The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (49 page)

They began like conventional rebels, arming themselves and seizing six towns. They chose that first day of January because it was the date that the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, which meant utter devastation for small farmers in Mexico; but they had also been inspired by the five hundredth anniversary, fourteen months before, of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas and the way Native groups had reframed that half-millennium as one of endurance and injustice for the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere.

Their rebellion was also meant to take the world at least a step beyond the false dichotomy between capitalism and the official state socialism of the Soviet Union, which had collapsed a few years before. It was to be the first realization of what needed to come next: a rebellion, above all, against capitalism and neoliberalism. Fourteen years later, it is a qualified success: many landless
campesino
families in Zapatista-controlled Chiapas
now have land; many who were subjugated now govern themselves; many who were crushed now have a sense of agency and power. Five areas in Chiapas have since that revolution existed outside the reach of the Mexican government under their own radically different rules.

Beyond that, the Zapatistas have given the world a model—and, perhaps even more important, a language—with which to reimagine revolution, community, hope, and possibility. Even if, in the near future, they were to be definitively defeated on their own territory, their dreams, powerful as they have been, are not likely to die. And there
are
clouds on the horizon: the government of President Felipe Calderón may turn what has, for the last fourteen years, been a low-intensity conflict in Chiapas into a full-fledged war of extermination. A war on dreams, on hope, on rights, and on the old goals of Emiliano Zapata, the hero of the Mexican Revolution a century before:
tierra y libertad
, land and liberty.

The Zapatistas emerged from the jungle in 1994, armed with words as well as guns. Their initial proclamation, the First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, rang with familiar, outmoded-sounding revolutionary rhetoric, but shortly after the uprising took the world by storm, the Zapatistas’ tone shifted. They have been largely nonviolent ever since, except in self-defense, though they are ringed by the Mexican army and local paramilitaries (and maintain their own disciplined army, a long line of whose masked troops patrolled La Garrucha at night, armed with sticks). What shifted most was their language, which metamorphosed into something unprecedented—a revolutionary poetry full of brilliant analysis as well as of metaphor, imagery, and humor, the fruit of extraordinary imaginations.

Some of their current stickers and T-shirts—the Zapatistas generate more cool paraphernalia than any rock band—speak of “el fuego y la palabra,” the fire and the word. Many of those words came from the inspired pen of their military commander, the nonindigenous Subcomandante Marcos, but that pen reflected the culture of a people whose memory is long and environment is rich—if not in money and ease, then in animals, images, traditions, and ideas.

Take, for example, the word
caracol
, which literally means “snail” or “spiral shell.” In August 2003, the Zapatistas renamed their five autonomous
communities
caracoles
. The snail then became an important image. I noticed everywhere embroideries, T-shirts, and murals showing that land snail with the spiraling shell. Often the snail wore a black ski mask. The term
caracol
has the vivid vitality, the groundedness, that often escapes metaphors as they become part of our disembodied language.

When they reorganized as
caracoles
, the Zapatistas reached back to Mayan myth to explain what the symbol meant to them. Or Subcomandante Marcos did, attributing the story as he does with many stories to “Old Antonio,” who may be a fiction, a composite, or a real source of the indigenous lore of the region:

The wise ones of olden times say that the hearts of men and women are in the shape of a
caracol
, and that those who have good in their hearts and thoughts walk from one place to the other, awakening gods and men for them to check that the world remains right. They say that they say that they said that the caracol represents entering into the heart, that this is what the very first ones called knowledge. They say that they say that they said that the caracol also represents exiting from the heart to walk the world. . . . The
caracoles
will be like doors to enter into the communities and for the communities to come out; like windows to see us inside and also for us to see outside; like loudspeakers in order to send far and wide our word and also to hear the words from the one who is far away.

The
caracoles
are clusters of villages, but described as spirals, they reach out to encompass the whole world and begin from within the heart. And so I arrived in the center of one caracol, a little further up the road from those defiant signs, in the broad, unpaved plaza around which the public buildings of the village of La Garrucha are clustered, including a substantial two-story, half-built clinic. Walking across that clearing were Zapatista women in embroidered blouses or broad collars and aprons stitched of rows of ribbon that looked like inverted rainbows—and those ever-present ski masks in which all Zapatistas have appeared publicly since their first moment out of the jungles in 1994. (Or almost all: a few wear bandannas instead.)

That first glimpse was breathtaking. Seeing and hearing those women
for the three days that followed, living briefly on rebel territory, watching people brave enough to defy an army and the world’s reigning ideology, imaginative enough to invent (or reclaim) a viable alternative was one of the great passages of my life. The Zapatistas had been to me a beautiful idea, an inspiration, a new language, a new kind of revolution. When they spoke at this Third Encounter of the Zapatista Peoples with the People of the World, they became a specific group of people grappling with practical problems. I thought of Martin Luther King Jr. when he said he had been to the mountaintop. I have been to the forest.

THE WORDS OF THE THIRD ENCOUNTER

The
encuentro
was held in a big shed-like auditorium with a corrugated tin roof and crossbeams so long they could only have been hewn from local trees—they would never have made it around the bends in the local roads. The wooden walls were hung with banners and painted with murals. (One, of an armed Zapatista woman, said, “cellulite sí, anorexia, no.”) An unfinished mural showed a monumental ear of corn whose top half merged into the Zapatista ski mask, the eyes peering out of the kernels. Among the embroideries local artisans offered were depictions of cornstalks with Zapatista faces where the ears would be. All of this—snails and corn-become-Zapatistas alike—portrayed the rebels as natural, pervasive, and fruitful.

