Last December, I made the difficult decision to close Triodos-Trivium, the project I started in 2018. Initially, I preferred not to explain my reasons, focusing instead on learning from the experience and moving forward. However, I’ve recently heard rumors suggesting that I closed Triodos-Trivium because I no longer wish to teach. This couldn’t be further from the truth, so I decided to write the following text to explain the reasons why I decided to close it. 

I founded Triodos-Trivium one Friday evening in the apartment of my friend Ana Guzmán in Berlin, it was 2018. We used to gather there every week after long hours of classes and work shifts to pursue our diverse creative projects and reading groups. By that time, I had already been involved with various associations.

After my one-year program at Polis, Jerusalem (2014-2015), I went back to Mexico and taught anyone who wanted to learn: my friends in my mom’s living room, students of philology at the university, and religious people who wanted to start reading the scriptures in Ancient Greek. Once I moved to Berlin to pursue an MA in Classical Philology, I started to connect with different organizations. I was invited to different cities to teach or give talks; Madrid, Granada, Poznan, New York City, Rome, and Jerusalem.

While these were enriching opportunities, I knew I did not want to always depend on invitations from others and to be constricted to using the materials I was told. I wanted to be free to determine when, what, how, and for how much I would teach Ancient Greek. I had been working all this time as a Spanish teacher in Berlin and teaching spoken Ancient Greek online, so I had already developed my own method and materials.

For me, it was also paramount to create a space where people from the most diverse cultural backgrounds could meet to learn Ancient Greek. In Germany, both inside and outside the university, I had come across several individuals who had told me that Classical Studies was not a discipline for someone like me (i.e., not white) and asked me why I was not studying Aztec (they meant Nahuatl), Mayan (there are actually many Mayan languages), or Incan (they meant Quechua). So, the first ever project I did as Triodos was a speech in Ancient Greek defending the right for everyone to occupy any place within the classical tradition, whether in the fiction of the performing arts or in the reality of academic spaces. That was the origin and purpose of Triodos-Trivium. Here’s a link to that speech and the website where it was published (link here). 

Almost two years later, I met Jenny Teichmann (2020). She was finishing her MA in Classical Philology and was really excited about the active methodology applied to ancient languages because of one class she had taken in Rome. So, thrilled to have met someone in Germany with whom I could organize activities, I invited her to be part of Triodos-Trivium as an equal partner. I shared with her the different methods and resources I had developed for teaching, as well as all the contacts I had made so far. She, in return, offered to contribute by setting up a website and an email account.

However, it did not take long to see that she was not interested in a partnership: she never allowed me access to the email account nor the website, she repeatedly made decisions regarding my classes without consulting with me, and she insisted on being the only one administering the money that came in, under the German motto of zu viele Köche verderben den Brei (too many cooks spoil the stew). 

While these things were extremely frustrating, I always tried to discuss the issues and find  solutions. We kept working together. The pandemic came, and we were both happy with the response we had from people all around the world, and were delighted to be teaching as many of them as we could.

One day, however, when it was time to organize our summer school for 2023, she told me that based on an agreement she had made with the Paideia Institute, we were no longer free to determine when to have our own summer school—it was “necessary” to accommodate to Paideia’s schedule. As a result, the only few weeks during the summer I had free from my duties at the university were excluded. I had been excluded from my own organization, and it did not matter how much we discussed the issue; Jenny always preferred to keep her word to the Paideia Institute. So, she taught “our” summer school by herself. 

I love teaching Ancient Greek, especially by speaking the language, and I am deeply thankful for all the students and people who supported the Triodos-Trivium project. It would not have been possible to achieve all the things we did without them. But Triodos, as such, could no longer exist. I had founded an organization on the basis of inclusivity and for the purpose of developing independent work for myself. I was removed from the planning and scheduling process, and priority was given to an organization that has already been plagued by issues surrounding discrimination (link here). Furthermore, as I was never given full access to either the email account or the website, I was forced to start something new from scratch.