Zapatismo beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Stability (review)

Since the Chiapas-based Zapatista National Liberation Army's (EZLN's) unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Mexican government in 1994, its famed spokesperson, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, has issued countless communiqués, some aimed at the global community. Alex Khasnabish attempts to show that, through unorthodox revolutionary means, the modern-era version of zapatismo stands as a leading opponent of neoliberal capitalism. He builds his discussion on the concept of rhizomatic effects.¹ This argument holds that, a bit like a rooted plant, the movement engenders effects far removed from Chiapas: an awkward proposition to be sure, in light of the fact that roots draw their sustenance from where they are planted and hardly enrich distant fields. Moreover, he maintains that revolutionaries like the zapatistas can advance their agendas more effectively without governing—a convenient point of view, given the zapatistas' failed attempt to do precisely that.

As the subtitle suggests, Khasnabish believes that, since 1994, zapatismo has inspired the imaginations of leftists around the world, encouraging them to seek new ways of bringing about change. These novel methods are necessary, he acknowledges, because the old ones were seldom effective. Innovative means of resistance and direct action are intended to break out of an antiquated paradigm that featured protest marches, demonstrations, lobbying, and deliberation. Some new tactics are symbolic yet emphatic, like those of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). OCAP and other organizations draw inspiration from the zapatistas of Chiapas, surviving as the zapatistas do in a land whose national government and military have been able neither to crush the movement nor to evict its participants. What the zapatistas represent in Mexico is, according to Khasnabish, expressed by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, whose remarks—sometimes poetic, always polemical, seldom simple—open each chapter.

Modern zapatismo began, we are reminded, with the initiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on 1 January 1994. No serious leftist has ever doubted that NAFTA was intended as a transcontinental form of capitalist exploitation—a crafty way to transcend international borders and remove economic trade barriers. Yet few oppositionists were willing to do more than criticize NAFTA. The zapatistas, however, went much further and continue today to stand as a beacon of strong yet unorthodox resistance to the megacapitalists who conceived, bore, nursed, and now collect rich dividends from the blood, sweat, tears, and toil of Mexico's rural indigenous and mestizo peoples. How do the zapatistas resist? Mostly by continuing to exist and by making Chiapas their own, despite others' efforts to eliminate them. Yet the author mentions little about the zapatistas' modi operandi and vivendi. Rather, his research and writing are aimed at the movement's effects in distant lands—mainly Canada and, to a lesser extent, the United States.

Before settling into his argument, Khasnabish recapitulates the twentieth-century socialist movement histories of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. All these treatments are of journeyman quality, and his understanding of the nuances of the Mexican experience is commendable. Interestingly, he "contend[s] that the legacy of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1917 has been and continues to be the object of appropriation and contestation by a multiplicity of actors."2 There is no need to "contend" anything. That the Revolution has been appropriated, used, abused, and distorted for every political reason imaginable by all kinds of groups and institutions—foremost among them the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which held power from 1929 to 2000—is commonly accepted by authors and scholars of twentieth-century Mexico.3 Nonetheless, this book nicely juxtaposes the agrarian struggle of Morelos with the revolutionary panorama that it helped create and in which it arguably occupies center stage. That the Chiapas revolutionaries chose to call themselves "zapatistas" is both apropos and ironic, as both struggles began with military campaigns and, after being stifled by federal forces, dug in to hold the territory they occupied.

The similarities end there, because, unlike the zapatistas of...