998 , was a study in flexibil-
ity and caution. Following the fall preparation course at Hartwick,
the group left for Chiapas, just three weeks following the massacre of
forty-five Mayas in the highland village of Acteal. Because of the ten-
uous and often dangerous political situation, a trip to the Lacandón
rainforest village of Nahá was not possible until the January 1999
field season. That year, as in others, we learned and did far more than
we could ever have covered in classroom preparation. Some things
are predictable; others are not. Whether they occur in the actual class-
room, during guest lectures, or in the field, it is the unpredictable ex-
periences, presented below, that are the so-called teachable moments
of experiential learning.