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stormdogThe other students who went to Chiapas and I had our presentation today. It was attended by about a dozen people, half of them professors. In my experience, events aren't terribly well-attended at Parkside in general. I think a lot of it has to do with it being a primarily commuter campus. But I digress. We did get some people, which was cool, and they had some interesting questions. I stayed a little bit late to respond to one more in depth.
My professor emailed me back this evening on my reflection paper too, saying that she really liked what I wrote, including my "even handedness and cautionary optimism," in light of the fact that she can get a little bit caught up in the romance of the moment in her own engagement with the Zapatistas. Her email made me happy, and I wrote a few paragraphs back in response. I think I'll include them here after the paper that I wrote.
Yes, here, finally, is the paper I wrote!
Also, there is a note for those of you (I don't know if you want public acknowledgement) who donated directly toward the trip at the end of the post. So, for those keeping score at home, here are:
1)The paper I wrote wherein I reflect on the experience. It's in two parts: a discussion of the way the Zapatistas are presented in the media I was exposed to before the trip, and my thoughts about the movement after having lived with the Zapatistas in Jol Ja for a week, as well as having visited the caracoles Roberto Barrios and Oventik.
2)A few paragraphs I wrote to my professor, comparing the Zapatista situation to cultures like foragers or pastoralists who are facing encroachment from state powers. (I think a more involved compare and contrast paper on that topic would be really interesting.)
3)A note about why it's important to me to offer to refund donations if donors read my paper and decide that they may not want to have donated.
All of that
My reflection paper
I: Before The Trip
As I prepared for the trip to Chiapas, I did what I always do when I’m looking for information about something new to me: I read. I read the D2L postings for our group with interest. The readings specifically about the Zapatistas helped me get a general sense of what the group was about, but left me with a lot of questions as well. The primary readings, Pablo González Casanova’s “The Zapatista “Caracoles”: Networks of Resistance and Autonomy” and Thomas Nail’s “Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo” both had a great deal of value to say about the movement. However, they both also left me with a lot of questions about particular information gaps.
Casanova and Nail both address the Zapatistas at a high level of abstraction. They examine the theory of Zapatismo, staying far away from the practicalities of its quotidian enactment. Thus, I started the trip with a lot of questions about lower-level matters. What is daily life is like for Zaptatista revolutionaries, and how has the movement had changed day-to-day existence for them?
I had higher level questions too. Nail references a number of people who have called the Zapatistas the “first post-modern revolutionaries.” Through his and Casanova’s writings, I saw post-modernity manifesting in two separate ways within Zapatismo. First, in the Zapatista’s desire to define themselves on their own terms, without reference to the state. Nail describes a revolutionary theory without state or party, and revolutionary desire without connection to state, capitalist power, class, or a vanguard party.
Second, but intertwined with this sort of unstructured revolutionary desire, Zapatismo as described by Nail felt to me to be subject to a criticism that is worth keeping in mind about any application of post-modern thought. It’s possible to keep deconstructing assumptions and bases for definition and comparison until there’s nothing left to anchor to. Nail quotes the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos, who said “We had to be honest and tell people that we had not come to lead anything of what might emerge.” This feels like Zapatismo is attacking the existing social structure, but doing so without a firm idea of what should be created in its place. Casanova states that “The Zapatistas are neither anti-party, nor seeking to found a party. The Zapatistas do not propose to take over the state, nor do they wish to fight in the elections as a new state party.” Putting Nail and Casanova together, I felt like I had a much better idea of what Zapatismo is not than what Zapatismo is.
Casanova speaks of the caracoles as “networks of autonomous peoples,” and of “organizations of resistance that are at once connected, coordinated, and self-governing,” but also “anti-systemic” in that the caracoles will be “autonomous rebel communities.” This gets a bit more at what the caracoles are, and the nature of Zapatista organization, but still seemed essentially theoretical rather than practical. As I drove toward Chicago the day before boarding the plane for Mexico, I still felt uncertain about how Zapatista governance was enacted.
Another source that shaped my preconceptions of Zapatismo was the text of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, which I found by looking through the Schools for Chiapas website. It addressed another topic I was curious about: the ways in which the Zapatista movement collaborates with other resistance movements around the world. The text is long and wandering; I suspect it might have suffered in translation. Regardless, the Sixth Declaration takes a very explicit stand against globalization and neoliberalism, which the Zapatistas see as the force behind their marginalization and oppression in Mexico via state economic and political policy. It expresses solidarity with, and support for, victims of neoliberal globalization all over the world, and proposes to listen to and learn from all people facing a similar struggle while respecting the differences that exist between them. However, the method of that support as expressed there – sending a truck loaded with maize and petrol to the Cuban Embassy, or coffee to “Europes which are not yet Union” – was still unclear to me.
