"Excuse the inconvenience, but this is a revolution": Zapatista Paradox and the Rhetoric of Tourism

This essay examines the conflation of various practices of tourism, such as eco-tourism and so-called "revolutionary tourism," surrounding the EZLN and the indigenous groups that they represent. Both eco-tourism and revolutionary tourism seek authentic versions of indigenous difference, yet they also carry the threat that such difference will fracture the myth of Mexican national unity. It is precisely this indigenous difference that both thrills and repels the tourist, and by extension, the Mexican state. While the Mexican state manipulates the idea of tourism in order to delegitimize neo-Zapatismo, the EZLN symbolically reclaims the power of political praxis by utilizing tourism as a rhetorical device to represent and analyze the construction of national and indigenous identity. I argue that the EZLN's mock tourist guides and travel narratives demonstrate the confluence and inversion of supposedly "non-modern" and "modern" temporalities, in which both the nation-state and indigenous groups alternately appropriate and reject official national discourse and stereotypically authentic indigenous identity. As such, tourism becomes a space not to access potential national unity, but rather to rewrite the terms of indigenous difference and national inclusion.