The Zapatista Revolution: Recognition, Redistribution, and the Limits of Identity Politics (original) (raw)
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Autonomy in a poetic voice: Zapatistas and political organizing in Los Angeles
Latino Studies, 2005
For the last decade, the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army) has breathed new life into modern concepts like democracy and the nation, invigorating urban social movements in their attempt to construct a new political culture in Mexico and beyond. This paper argues that the EZLN offers an actual ''theory'' of political organizing and decolonization that is not bound to the Indian countryside in Mexico. Many theorists have attempted to locate Zapatistas as either an ethnic or a peasant movement. Challenging Eurocentric and developmentalist theories of social change, subjectivity, and revolution, a number of interdisciplinary scholars such as Walter Mignolo have developed theoretical concepts such as ''border thinking,'' ''border gnosis,'' and ''translanguaging'' to explain the new type of movement embodied by the EZLN and the possibilities for building new movements here in the United States. I use data drawn from my research on Casa del Pueblo in Los Angeles to highlight the points that Mignolo and others make about cultural difference and social change.
Zapatista anti- capitalista politics and the other campaign
Zapatista indigenous autonomy offers new political road maps that chart courses through a complex and contradictory terrain marked by a rearticulation of neoliberal hegemonic forces and a legacy of left politics of recognition positioned between mestizaje ideologies and Indianist discourses. The emerging cartography locates practices of resistance to the political-economic and the cultural logics of late capitalism in the ways in which autonomy links political identity claims to self-governing practices and to struggles for resource redistribution. Similarly, it critiques the ethnic-racialized ordering of society by unmasking the way biological and cultural traits work interchangeably to define dominant constructs of indigenous subjectivity.
Migración y desarrollo
"La migración de chiapanecos a Estados Unidos es un fenómeno reciente pero que ha cobrado gran fuerza y está transformando las dinámicas locales en casi todo el estado, incluso en los municipios zapatistas, donde las salidas al Norte se habían retrazado ante la opción de la lucha y el diálogo. Hoy la migración se ha convertido en un proyecto que no sólo le disputa sus bases al movimiento, sino que también compite con éste como nuevo productor de subjetividades. A partir de la reconstrucción del fenómeno migratorio en una comunidad zapatista de la Selva Lacandona, me propongo mostrar cómo ésta provoca un conflicto comunitario en el que se oponen dos tipos de subjetividades y en el que los diferentes actores se disputan la definición de sentido de la acción migratoria y la forma de gestionarla. Se mostrará también, cómo en medio de grandes tensiones, las comunidades zapatistas pasan de una etapa de repliegue defensivo ante el fenómeno a una de apertura. Chiapaneco migration to the United States is a recent and increasingly large phenomenon that is transforming local dynamics across the state, even in Zapatista municipalities where emigration had been delayed during times of struggle and perceived dialogue opportunities. Today, migration is wearing down the movement and creating a new set of subjectivities. This paper reconstructs the migration phenomenon in a Zapatista community of the Lacandon Jungle and, in doing so, intends to show the ways in which it leads to a communal conflict involving two different types of subjectivities as different actors argue over the meaning of migration and how to manage it. I will also show how, in the midst of great tension, Zapatista communities go through a stage of defensive retreat when faced by this new process."
A Rainbow at Midnight: Zapatistas and Autonomy
THE BRUTAL MASSACRE of 45 indigenous sympathisers, mostly women and children, of the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army) in a refugee camp near Acteal in the south-eastern state of Chiapas,Mexico, last December 22, at the hands of paramilitary death squads linked to the PRI government served to remind world opinion that the ‘Rebellion of the Forgotten’ of January 1994 has moved from a low to a high intensity conflict.The success of the Zapatistas in mobilising Mexican and international ‘civil society’, particularly through the Internet, in a common struggle against the disastrous human and environmental consequences of neoliberalism, globalisation and “free trade”and for increased autonomy for indigenous peoples has forced the PRI regime, under the instigation of the US government and World Bank, to adopt a more violent and politically riskier strategy of repression through state terror. This has effectively ended the phase of negotiations which led to the signing of the San Andrés Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture in February 1996, which the PRI (Party of the Institutional Revolution) regime has since refused to implement, so intensifying the conflict.