Three or four times a day, a man on a high, roofed-over stage outside the hall would play a jaunty snippet of a tune on an organ and perhaps 250 of the colorfully dressed Zapatista women in balaclavas or bandannas would walk single file into the auditorium and seat themselves onstage on rows of backless benches. The women who had come from around the world to listen would gather on the remaining benches, and men would cluster around the back of the hall. Then, one
caracol
at a time, they would deliver short statements and take written questions. Over the course of four days, all five
caracoles
delivered reflections on practical and ideological aspects of their situation. Pithy and direct, they dealt with difficult (sometimes obnoxious) questions with deftness. They spoke of the challenge of living a revolution that meant autonomy from the Mexican government but also
of learning how to govern themselves and determine for themselves what liberty and justice mean.

The Zapatista rebellion has been feminist from its inception: many of the
comandantes
are women—this
encuentro
was dedicated to the memory of deceased Comandante Ramona, whose image was everywhere—and the liberation of the women of the Zapatista regions has been a core part of the struggle. The testimonies addressed what this meant—liberation from forced marriages, illiteracy, domestic violence, and other forms of subjugation. The women read aloud, some of them nervous, their voices strained—and this reading and writing was itself testimony to the spread both of literacy and of Spanish as part of the revolution. The first language of many Zapatistas is an indigenous one, and so they spoke their Spanish with formal, declarative clarity. They often began with a formal address to the audience that spiraled outward: “Hermanos y hermanas, compañeras y compañeros de la selva, pueblos del Mexico, pueblos del mundo, sociedad civil . . .” (Brothers and sisters, companions of the rainforest, people of Mexico, people of the world, civil society . . .) And then they would speak of what revolution had meant for them.

“We had no rights,” one of them said about the era before the rebellion. Another added, “The saddest part is that we couldn’t understand our own difficulties, why we were being abused. No one had told us about our rights.”

“The struggle is not just for ourselves, it’s for everyone,” said a third. Another spoke to us directly: “We invite you to organize as women of the world in order to get rid of neoliberalism, which has hurt all of us.”

They spoke of how their lives had improved since 1994. On New Year’s Eve, one of the masked women declared:

Who we think is responsible [for the oppressions] is the capitalist system, but now we no longer fear. They humiliated us for too long, but as Zapatistas no one will mistreat us. Even if our husbands still mistreat us, we know we are human beings. Now, women aren’t as mistreated by husbands and fathers. Now, some husbands support and help us and don’t make all the decisions—not in all households, but
poco a poco
. We invite all women to defend our rights and combat machismo.

They spoke of the practical work of remaking the world and setting the future free, of implementing new possibilities for education, health care, and community organization, of the everyday workings of a new society. Some of them carried their babies—and their lives—onstage and, in one poignant moment, a little girl dashed across that stage to kiss and hug her masked mother. Sometimes the young daughters wore masks too.

A Zapatista named Maribel spoke of how the rebellion started, of the secrecy in which they met and organized before the uprising:

We learned to advance while still hiding until January 1. This is when the seed grew, when we brought ourselves into the light. On January 1, 1994, we brought our dreams and hopes throughout Mexico and the world—and we will continue to care for this seed. This seed of ours we are giving for our children. We hope you all will struggle even though it is in a different form. The struggle [is] for everybody.

The Zapatistas have not won an easy or secure future, but what they have achieved is dignity, a word that cropped up constantly during the
encuentro
, as in all their earlier statements. And they have created hope. Hope (
esperanza
) was another inescapable word in Zapatista territory. There was
la tienda de esperanza
, the unpainted wooden store of hope, that sold tangerines and avocados. A few mornings, I had
café con leche
and sweet rice cooked with milk and cinnamon at a
comedor
whose hand-lettered sign read: “Canteen of autonomous communities in rebellion . . . dreams of hope.” The Zapatista minibus was crowned with the slogan “The collective [which also means bus in Spanish] makes hope.”

After midnight, at the very dawn of the New Year, when men were invited to speak again, one mounted the platform from which the New Year’s dance music was blasting to say that he and the other men had listened and learned a lot.

This revolution is neither perfect nor complete—mutterings about its various shortcomings weren’t hard to hear from elsewhere in Mexico or the internationals at the
encuentro
(who asked many testing questions about these
campesinas’
positions on, say, transgendered identity and abortion)—but it is an astonishing and fruitful beginning.

THE SPEED OF SNAILS AND DREAMS

Many of their hopes have been realized. The testimony of the women dealt with this in specific terms: gains in land, rights, dignity, liberty, autonomy, literacy, and a good local government that obeys the people rather than a bad one that tramples them. Under siege, they have created community with each other and reached out to the world.

Emerging from the jungles and from impoverishment, they were one of the first clear voices against corporate globalization—the neoliberal agenda that looked, in the 1990s, as though it might succeed in taking over the world. That was, of course, before the surprise shutdown of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 and other innovative, successful global acts of resistance against that agenda and its impact. The Zapatistas articulated just how audacious indigenous rebellion against invisibility, powerlessness, and marginalization could be—and this was before other indigenous movements from Bolivia to northern Canada took a share of real power in the Americas. Their image of “a world in which many worlds are possible” came to describe the emergence of broad coalitions spanning great differences, of alliances between hunter-gatherers, small-scale farmers, factory workers, human rights activists, and environmentalists in France, India, Korea, Mexico, Bolivia, Kenya, and elsewhere.

Their vision represented the antithesis of the homogenous world envisioned both by the proponents of “globalism” and by the modernist revolutions of the twentieth century. They have gone a long way toward reinventing the language of politics. They have been a beacon for everyone who wants to make a world that is more inventive, more democratic, more decentralized, more grassroots, more playful. Now, they face a threat from the Mexican government that could savage the
caracoles
of resistance, crush the rights and dignity that the women of the
encuentro
embodied even as they spoke of them—and shed much blood.