On a personal level, details of policy and political theory aside, I began the process of preparation for the trip feeling positively about the Zapatistas. From the first time I saw the poster advertising the trip in the campus hallways, I was excited by the possibility of being involved. A large part of that excitement stemmed from a certain idealism. My time at Parkside has transformed my awareness of economic imperialism. My prior conception was of a nebulous evil that I realized first world nations were enabling and creating to the detriment of many people of third world nations through means that I knew little or nothing about. Through classes in topics like environmental anthropology and the people of Southeast Asia, I gained a more concrete understanding of the tactics used by neoliberal powers to marginalize a wide range of groups across the globe. The thought of seeing first-hand what living conditions are like for some of the people who are marginalized by that system was exciting. If I am to understand and explain the downsides of neoliberal economic policy, expanding my base of understanding of the effects of such policy is important. The opportunity to directly experience life for the Zapatistas would be a rare opportunity to do that in a very direct way. I would meet and get to know some of the people whose lives are strongly shaped by the policies my country supports, but who are largely invisible to its citizens.
Along with that idealism was some romanticism. There’s a lot of sympathy for the underdog in popular media, and the Zapatistas fit that trope well. Besides the academic readings for the trip, I read pieces by journalists who traveled to Chiapas, typically to Oventik, to write about the movement. Journalist Laura Gottesdiener wrote one such piece which was published online by both Mother Jones and The Nation. She described the freedom of a child born to a Zapatista household, who would grow up free of pesticides and GMOs, and who would never know the “densely packed cities without access to land, animals, crops, or almost any of the natural resources that are required to sustain human life.”(The Nation) Other articles took a similar, if not quite so black and white, tone. My view of such an existence is a bit more nuanced, but the framing of the Zapatistas as echoes of the noble savage living their lives with integrity and dignity outside of the complexities and contradictions of civilization can’t help but strike a chord, even as I turn a skeptical eye toward the underlying assumptions of such a presentation.
The documentary Zapatista! presented the Zapatistas as underdogs in a different context, with its examination of the EZLN and the military action against them by the government. The stories of violence and intimidation provided another image of the Zapatistas, and left me wondering just what the relationship between the EZLN and the rest of Zapatismo was. My understanding was that the EZLN was very much distinct from everyday life in Zapatista territory, but that it was the military response to NAFTA and the EZLN uprising that really created the movement. I was also aware that the Zapatistas continue to face the potential of violence from governmental and non-governmental actors.
So I had a wide array of thoughts and feelings as we boarded the plane on the first leg of our trip. I was excited about broadening myself by being part of lifeways that were totally outside my experience. I felt romanticism about supporting a struggle against economic imperialism. I was curious about how people living in a war zone under threat of violence, even given the long-lasting ceasefire, manage that threat. I wondered, too, how a movement that began as a military campaign had transformed into a civilian, peaceful resistance of autonomous daily life. The time we spent in Chiapas with the Zapatistas answered some of my questions, left others unresolved, and raised new ones.
II: After the Trip
This trip engaged the Zapatistas on a very practical, everyday level. That’s not to say that we were part of everyday activities exactly. In Jol Ja, we were primarily there to paint a mural, which is not an everyday activity. Still, we were in a quiet and peaceful community center. We cooked, washed dishes, and talked around the fire. Apart from painting and photography, the majority of my attention was given to routines like washing clothes, helping with food preparation, talking with people, and journaling. This is a very different set of activities than media presentations like Zapatista! or discussions of theory address. They’re like two different worlds: the first public, performative, and linked to atypical and significant events and their repercussions; the second quotidian and possessing a holistic significance rather than one associated with any particular special occurrences. We weren’t having highly abstracted theoretical discussions with them a la Nail and Casanova, or taking a direct stand against government forces. In that way, it was hard to compare the two.
