Zapata Lives!: Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico

6. Zapata Vive! Lacandon Zapatismo and Its Translation to Larger Mexico

chapter 6 Zapata Vive! Local Lacandon Zapatismo and Its Translation to Larger Mexico Article 27 of the Magna Carta should respect the original spirit of Emiliano Zapata: the land is for the indigenous peoples and peasants who work it. Not for latifundistas. We want the huge amounts of land that are in the hands of ranchers, national and international landowners, and other people who occupy a lot of the land but are not peasants to pass into the hands of our communities where there is an absolute shortage of lands, as is established in our revolutionary agrarian law. . . . The Salinas reform to Article 27 of the Constitution should be annulled and the right to land should be returned to our Magna Carta. Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indigena– Comandancia General del EZLN, point 8 of the first set of Zapatista peace proposals, March 1994 (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional 1994, 181) Since its first appearance in the press in Mexico, the EZLN has used the figure of Emiliano Zapata as a central symbol in communiqués written by its supreme authority, the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee, constituted in early 1993. This chapter seeks in part to establish how ejidatarios who formed and joined the EZLN in the Lacandon region of Chiapas appropriated the dominant symbol of Zapata, claimed for decades by the Mexican government, and reworked it for the purposes of resistance and armed struggle. This general story is not particularly unique in history. Many groups have reclaimed dominant symbols for their own purposes, often against established governments or groups in power. What stands out about Lacandon Zapatismo is not only its local development in eastern Chiapas, but also its projection and 147 presence outside the boundaries of its origins—throughout Mexico and even throughout the world.1 What distinguishes the Zapatista rebellion from prior indigenous revolts in Mexican history is that so many knew about it instantly and continued to follow its changes. The presence of the media (television, radio, and newspapers) in Chiapas on the first and subsequent days of the rebellion, as well as the consistent transfer of EZLN communiqués from printed to internet versions, made a critical difference in the impact of neo-Zapatismo outside Chiapas. “This ‘third army’ of news reporters, as they were called in Chiapas, made the difference between an uprising that exposed the impoverishment of the majority of Mexicans to a world audience and a skirmish that could be buried by a government dedicated to a course of neoliberal ‘modernization ’ and entry into international investment markets,” June Nash wrote in reference to a story that might have appeared on the first day of NAFTA, 1 January 1994 (Nash 1997, 48). The successful projection of neo-Zapatismo outside Chiapas since 1994 has also affected the struggle over how the Mexican nation is to be defined—over which nation views are to be part of wider hegemonic and counterhegemonic discussions transcending local and regional contexts . While the governments of presidents Salinas de Gortari (1988– 94) and Zedillo (1994—2000) consistently put forward a vision of a new Mexico integrated into the global economic order built on free trade agreements and foreign investment (a vision some might argue is an anti-nationalist view of the nation), the new Zapatismo projected from Chiapas has put forward a different nation view—one based on looking inward, on fixing social and economic inequality, on returning territory and resources to indigenous peoples, and on not accepting the rules of global economics that disadvantage those on the bottom. This chapter suggests how the refashioning of government-claimed nationalist symbols, such as the transforming of Emiliano Zapata into Votán Zapata (a hybrid Tzeltal/nationalist figure created by Marcos and the EZLN), and the projection of the local struggle represented by Votán Zapata back to the rest of the nation, resulted in a new version of nationalism projected from the margins—neo-Zapatismo. Because the nationalist vision of the Chiapas Zapatistas resonated for others outside Chiapas—particularly the organized left, labor, students, indigenous movements, debtors’ movements, human rights movements, and progressive sectors of the Catholic Church—this vision became another nationalist discourse, legitimized for its believers by the government’s steadfast opposition. As contemporary neo-Zapatismo gained both sup148 Zapatismo in Eastern Chiapas porters and virulent opponents at the national level, it became sanctified as a competing nationalist discourse, a vision counter to that projected...