Dancing with the Zapatistas ed. by Diana Taylor and Lorie Novak (review)

The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) or Zapatista Army of National Liberation is a revolutionary group composed of indigenous people and mestizos living in Chiapas, Mexico. Through both political and artistic acts of resistance, the Zapatistas have rebelled against the Mexican government since the passage of NAFTA in 1994, arguing that the agreement threatened the livelihood of their agriculture and community.

Dancing with the Zapatistas, edited by Diana Taylor and Lorie Novak, is an open-access, multimedia digital book that presents a collection of written essays, poetry, spoken word, photo essays, interviews, video, and performative responses in conjunction with the 20th anniversary of the emergence of the Zapatistas. Taylor and Novak's book contains 17 essays, with bibliographies at the end of each, accessed through a visual thumbnail table of contents. Written by scholars, artists, journalists, and activists, this book considers Zapatista life and the Zapatistas' global impact on political art movements since 1994.

In her introduction, Taylor connects her experiences visiting and teaching with the Zapatistas with four reflections on the book's themes: waiting, "good" and "bad" governments, Mayan-inspired ethos, and the collective "WE" (1).

Taylor's video interview with artist Ricardo Dominguez, the eighth essay, is a good example of the first and second reflections. The Zapatista fight for a "good" government (one that is nondiscriminatory and collaborative), over a "bad" government (a neoliberal one driven by globalization), is a long-term, durational performance about resistance and requires patience (1). Inspired by the Zapatista resistance, Dominguez recalls encountering the Zapatista rebellion online on 1 January 1994: "The Zapatistas shifted for me the notion of what electronic civil disobedience might be" (8). In 2000, Dominguez's Electronic Disturbance Theater along with Fran Illich used a port scanner application to search for open ports on the US Border Patrol's servers in Tijuana, Mexico. Every time they found an open door (port), Dominguez and Illich sent a Zapatista story or poem to the Border Patrol (8). With his durational performance practice (1), Dominguez continues to resist hegemonic political systems, including his development of the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a GPS system to assist in a safe and poetic crossing of the US-Mexico border (Nadir 2012).

Ethos, the third reflection of the text, refers to the Mayans' age-old belief system. For example, corn, humans, snails, and mountains, depicted in many Zapatista murals, have "ch'ulel, an inner life" whereby all are connected in the universe. In the second essay, "Zapatista Muralism and the Making of a Community," art historian Luis Vargas-Santiago provides images and describes murals that are scattered across Zapatista territories as "pedagogical devices" that narrate and convey the Zapatista ideology, including indigenous values (2). The indigenous, known as the people of corn, believe that the genetically modified corn of Monsanto kills the corn's ch'ulel. Some murals depict Zapatista faces painted in each kernel of corn on a stalk while others narrate the fight between the Zapatistas and the corporate takeover of their corn and agriculture (1, 8).

The fourth reflection of this book contemplates the role of the collective "WE." In the tenth (video) essay "I Am: A Poetic Conversation," artist Guillermo Goméz-Peña performs a poetic exchange with Zapatista Subcommander Marcos. In "Rewriting Marcos" (2012) Goméz-Peña recites:

We are,
or rather I am
all of us but no one in particular, nadie,
an orphan of all nation states [...]

(10)

"Rewriting Marcos" was written in conversation with the poem "Marcos Is Gay" (1997) that Marcos composed in response to rumors that he was gay and encompasses a collective "we" of those who have been abnormalized and marginalized:

Yes, Marcos is gay.
Marcos is gay in San Francisco
Black in South Africa
an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain [...]

(10)

Goméz-Peña's use of "we" and "all of us" (10) relates to Marcos...