I wanted to engage more with individual people, especially at Jol Ja where we spent so much time. I feel that I didn’t take full advantage of the opportunity to do so that this trip was intended to afford. I did, however, have the opportunity to learn something else I’d hoped the trip would afford me the opportunity to explore; to what extent prosopagnosia would keep me from engaging with people on an individual level in conditions like our trip provided. The answer to that is ‘more than I’d hoped.’ I won’t elaborate on that in detail because this paper is more about my experience with the Zapatistas than my experience with myself, but it was part of a combination of factors that kept me from interacting with the people of Chiapas as much as I wished. I realized that it was impossible for me to tell whether I’d seen a given person before or not. If I were to have a conversation with someone, I knew that I would keep seeing them through the course of our stay and have no memory of having talked to them before. It’s a problem I deal with everyday, but it was even more problematic in Chiapas where hair and clothing styles are less of a recognition aid for me and where I lack the vocabulary to explain to people why it may seem like I don’t care about them enough to remember them as individuals. For all that I could tell, there was an entirely new local population in Jol Ja every day. This experience is a significant part of my decision that this kind of fieldwork would be a bad choice for me. I suppose I write this to explain why I don’t have more to say in terms of one-on-one talks from the trip.
I did gain an appreciation for life in the autonomous zone. Dealing with the monotonous menu of kitchen-fire cooking, sanitary facilities that I’ll generously describe as rustic, and a pervasive and inescapable heat, quickly gave me a deeper appreciation for the Zapatistas’ active choice to reject significant involvement in mainstream society. I understand that, as marginalized people, deciding to take part in the greater economy would not instantly provide with them all the comforts of modern technological conveniences. At the same time, if the Mexican state is offering significant infrastructural improvements to those who are willing to take them, I see a great deal of considered commitment to ideals in the Zapatistas’ choice to forsake such improvements. The discussions I had with our group about the economic warfare the state is engaging in with the autonomous people made it sound like there are many benefits, real or perceived, to giving up Zapatismo. Though I had a general sense of this being the case before we left, I have a much better first-hand understanding of some of the trade-offs involved in commitment to the cause, though I’d still like to have a better understanding of the alternative.
I am still somewhat uncertain about Zapatista political structure. Talking with Susan about the different levels of authority helped. She explained the relationship between the caracoles and the EZLN. I responded by saying that it sounds a lot like the colonial era anti-federalists’ ideal vision of the United States federal government, and she agreed. That helped me put our meetings with the juntas into a larger political framework. Knowing, though, that the civilian government of the caracoles is subject to oversight by the military EZLN, makes me a little uncomfortable in that it’s theoretically possible for financial aid rendered to the junta of a particular caracol to be used by the EZLN for a military purpose. To be fair, that seems pretty unlikely, especially given the current long-lasting cessation of hostilities.
On the other hand, I was also impressed by the integrity of the junta of Oventik regarding money. When they learned that improper social pressure had been applied to our group in a request for donations at the entrance, they returned all such donated monies. Certainly they seem to hold themselves to a high standard of accountability, and take pains not to misrepresent themselves. I had a similar feeling in our group meeting with the Oventik junta. The junta members who were serving needed to ensure that they do not receive funds under false pretenses. Of course, that’s not a surprise given the importance of international awareness and support to the movement. If outside groups were to lose confidence in the Zapatista officials’ integrity, the movement would be in a very difficult position.
Of course, I’m wary of talking about the Zapatistas as a monolithic entity. Diversity, it seems, is a fundamental part of the movement. I saw that in the sharp contrasts between Roberto Barrios, Jol Ja, and Oventik. The feeling and mood in each individual place was very different. A lot of that may be situational, connected with relative nearness to (as with Roberto Barrios) or distance from (as with Jol Ja) urban areas, or the amount of media attention that a place like Oventik receives. The presence of a film crew at Oventik as we were leaving, along with the fact that all the journalists whose Zapatista-related writings I could easily find were talking about Oventik, made it clear that we were at the public face of Zapatismo. That status must be part of the shaping Oventik as well. So while I only got a glimpse of the multicultural pluralism that characterizes the movement, I admire that it seems to be functioning.
Overall, the trip has made me feel more sympathetic to the Zapatistas. Part of that is a natural reaction to having spent time with any group of people in person. Beyond that, I am impressed at the level of organization and success they have created through their stand against a state-level power. Their autonomy leads to difficult contradictions though. I feel that the living conditions in the communities we visited are not justifiable in a developed nation such as Mexico. At the same time, with my limited experience and knowledge, it’s not clear how to resolve that inequality. Now that the Zapatistas have positioned themselves solidly against any involvement with the state, they must rely on themselves to better their condition.
