Searching for the Spirit of Zapata

A century after peasant leader Emiliano Zapata marshaled an Ejército Libertador del Sur (Liberation Army of the South—ELS) in the cause of the Mexican Revolution, his banner continues to be taken up in other struggles across time and space, albeit in poetic and contested reinterpretations. The 1994 rebellion of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation—EZLN) brought public attention again to what has in fact been a long-standing tradition of social protest by those who locate themselves “below and to the left.” The three works considered here examine different facets of this popular resistance, a legacy as relevant as ever now that the hegemonic forces that consolidated control in Mexico after the assassination of Zapata have reimposed the reign of the oxymoronically named Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party—PRI).

The production of knowledge about social struggles is itself a political act, and the memory of Zapata has been invoked by presidents and guerrillas alike while other rebellious movements have been given scant historical treatment and/or quietly repressed. Recent theorizing of rebellion and revolution, especially of the so-called fourth generation, highlights the importance of stories and the way stories are transmitted through collective historical memory as an essential component of mobilization for fundamental change (Selbin, 2010). In the case of Mexico, careful historiography is required to disentangle the numerous and diverse forms of everyday local resistance (Joseph and Nugent, 1994; Nugent, 1998) from the dominant narrative of what Morton (2011) has called “passive revolution,” in which reaccommodations in social relations have been orchestrated to preserve the capitalist order.

In her excellent study of the agrarian movement led by Rubén Jaramillo in Zapata’s home state of Morelos in the 1940s and 1950s, the historian Tanalís Padilla skillfully combines archival research and oral histories to highlight the continuities of rural struggles in Mexico. The result is a valuable corrective to standard accounts that skim over the Jaramillistas, along with the rebellions of Genaro Vázquez and Lucio Cabañas in Guerrero in the 1970s and numerous other mobilizations from below, as anomalous discontinuities. Padilla shows how the Jaramillistas were influenced by the legacies of Emiliano Zapata, the promises of Lázaro Cárdenas in the ambiguous period of institutionalization of the Revolution, and the Morelos peasantry’s experience of indigenous identity, linking agrarianism and indigeneity in its own rebellious reconstruction of history.

Padilla offers a nuanced portrait of the eclectic ideology of Jaramillo, who learned to read and became a Methodist pastor thanks to his first wife, Epifania Ramírez. Alternating between armed uprising and periodic amnesties leading to negotiations, Jaramillo engaged tenaciously with the state as it shifted between repression, pacts, and attempted co-optation. We see a man determined to invoke the laws of the revolutionary state, not unlike today’s Zapatistas exercising “the inalienable right to alter or modify their form of government” enshrined in Article 39 of the Mexican Constitution. As do today’s ski-masked rebels of Chiapas, the rural Jaramillistas in industrializing Mexico battled the forces of a shifting political economy not to preserve some static notion of “tradition” but to reject a top-down scheme of modernization that pushed them to the margins. Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata includes an important chapter on Jaramillista women, documenting their gender-bending roles, which were criticized or ignored. Eschewing simplification, Padilla notes “the contradictions of a movement which called attention to the needs and rights of women but upheld gender codes that subjugated them” (p. 163). At the same time she recognizes the dilemmas of the gender empowerment entailed by Mexico’s consolidation as a modern state and an agrarian reform that reinforced gendered rural structures of family and community.

The main contribution of this valuable study is reflected in the subtitle: the challenge to “the myth of the Pax Priísta,” with its corollaries of a long postwar “Mexican economic miracle” and of sociopolitical stability unbroken until the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. This close examination of the Jaramillistas gives hope for the battles ahead because in highlighting the overlooked resistance of ordinary people it suggests that “the PRI’s hegemony appears far less complete” (p. 214). Padilla also makes a significant contribution to Mexican historiography by acknowledging the ways in which the construction of historical memory can be a tool for inspiring and shaping subsequent mobilization. She notes that although Jaramillo’s autobiography may have retouched his thoughts and actions of the moment, it still provides important evidence of the narrative he wanted to construct. If the campesinos of Morelos hold onto a mythologized memory of the Zapata of the Mexican Revolution or, in the aftermath of the 1994 Zapatista rebellion, choose to read an indigenous dimension into their own struggles of a half century before, this dialogue across history—highlighted by bottom-up scholarship—reinforces the struggle for social justice.

The other two works considered here focus on the (neo)Zapatista rebellion that became visible with the uprising of January 1, 1994, in Chiapas, and they too take seriously the voices of ground-level actors. The New Year’s “surprise” on the eve of Mexico’s official entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement had actually been in gestation for some time. A careful examination of the roots of the rebellion reveals multiple strands of resistance including various independent campesino organizing initiatives, Liberation theology–inspired catechists planting seeds of critical thought in the agricultural frontier, an awakening of indigenous consciousness, and Maoist-leaning organizers from northern cities scattered in the wake of the repression of 1968 (Harvey, 1998). Amidst the general excitement about a rebellion that seemed to resonate with the broader themes of the “alterglobalization” movement and the media frenzy surrounding the charismatic spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos, too much of the writing on Zapatismo has adopted a superficial, external perspective, often imposing on the movement the most fervent desires or fears of the chronicler. Only a few works have been based on a more extended presence within the self-proclaimed autonomous Zapatista communities in Chiapas, adopting what Hale (2008) calls an “engaged scholarship” perspective that explicitly recognizes the “positionality” of the researcher in a movement for radical social change (Baronnet, 2012; Baronnet, Mora Bayo, and Stahler-Sholk, 2011; Cerda García, 2011).

