"International Student Movement"

Ocup(arte) Manifesto for the Humanities
(English translation from the Spanish original text)

The Humanities faculty is yours, his, hers, and ours. Let’s transform it, then, into an active and dynamic space filled with participation and collaboration.
Let’s modify the State and Administration attitudes of competition and anxiety, and replace them with cooperation, compassion and youthful jubilation.
As existing power structures have already started to crack and show their anti-­‐humanist agendas, so should today and tomorrow be filled with love and a call to action. Our academic spaces are under siege from the powerful, and must be reclaimed as tools for liberation. As humanists we can imagine and create all sorts of possible worlds. It is time to turn these worlds into realities.
We are occupying our faculty in order to find ourselves, to cast aside any attempt to separate and alienate us. Instead of this kind of death, we have decided to un-­‐muzzle our mouths and let the world know that a new world has taken shape from our hearts.
We are a multitude that thinks, reflects, and criticizes: a generation whose heartbeat is steeled by the shared interaction between the fist and a kiss.
This is not a call to defend the University, but to re-­‐signify it into something new, horizontal and not hierarchic, participative and democratic.
Our action is a call for diversity, to the plurality that defines our educational space. It is the whole of all the types of rich knowledge that contributes to new and different worlds, countries, cities, multitudes and spaces. Such a colorful melody of difference and respect, solidarity and love, echoes along the halls of our faculty. We are the children of crisis and marginalization, of an economic system that represses and plunders.

We are the descendants of a political system that condemns participation and decides unilaterally, from the top down.
But we are also the heirs of a long tradition of people that blazed a path for those rights that we now enjoy, that paid with sweat and blood for those benefits that today face annihilation.
For all of this, we are retaking the UPR, so that those that follow tomorrow posses what we have endeavored to build: a multiplicity of knowledge, of perspectives that allow to think freely in the world we live in, and the world we choose to create.
The fiscal fetish shared by the State and the university’s administration conceives education as a production line of consumer goods. As the humanities do not seem to offer this, they are targeted for elimination by increments.
What the humanities do provide, and they choose to ignore, is the opportunity to be critical, to reflect and question, to give shape to worlds of sounds, of color, performances and of the written word, distinct from our own. Education cannot be seen through capital’s narrow gaze or the market’s whims. Such an education merely reproduces docile subjects and uncritical automatons.
Let us smash the machine!
We propose a liberating and edifying education that generates autonomous and critical minds, in a collaborative bond between professor and student.
We want an education where everyone involved participates, those who teach and those who learn. Yet let us not confuse both of these verbs with the assigned roles teacher and learner, for they apply to all.
Such an education by definition must include the subaltern and marginalized as subjects of study: immigrants, gays, lesbians and the transgender, women, men, old and young.

In order to achieve this participative and democratic education, we must build strong ties of solidarity between study and its subjects.
Solidarity is not built vertically, from the top down, but sideways.
Embrace the one next to you and whisper into his or her ear that you affirm their existence,
and that you will not abandon him or her.
Let us intertwine our bodies as roots in a fertile soil that will bear the fruit of imagination and change.

Paint our arms with landscapes of dignity and respect.
Don’t just worry and stand by, occupy!