Thursday February 20, 2025, Benefit dinner to support the Barrio Bravo popular autonomous gym and its future sport climbing wall. Food served from 7pm, no reservation.
The Barrio Bravo Popular Autonomous Gymnasium is located in the Cuxtitali neighborhood, on the eastern part of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. Cuxtitali is one of the oldest neighborhoods, founded by the first indigenous settlers used by the conquistadores for the construction of the city. For always maintaining its own identity and an attitude of community self-care, it has long been called “Barrio Bravo” (Untamed District). A legacy of that old pride continues today and is expressed in the popular cultural manifestations of the neighborhood, in the community self-management of the drinking water source and in the struggle to defend the territory and forests that surround this area. Despite its extraordinary example of popular organization for the urban context of San Cristóbal, the neighborhood of Cuxtitali encounters the social difficulties characteristic of the Chiapas context, marked by historical structural inequities: low wages, low schooling, insecurity, exploitation of its people and resources, institutional abandonment and, especially in the last three years, the dramatic incidence of drug trafficking groups and organizations that have subjugated the city and the entire region. In this context, sports, health, coexistence and community can create the physical, mental and political space for the young people of the neighborhood to have healthy and constructive alternatives and feel relief from the alienation of today’s society, which in San Cristóbal sees in them only the future cheap labor for the bars of the various walkways of the city at the service of tourists or, worse, as the basic forces of increasingly violent criminal groups. It is a long-term ambition, just like any social project that also wants to radically transform the unjust social relations imposed by capitalism.
The Barrio Bravo Gym opened its doors on May 3, 2021 and since then has received more than 200 students (mostly children between 5 and 15 years old) and offered courses in 9 sports disciplines: KungFu, Calisthenics, Parkour, Boxing, Contemporary Dance, Yoga, Polynesian Dance, Kenpo and Capoeira. The plan is to raise funds to be able to build a wall and open a climbing course for the children of the Gym. We see the climbing wall as a link between the body and the territory; An element to reconnect with nature, with new people, to regain confidence in the body by recognizing the abilities that each one has. It’s like a window to see beyond violence, a great tool to overcome bad times. A wall is a first encounter with a sport that can take young people to new places, which they didn’t know existed. The wall has the power to help them free their mind and body.
https://tekio.org.mx/red-beta-libre.php
https://nodosolidale.noblogs.org/ […Lees verder]
In this year’s second open session of Radical Sunday School, we wanted to reflect on what the activist community’s relationship with “theory” and “practice” is. How can RSS play a better role in supporting our community as we try to make the world better? 