Their informal access to electricity is an interesting exception to that need for self-reliance. I approve, with some reservations, of the theft of power, but one implication of that appropriation is that the only way to access modern conveniences is to take them from the entities that generate them without any formal arrangement or compensation. Certainly the Zapatistas cannot build their own power generating facilities, water treatment plants, or other such infrastructure. I don’t believe that the situation they are in is infinitely socially sustainable. As the junta of Roberto Barrios stated in response to my question to them about the Mexican flag, they feel that they are part of the concept of Mexico, despite having cut themselves off entirely from the current government. To me, this implies that at some point they are going to be forced to reengage with the state on a formal, structural level rather than informally or as individuals. My hope is that the Mexican state will eventually find the Zapatistas too much of a thorn in their side to ignore, and will enter into good faith negotiations with them. Insofar as their actions, their politics, and their support from the global community help them make progress toward that end, I whole-heartedly support their aims.
My brief comments to the professor comparing Zapatista issues of isolation and engagement vs similar issues faced by non-state people
Thanks very much for your comments and compliments!
I do feel like I learned a lot, both about the Zapatistas and about myself. That's a tremendously valuable thing, and I'm grateful for you making it possible!
I have a huge amount of sympathy for the situation the Zapatistas are in and what they're trying to accomplish. But it's hard to get a sense of what the future will bring. I admire the idealism in existing entirely separately from the state. But it makes me think a little bit of some of the non-state cultures, like groups of foragers say, or transhumant nomads, with whom anthropologists work in various places. There's a part of you that wants to help preserve the group as they are, keeping them free from the incursions of globalization and capitalism. But at the same time, there are some real benefits that come from becoming a part of that global system, such as gaining support from the international community in issues of land rights or political autonomy. There will be some people within such cultures who see these global connections, and even the introduction of new technologies and ideas, as a good thing, and that's a valid perspective too.
The Zapatistas are different in that (I think) most of them have long-term experience with living in a modern capitalist industrial economy. They have chosen to remove themselves from it from a position of knowledge about what an industrial economy is like. (This is probably more or less true in different areas. Perhaps more rural people never left a system of non-market subsistence horticulture and agriculture, and those who have been born into the movement do not have that experience either.) But that seems difficult to me. It's hard to renounce membership in that kind of economy and go back to self-sufficiency. To do so in totality feels like its's relegating people to a permanent position of subordinance. It's opting out of any claim to the political power structures of the modern world, and not having those kinds of political connections makes you very vulnerable in the present era, much like people in traditional foraging or pastoralist societies who don't have support from formal state powers to protect their ways of life.
Which is, of course, why it's so important for them to make the kinds of connections that they do with groups outside of Mexico, to gain support, sympathy, and publicity. But it's paradoxical; they might be able to be materially self-sufficient (more or less), but in terms of social and political capital, they seem very much to need to enmesh themselves in those global webs that they reject on a material level. I feel like a lot of what I read about them implies that they want to exist completely on their own terms; that they want to define themselves completely on their own terms. But I don't think that's a privilege that the current state of the world affords anybody. As long as they continue to engage with outside groups on political and social levels, and as long as they continue to exist inside the framework of the Mexican state, it just feels to me like the sort of isolation they would ideally like to exist in is forcing them to be static rather than dynamic; putting them in a position where they would be unable to change even if they wanted to.
Of course, Mexico holds a huge amount of blame in this too. I think the Zapatistas are kind of damned if they do and damned if they don't when it comes to relations with the Mexican government. Also of course, my understanding of this is pretty superficial; I know there's a much, much bigger body of literature and knowledge out there than I've been exposed to, so I don't know how accurate my analysis really is.
It's a complicated thing, and I hope they're able to navigate it in a way that's as beneficial for themselves as possible. Everyone deserves the chance to live in a way that they can be happy with.
My note about donations
So when I was soliciting donations, I did so with the belief that donated funds were going specifically for community support; things like education, medical supplies, and similar. As I learned while I was there, and as I described in my writing above, it's possible that some of that funding could end up being used by the EZLN, a military organization. If that makes you, as a donor, uncomfortable, I understand. It makes me a little bit uncomfortable too, despite my sympathy for the Zapatistas. If you'd like me to refund any money you donated for the Zapatistas, I am entirely willing to do so.
Well, my posts here get long sometimes, but this must be one of the longest! I don't usually put text behind a cut, but this seemed to merit one. I hope that it was at least somewhat interesting, and what you were hoping for, for those that read it.