Creative Resistance And Utopian Subjectivities: Zapatista Autonomy As Discourse, Power, And Practice
2018
This thesis explores the Zapatistas’ autonomous project based on an alternative discourse that acts as resistance to the hegemonic system of neoliberalism and the regimes of power that maintain it. Drawing from Escobar’s (1995) post-structuralist discursive analysis, it traces the reinforcing relations of power in the hegemonic system through examining the development discourse, its connections to coloniality, and its privileging of Euro-centric forms knowledge which shape subjectivities to set the limits of possibility and, in that, assert violence towards non-dominant peoples and the environment. Thus, in order to change the dominant order and prevent this violence, there must be change at the level of discourse. The Zapatistas have created an alternative discourse (Zapatismo) that provides the basis for utopian creative resistance through opening the limits of possibility and capacitating people to create their ideal realities. The thesis explores the effects of this discourse on...
Zapatista Voice, Visibility and Vision: An-other Aesthetics of Globalization
Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo , 2020
Since their insurrection on January 1st, 1994, the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [“Zapatista Army of National Liberation] has promulgated an incisive critique of the colonial character of capitalist accumulation and violent dispossession led by globalized finance capital and enabled by state force. With their grassroots organization, Zapatistas have transmitted an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial worldview to urban and rural communities around the world, demonstrating us an-other globalization. This was possible not only with the strategic use of communication technologies and alternative media networks but with an understanding and production of aesthetics that uses language, visual symbols, humor and stories with an indigenous sensibility. It is thus a very poignant observation by Maria Saldaña-Portillo who argues that the Zapatistas fill in the empty content of the signifier ‘Indian’ with ‘Indian specificity (Saldaña-Portillo2003). The unification of the ‘subjective philosophy of rage’ with Mayan cosmology and worldview makes neo-Zapatismo both aesthetic and political. Zapatistas strategically build their vision of the ‘other politics’ by constructing a visual and aural world, which is hard to articulate in the traditional vocabulary and imagination of revolution as it is a unique encounter between libertarian Marxism and historical indigenous resistance. This has constituted 'a powerful disruption on the original plan, and the opening of unprecedented possibilities around which a new subjectivity started taking shape ' as Deleuze articulated (Deleuze 1994:190). It is thus essential to examine the art of the Zapatista movement that can present an important political conjuncture from which to sustain other sensorial worlds here and now. Analyzing their community murals and other visual production with a dialectical materialist perspective, this paper theorizes and historicizes the Zapatista aesthetics and shows how the Zapatista movement in Chiapas has creatively articulated new forms of social politicity with their unique aesthetic engagements.. Zapatista aesthetics is not only important to recognize that 'another aesthetics' is possible but also enables us to map the visible but disregarded ground of aesthetics in recent social movements.
Opening Chapters--Poetics of Indigenismo in Zapatista Discourse
The Poetics of Indigenismo in Zapatista Discourse: The Mexican Revolution Revisioned through Mayan Eyes, 2019
This sample provided by Cambridge Scholars includes Chapter 1: "The Neo-Zapatistas: An Introductory Sketch"; Chapter 2: "Translating Zapatismo: Zapata como Alimento y Abono"; Chapter 3: "Integrating 'Our Indians' into the Nation: 'Una Hábil Alquimia'," as well as a book introduction, and a new 2019 Preface: ”Masked, Enmeshed, by Literature Blessed" which discusses similarities between the trajectories of Marcos and Carlos Castaneda, as well as the interface between ethnography and literature, or creative writing.
The Politics of Justice: Zapatista Autonomy at the Margins of the Neoliberal Mexican State
This article focuses on the interplay between shifting regulatory practices of the Mexican neoliberal state and attempts to destabilize them by Zapatista civilian support bases, as they enact practices of autonomy, particularly through the sphere of conflict resolution. In doing so, the article suggests that the cultural practices of justice unsettle relevant regulatory forces during a particular moment in Chiapas state formation and are hence central to disrupting the continued legacies of colonial power – knowledge. Similarly, the argument offers a framework of analysis that allows us to trace the possibilities and challenges of indigenous and afro-descendent struggles in subverting hegemonic state processes.