Niels Barmeyer’s Developing Zapatista Autonomy is one of the few books in English that offer an inside glimpse of everyday life within the Zapatista communities. Written from the perspective of an anthropologist who spent time in communities as a human rights observer and volunteer on a water project between 1996–1997 and 2000–2002, the book focuses on transnational activism and development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Chiapas. The author’s framework draws on earlier work by Lynn Stephen (2002) showing the varied and ambiguous historical relationships of communities in Oaxaca and Chiapas with the PRI and the state and their complex negotiations of identity around the legacy of Zapata. Emphasizing the participation of the Zapatista movement in a web of transnational networks and framing (Olesen, 2005), Barmeyer casts a critical eye on the interaction between communities aspiring to autonomy and well-intentioned Northern NGOs with their own agendas and usos y costumbres (norms and customs).

Developing Zapatista Autonomy usefully sets aside the romanticizing of indigenous communities that characterizes much of the writing about the Zapatistas; zeroing in on the contradictions inherent in North-South solidarity and, indeed, in the Zapatistas’ strategy of “resistance,” which calls on the poor communities that make up their support base to reject government aid and programs. These issues are important in considering exactly what it means to be autonomous amidst structures of unequal power and resources. Barmeyer’s work is at its strongest when recounting directly observed dilemmas in the design and implementation of development projects. It is on shakier ground when it attempts to extrapolate from the experience of one community and one key informant to broad generalizations, for example, about declining support for the movement. The author does not hide his personal frustration when Zapatista authorities make decisions with which he is not in agreement, whether they involve deciding on his own access to the communities or on where to run a water tap, even though he makes precisely the opposite critique in arguing that Zapatista autonomy is compromised by outside NGO funders and volunteers. The book is also limited insofar as the fieldwork was conducted before 2003, when the Zapatistas reorganized to create a regional structure of governance (juntas de buen gobierno, or good-governance councils, centered in five sites called caracoles). As Barmeyer notes, this was partly motivated by the Zapatistas’ recognition of a need to regain control of a patchwork of development projects to ensure equity, coordination, and accountability and to avoid the trap of the NGO tail’s wagging the dog.

This raises the important question, too often defined away by the positivist bias of mainstream social science, of who and where “we” are as academics, development volunteers, human rights observers, or solidarity activists accompanying and analyzing subaltern struggles. In an interesting, less academic but no less critical inside look at solidarity/development work in Zapatista communities, Ryan (2011) also interrogates the concept of what Olesen (2005) calls “mutual solidarity” but from a self-reflective perspective, acknowledging that indigenous communities in Chiapas may not see things from the same perspective as a European anarchist.

So what, then, is Zapatismo for the chilango from Mexico City or the Chicano from Los Angeles? How is the construction of autonomy in Zapatista communities in Chiapas linked to wider, transnational struggles for freedom, justice, and democracy? These are the questions taken up by Kara Zugman Dellacioppa in This Bridge Called Zapatismo. This book makes an important contribution to a growing newer literature on transnational social movements (see Andrews, 2011) that counteracts the colonialist assumption of a unidirectional flow of ideas and strategies from North to South. Dellacioppa shifts the focus away from the bureaucratic world of NGOs to grassroots organizations and the ways in which they appropriate and adapt Zapatista principles in their local contexts. In contrast to the institutionalist approach of some scholars of transnational social movements, she uses in-depth interviewing of movement activists (in Mexico and the United States) to highlight the ways in which social actors subjectively interpret and apply the experiences of other movements across time and space through what she calls “transcultural activist networks.”

The Zapatista rebellion of 1994 has generated interlocking networks of related activism in Chiapas, Mexico, and the world. Any attempt to pin the phenomenon down to a single interpretation of the “authentic” Zapata or of essentialist indigenous identity and monolithic interests would miss the novelty of this open-ended insurrection. Even those indigenous communities in Chiapas that have not joined the movement are immersed in the same conditions that gave rise to it, and their consciousness and political opportunities have been at least indirectly affected by the rebellion (Rus, Hernández Castillo, and Mattiace, 2003). This Bridge Called Zapatismo has the merit of giving credit and agency to all those seeking to build autonomous spaces to foster community and solidarity against the atomizing forces of neoliberalism.

Dellacioppa’s revealing inside look at what Leyva Solano (1999) has called “neo-Zapatista networks” shows the diffusion of norms and practices of participatory democracy and horizontal decision making but also the way these clashed with old left sectarianism and verticalism. One might wish for more critical assessment of how the latter tendencies contributed to the unraveling of such initiatives as the civic Frente Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista National Liberation Front—FZLN) and the student-led Consejo General de Huelga (General Strike Council—CGH) at the national university or the stalling of the “Other Campaign” launched by the Zapatistas in 2005. The main contribution of this book is in its hopeful message that the ideas and values transmitted across movements can transcend their institutional manifestations.

All three of these books are worth a read for anyone interested in social movements and rebellion. They all highlight the subjective perceptions and experiences of grassroots actors, and each in its own way raises important questions about perspective and about the power dynamics in the construction of knowledge. These analyses also remind us that the legacy of Zapata is not only in uprisings against the state but in the painstaking transformation of everyday practices and relationships within the society.