I am also going to write up more of a daily log of personal experiences and what the trip was like for me, referencing my voice notes, journal, and photos. But that might happen after finals.
Also, sorry for the lack of citations on the paper. It was pretty informal and they were not required. I'd be happy to send you more about Nail, Casanova, or any other sources of information I mentioned.
My professor emailed me back this evening on my reflection paper too, saying that she really liked what I wrote, including my "even handedness and cautionary optimism," in light of the fact that she can get a little bit caught up in the romance of the moment in her own engagement with the Zapatistas. Her email made me happy, and I wrote a few paragraphs back in response. I think I'll include them here after the paper that I wrote.
Yes, here, finally, is the paper I wrote!
Also, there is a note for those of you (I don't know if you want public acknowledgement) who donated directly toward the trip at the end of the post. So, for those keeping score at home, here are:
1)The paper I wrote wherein I reflect on the experience. It's in two parts: a discussion of the way the Zapatistas are presented in the media I was exposed to before the trip, and my thoughts about the movement after having lived with the Zapatistas in Jol Ja for a week, as well as having visited the caracoles Roberto Barrios and Oventik.
2)A few paragraphs I wrote to my professor, comparing the Zapatista situation to cultures like foragers or pastoralists who are facing encroachment from state powers. (I think a more involved compare and contrast paper on that topic would be really interesting.)
3)A note about why it's important to me to offer to refund donations if donors read my paper and decide that they may not want to have donated.
All of that
I: Before The Trip
As I prepared for the trip to Chiapas, I did what I always do when I’m looking for information about something new to me: I read. I read the D2L postings for our group with interest. The readings specifically about the Zapatistas helped me get a general sense of what the group was about, but left me with a lot of questions as well. The primary readings, Pablo González Casanova’s “The Zapatista “Caracoles”: Networks of Resistance and Autonomy” and Thomas Nail’s “Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo” both had a great deal of value to say about the movement. However, they both also left me with a lot of questions about particular information gaps.
Casanova and Nail both address the Zapatistas at a high level of abstraction. They examine the theory of Zapatismo, staying far away from the practicalities of its quotidian enactment. Thus, I started the trip with a lot of questions about lower-level matters. What is daily life is like for Zaptatista revolutionaries, and how has the movement had changed day-to-day existence for them?
I had higher level questions too. Nail references a number of people who have called the Zapatistas the “first post-modern revolutionaries.” Through his and Casanova’s writings, I saw post-modernity manifesting in two separate ways within Zapatismo. First, in the Zapatista’s desire to define themselves on their own terms, without reference to the state. Nail describes a revolutionary theory without state or party, and revolutionary desire without connection to state, capitalist power, class, or a vanguard party.
Second, but intertwined with this sort of unstructured revolutionary desire, Zapatismo as described by Nail felt to me to be subject to a criticism that is worth keeping in mind about any application of post-modern thought. It’s possible to keep deconstructing assumptions and bases for definition and comparison until there’s nothing left to anchor to. Nail quotes the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos, who said “We had to be honest and tell people that we had not come to lead anything of what might emerge.” This feels like Zapatismo is attacking the existing social structure, but doing so without a firm idea of what should be created in its place. Casanova states that “The Zapatistas are neither anti-party, nor seeking to found a party. The Zapatistas do not propose to take over the state, nor do they wish to fight in the elections as a new state party.” Putting Nail and Casanova together, I felt like I had a much better idea of what Zapatismo is not than what Zapatismo is.
Casanova speaks of the caracoles as “networks of autonomous peoples,” and of “organizations of resistance that are at once connected, coordinated, and self-governing,” but also “anti-systemic” in that the caracoles will be “autonomous rebel communities.” This gets a bit more at what the caracoles are, and the nature of Zapatista organization, but still seemed essentially theoretical rather than practical. As I drove toward Chicago the day before boarding the plane for Mexico, I still felt uncertain about how Zapatista governance was enacted.
Another source that shaped my preconceptions of Zapatismo was the text of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, which I found by looking through the Schools for Chiapas website. It addressed another topic I was curious about: the ways in which the Zapatista movement collaborates with other resistance movements around the world. The text is long and wandering; I suspect it might have suffered in translation. Regardless, the Sixth Declaration takes a very explicit stand against globalization and neoliberalism, which the Zapatistas see as the force behind their marginalization and oppression in Mexico via state economic and political policy. It expresses solidarity with, and support for, victims of neoliberal globalization all over the world, and proposes to listen to and learn from all people facing a similar struggle while respecting the differences that exist between them. However, the method of that support as expressed there – sending a truck loaded with maize and petrol to the Cuban Embassy, or coffee to “Europes which are not yet Union” – was still unclear to me.
