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5 Revolutionary Spiritualities in Chiapas Today Immanent History and the Comparative Frame in Subaltern Studies José Rabasa This chapter traces some of the signature concepts of the Zapatista insurrection of 1994 and the pacifism of Las Abejas back to native colonial pictorial articulations of the possibility of dwelling in a plurality of worlds, of the possibility of being modern and not-modern without incurring a contradiction . I prefer the notion of the “not-modern” to the “premodern” in that the latter carries a built-in teleology that posits modernity as a historical necessity. It has been argued that the Spanish invasion of the Americas in the sixteenth century should be considered as the beginning of modernity; we should take care not to define indigenous forms of life under colonial power as one more instance of the modern, but rather as life forms with their own periodicity. In this regard, the juxtaposition of Mesoamerican, colonial, and modern texts in this essay seeks to reproduce the sense of a multi-temporal present that characterizes the native colonial pictorial maps and histories, the Zapatista communiqués, and even Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of historical immanence. I first draw from the map of Cholula in the Relación Geográfica of 1581 an example and a definition of immanent history, and finally I close with the question of revolutionary spiritualities in Chiapas today. If native hybrid pictorial and alphabetical texts from central Mexico lend themselves to an initial articulation of historical immanence and plural-world dwelling, these colonial texts also give historical depth to the mural “Vida y sueño de la cañada Perla” and the photographic testimonio of Las Abejas that I examine at the end of the essay. My critique of Gramsci’s conception of subaltern studies enables me not only to document further what I mean by immanent history, but also to lay out strategies for curtailing the constitution of a transcendental concept or institution that would subordinate immanence to an exterior source of meaning. 120 / José Rabasa Cartographic Specters or the Immanence of Memory In the map of Cholula from 1581 (fig. 5.1), we can trace the indigenous production of artifacts for Spanish bureaucrats that comprised at least two codes. While we know the identity of the corregidor, Gabriel Rojas, who provided the verbal responses to the questionnaire of the Relaciones Geográficas , which included a question requesting a pictorial representation of the locations, the tlacuilo (the native painter) who drew the map of Cholula remains unknown. For the most part the painting of maps was delegated to the tlacuilo, but as we will see further down Rojas’s written information proves invaluable for tracing the double register the tlacuilo deploys in the map of Cholula. On the one hand, the townscape of Cholula would satisfy the Relaciones Geográficas’s request of pictorial representations. On the other hand, the tlacuilo, the native painter, inscribed the signs that would enable readers to recognize precolonial structures and meanings beyond the colonial order signified by the gridiron pattern of streets, the use of alphabetical writing, and the massive buildings occupying the center of the town.1 The tlacuilo displays an ability to use European cartographic systems of representation , but the map also contains indigenous pictographic forms. Under close examination, the map manifests that the Spanish pictorial vocabulary is used as signifiers rather than the signifieds usually associated with the meanings conveyed by grids, perspective, and landscape in chorographic maps and townscapes. These forms do not convey the corresponding realities of street patterns, the realistic depictions of cities, and the topography of the surroundings, but rather the system of representation itself. That is not to say that buildings and temples represented in the map did not have a corresponding reality, but that beyond these structures we find an immanent historical layer that becomes manifest when we juxtapose a map of precolonial Cholula (fig. 5.2) from the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca (ca. 1545–65).2 As in the case of the tlacuilo who drafted the map of Cholula, the “authors” of the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca remain anonymous, the latter having been produced independently of Spanish authorities and intended mainly for use within the community of Quautinchan. In both cases we must assume a collective “author” rather than an individual tlacuilo working independently. Even when the map of Cholula was produced at the request of the corregidor Rojas, we can imagine the tlacuilo consulting the elders of Cholula, and, as such, tracing the...

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