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106 Chapter 5organizer, and (post-dictatorship) Brazilian minister of education PaoloFreire. Freire is perhaps best known for his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed ,in which he opposed what he called the “ banking model ” of education,or the one-way transmission of knowledge from educator to student, andposited instead a practice of critical pedagogy. He encouraged educators topose problems, creating space for learners to build shared critical consciousness,plan for action, and develop agency. Freire defined praxis as“ reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it. ” 6 LatinAmerican popular educators, using the methods of critical pedagogy andpraxis, taught hundreds of thousands of rural peasants and urban poorhow to read and write while also working together to expose oppressionand question unjust power relationships. For popular educators, literacy isa key tool that can enable oppressed individuals to become subjectswho are able to act on the world and transform their conditions ofoppression. 7Many popular educators linked to Latin American liberation movementsfled U.S.-backed state and paramilitary repression in the 1970s and1980s; some ended up in the United States, and many came to Los Angeles. 8Popular education had already long played a role in U.S. social movements,from labor organizing to the civil rights movement and beyond. Forexample, the Highlander Research and Education Center, in New Market,Tennessee, had a history of using popular education to provide training ingrassroots organizing and leadership. 9 Project South, based in Atlanta,Georgia, has used popular education since 1986 to organize young peoplein the struggle against poverty, violence, and racial injustice. 10 The traditionof popular education that emerged from the context of the U.S. civilrights movement, bolstered by a new wave of people, ideas, and practicesfrom Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, thus informs present-daysocial movements in Los Angeles. 11While these histories provide important grounding, at the same time,the changed media ecology requires new approaches to popular education.If print literacy was the primary tool of liberatory pedagogy duringthe era of popular struggle against the centralized power of authoritarianLatin American nation-states, critical digital media literacy assumes centralimportance as a tool of liberation against the networks of corporateand state power in the information society. 12 This may seem selfevident.Yet if we take the long view, the present moment is only the