On a personal level, details of policy and political theory aside, I began the process of preparation for the trip feeling positively about the Zapatistas. From the first time I saw the poster advertising the trip in the campus hallways, I was excited by the possibility of being involved. A large part of that excitement stemmed from a certain idealism. My time at Parkside has transformed my awareness of economic imperialism. My prior conception was of a nebulous evil that I realized first world nations were enabling and creating to the detriment of many people of third world nations through means that I knew little or nothing about. Through classes in topics like environmental anthropology and the people of Southeast Asia, I gained a more concrete understanding of the tactics used by neoliberal powers to marginalize a wide range of groups across the globe. The thought of seeing first-hand what living conditions are like for some of the people who are marginalized by that system was exciting. If I am to understand and explain the downsides of neoliberal economic policy, expanding my base of understanding of the effects of such policy is important. The opportunity to directly experience life for the Zapatistas would be a rare opportunity to do that in a very direct way. I would meet and get to know some of the people whose lives are strongly shaped by the policies my country supports, but who are largely invisible to its citizens.
Along with that idealism was some romanticism. There’s a lot of sympathy for the underdog in popular media, and the Zapatistas fit that trope well. Besides the academic readings for the trip, I read pieces by journalists who traveled to Chiapas, typically to Oventik, to write about the movement. Journalist Laura Gottesdiener wrote one such piece which was published online by both Mother Jones and The Nation. She described the freedom of a child born to a Zapatista household, who would grow up free of pesticides and GMOs, and who would never know the “densely packed cities without access to land, animals, crops, or almost any of the natural resources that are required to sustain human life.”(The Nation) Other articles took a similar, if not quite so black and white, tone. My view of such an existence is a bit more nuanced, but the framing of the Zapatistas as echoes of the noble savage living their lives with integrity and dignity outside of the complexities and contradictions of civilization can’t help but strike a chord, even as I turn a skeptical eye toward the underlying assumptions of such a presentation.
The documentary Zapatista! presented the Zapatistas as underdogs in a different context, with its examination of the EZLN and the military action against them by the government. The stories of violence and intimidation provided another image of the Zapatistas, and left me wondering just what the relationship between the EZLN and the rest of Zapatismo was. My understanding was that the EZLN was very much distinct from everyday life in Zapatista territory, but that it was the military response to NAFTA and the EZLN uprising that really created the movement. I was also aware that the Zapatistas continue to face the potential of violence from governmental and non-governmental actors.
So I had a wide array of thoughts and feelings as we boarded the plane on the first leg of our trip. I was excited about broadening myself by being part of lifeways that were totally outside my experience. I felt romanticism about supporting a struggle against economic imperialism. I was curious about how people living in a war zone under threat of violence, even given the long-lasting ceasefire, manage that threat. I wondered, too, how a movement that began as a military campaign had transformed into a civilian, peaceful resistance of autonomous daily life. The time we spent in Chiapas with the Zapatistas answered some of my questions, left others unresolved, and raised new ones.
II: After the Trip
This trip engaged the Zapatistas on a very practical, everyday level. That’s not to say that we were part of everyday activities exactly. In Jol Ja, we were primarily there to paint a mural, which is not an everyday activity. Still, we were in a quiet and peaceful community center. We cooked, washed dishes, and talked around the fire. Apart from painting and photography, the majority of my attention was given to routines like washing clothes, helping with food preparation, talking with people, and journaling. This is a very different set of activities than media presentations like Zapatista! or discussions of theory address. They’re like two different worlds: the first public, performative, and linked to atypical and significant events and their repercussions; the second quotidian and possessing a holistic significance rather than one associated with any particular special occurrences. We weren’t having highly abstracted theoretical discussions with them a la Nail and Casanova, or taking a direct stand against government forces. In that way, it was hard to compare the two.
