Based on the educational practices of the Zapatista peasants of Chiapas, autonomy is conceptualized as the collective construction of a project of Indian peoples in a field of domination and social resistance. At the center of the dispute with the nation state, control over educators by the communities who designate and evaluate them is put into perspective with other contexts, discourses and actions of indigenous political organizations in Latin America. Before 1994, Indian education programs, primarily clandestine, as in the Quiché [Guatemala] and Cauca [Colombia], were antecedents to the Zapatista experience of radical autonomy. As endogenous policies, sui generis, and historically located in multicultural territories or refuges, they call into question the capacity and legitimacy of the nation state in the administrative and pedagogical management of schools. With the authority of the assembly of families and of new communitarian roles! [including the “promoters of education”], the power relations and the social positions of intermediation are being reconfigured between State actors and rebel territories. The active participation of Tzeltal activists contributes to the social appropriation of the school, thus becoming a barrier against social differentiation and cultural assimilation. This participation is an engine for dignity and legitimacy in managing space and time at school, as well as methods and contents. Changes related to autonomy destabilize the status quo in terms of the organization of the school, the political role and work of teachers, and the educational choices relevant for Zapatistas indigenous people.