I wanted to engage more with individual people, especially at Jol Ja where we spent so much time. I feel that I didn’t take full advantage of the opportunity to do so that this trip was intended to afford. I did, however, have the opportunity to learn something else I’d hoped the trip would afford me the opportunity to explore; to what extent prosopagnosia would keep me from engaging with people on an individual level in conditions like our trip provided. The answer to that is ‘more than I’d hoped.’ I won’t elaborate on that in detail because this paper is more about my experience with the Zapatistas than my experience with myself, but it was part of a combination of factors that kept me from interacting with the people of Chiapas as much as I wished. I realized that it was impossible for me to tell whether I’d seen a given person before or not. If I were to have a conversation with someone, I knew that I would keep seeing them through the course of our stay and have no memory of having talked to them before. It’s a problem I deal with everyday, but it was even more problematic in Chiapas where hair and clothing styles are less of a recognition aid for me and where I lack the vocabulary to explain to people why it may seem like I don’t care about them enough to remember them as individuals. For all that I could tell, there was an entirely new local population in Jol Ja every day. This experience is a significant part of my decision that this kind of fieldwork would be a bad choice for me. I suppose I write this to explain why I don’t have more to say in terms of one-on-one talks from the trip.
I did gain an appreciation for life in the autonomous zone. Dealing with the monotonous menu of kitchen-fire cooking, sanitary facilities that I’ll generously describe as rustic, and a pervasive and inescapable heat, quickly gave me a deeper appreciation for the Zapatistas’ active choice to reject significant involvement in mainstream society. I understand that, as marginalized people, deciding to take part in the greater economy would not instantly provide with them all the comforts of modern technological conveniences. At the same time, if the Mexican state is offering significant infrastructural improvements to those who are willing to take them, I see a great deal of considered commitment to ideals in the Zapatistas’ choice to forsake such improvements. The discussions I had with our group about the economic warfare the state is engaging in with the autonomous people made it sound like there are many benefits, real or perceived, to giving up Zapatismo. Though I had a general sense of this being the case before we left, I have a much better first-hand understanding of some of the trade-offs involved in commitment to the cause, though I’d still like to have a better understanding of the alternative.
I am still somewhat uncertain about Zapatista political structure. Talking with Susan about the different levels of authority helped. She explained the relationship between the caracoles and the EZLN. I responded by saying that it sounds a lot like the colonial era anti-federalists’ ideal vision of the United States federal government, and she agreed. That helped me put our meetings with the juntas into a larger political framework. Knowing, though, that the civilian government of the caracoles is subject to oversight by the military EZLN, makes me a little uncomfortable in that it’s theoretically possible for financial aid rendered to the junta of a particular caracol to be used by the EZLN for a military purpose. To be fair, that seems pretty unlikely, especially given the current long-lasting cessation of hostilities.
On the other hand, I was also impressed by the integrity of the junta of Oventik regarding money. When they learned that improper social pressure had been applied to our group in a request for donations at the entrance, they returned all such donated monies. Certainly they seem to hold themselves to a high standard of accountability, and take pains not to misrepresent themselves. I had a similar feeling in our group meeting with the Oventik junta. The junta members who were serving needed to ensure that they do not receive funds under false pretenses. Of course, that’s not a surprise given the importance of international awareness and support to the movement. If outside groups were to lose confidence in the Zapatista officials’ integrity, the movement would be in a very difficult position.
Of course, I’m wary of talking about the Zapatistas as a monolithic entity. Diversity, it seems, is a fundamental part of the movement. I saw that in the sharp contrasts between Roberto Barrios, Jol Ja, and Oventik. The feeling and mood in each individual place was very different. A lot of that may be situational, connected with relative nearness to (as with Roberto Barrios) or distance from (as with Jol Ja) urban areas, or the amount of media attention that a place like Oventik receives. The presence of a film crew at Oventik as we were leaving, along with the fact that all the journalists whose Zapatista-related writings I could easily find were talking about Oventik, made it clear that we were at the public face of Zapatismo. That status must be part of the shaping Oventik as well. So while I only got a glimpse of the multicultural pluralism that characterizes the movement, I admire that it seems to be functioning.
Overall, the trip has made me feel more sympathetic to the Zapatistas. Part of that is a natural reaction to having spent time with any group of people in person. Beyond that, I am impressed at the level of organization and success they have created through their stand against a state-level power. Their autonomy leads to difficult contradictions though. I feel that the living conditions in the communities we visited are not justifiable in a developed nation such as Mexico. At the same time, with my limited experience and knowledge, it’s not clear how to resolve that inequality. Now that the Zapatistas have positioned themselves solidly against any involvement with the state, they must rely on themselves to better their condition.
Their informal access to electricity is an interesting exception to that need for self-reliance. I approve, with some reservations, of the theft of power, but one implication of that appropriation is that the only way to access modern conveniences is to take them from the entities that generate them without any formal arrangement or compensation. Certainly the Zapatistas cannot build their own power generating facilities, water treatment plants, or other such infrastructure. I don’t believe that the situation they are in is infinitely socially sustainable. As the junta of Roberto Barrios stated in response to my question to them about the Mexican flag, they feel that they are part of the concept of Mexico, despite having cut themselves off entirely from the current government. To me, this implies that at some point they are going to be forced to reengage with the state on a formal, structural level rather than informally or as individuals. My hope is that the Mexican state will eventually find the Zapatistas too much of a thorn in their side to ignore, and will enter into good faith negotiations with them. Insofar as their actions, their politics, and their support from the global community help them make progress toward that end, I whole-heartedly support their aims.
Thanks very much for your comments and compliments!
I do feel like I learned a lot, both about the Zapatistas and about myself. That's a tremendously valuable thing, and I'm grateful for you making it possible!
I have a huge amount of sympathy for the situation the Zapatistas are in and what they're trying to accomplish. But it's hard to get a sense of what the future will bring. I admire the idealism in existing entirely separately from the state. But it makes me think a little bit of some of the non-state cultures, like groups of foragers say, or transhumant nomads, with whom anthropologists work in various places. There's a part of you that wants to help preserve the group as they are, keeping them free from the incursions of globalization and capitalism. But at the same time, there are some real benefits that come from becoming a part of that global system, such as gaining support from the international community in issues of land rights or political autonomy. There will be some people within such cultures who see these global connections, and even the introduction of new technologies and ideas, as a good thing, and that's a valid perspective too.
The Zapatistas are different in that (I think) most of them have long-term experience with living in a modern capitalist industrial economy. They have chosen to remove themselves from it from a position of knowledge about what an industrial economy is like. (This is probably more or less true in different areas. Perhaps more rural people never left a system of non-market subsistence horticulture and agriculture, and those who have been born into the movement do not have that experience either.) But that seems difficult to me. It's hard to renounce membership in that kind of economy and go back to self-sufficiency. To do so in totality feels like its's relegating people to a permanent position of subordinance. It's opting out of any claim to the political power structures of the modern world, and not having those kinds of political connections makes you very vulnerable in the present era, much like people in traditional foraging or pastoralist societies who don't have support from formal state powers to protect their ways of life.
Which is, of course, why it's so important for them to make the kinds of connections that they do with groups outside of Mexico, to gain support, sympathy, and publicity. But it's paradoxical; they might be able to be materially self-sufficient (more or less), but in terms of social and political capital, they seem very much to need to enmesh themselves in those global webs that they reject on a material level. I feel like a lot of what I read about them implies that they want to exist completely on their own terms; that they want to define themselves completely on their own terms. But I don't think that's a privilege that the current state of the world affords anybody. As long as they continue to engage with outside groups on political and social levels, and as long as they continue to exist inside the framework of the Mexican state, it just feels to me like the sort of isolation they would ideally like to exist in is forcing them to be static rather than dynamic; putting them in a position where they would be unable to change even if they wanted to.
Of course, Mexico holds a huge amount of blame in this too. I think the Zapatistas are kind of damned if they do and damned if they don't when it comes to relations with the Mexican government. Also of course, my understanding of this is pretty superficial; I know there's a much, much bigger body of literature and knowledge out there than I've been exposed to, so I don't know how accurate my analysis really is.
It's a complicated thing, and I hope they're able to navigate it in a way that's as beneficial for themselves as possible. Everyone deserves the chance to live in a way that they can be happy with.
So when I was soliciting donations, I did so with the belief that donated funds were going specifically for community support; things like education, medical supplies, and similar. As I learned while I was there, and as I described in my writing above, it's possible that some of that funding could end up being used by the EZLN, a military organization. If that makes you, as a donor, uncomfortable, I understand. It makes me a little bit uncomfortable too, despite my sympathy for the Zapatistas. If you'd like me to refund any money you donated for the Zapatistas, I am entirely willing to do so.
Well, my posts here get long sometimes, but this must be one of the longest! I don't usually put text behind a cut, but this seemed to merit one. I hope that it was at least somewhat interesting, and what you were hoping for, for those that read it.
I am also going to write up more of a daily log of personal experiences and what the trip was like for me, referencing my voice notes, journal, and photos. But that might happen after finals.
Also, sorry for the lack of citations on the paper. It was pretty informal and they were not required. I'd be happy to send you more about Nail, Casanova, or any other sources of information I mentioned.
