Academic Activism in Zapatista Communities Living in Resistance

Fieldwork is important in any academic field, and the field of Latin American cultural studies is no exception. The increasing popularity of interdisciplinary research and what may perhaps be deemed a nontraditional approach in which the scholar not only observes but also participates in everyday life events are adding to the richness of the field. Abril Trigo (2004: 3) argues that the main objects of inquiry of Latin American cultural studies are the symbolic production and living experiences of social reality in Latin America. Social realities and lived experiences are often the focus not only of anthropological and ethnographic studies but also of many human rights observation missions and solidarity activist projects in Zapatista communities living in resistance. Trigo points to the “strong political thrust” of Latin American cultural studies—their “focus on the analysis of institutions, experiences, and symbolic production as intricately connected to social, political, and material relations” (4).

The three books under review can best be understood as what Ileana Rodríguez (2001: 1) calls “politically committed scholarship.” A common theme of these volumes is the attempt to link social and political theory with action, keeping in mind the problems that arise when non-Western objects are studied through Western lenses. Each book showcases a different approach to connecting with the Zapatista insurgency: demonstrating its importance for the development of an alternative history of indigenous insurgency and new theoretical perspectives (Rabasa), examining the human and indigenous rights discourse of the state and the Zapatistas though “activist research” (Speed), and assessing international solidarity work in a Zapatista community (Ryan).

José Rabasa’s Without History situates itself firmly within the field of Latin American cultural studies in focusing on symbolic production and lived social realities. The book is a collection of 12 essays written since the mid-1990s, some of them previously published. It is a complex reading of the intersections between the Zapatista insurgency, subaltern studies, and historiography. It is also an attempt to revitalize the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, of which Rabasa was a founding member. This academic collective, modeled on the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group led by Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, argued that it was the academic community’s responsibility to find the multiple voices historically excluded from Latin American studies and ensure their inclusion in academic, social, and political discourse. Elsewhere Rabasa (2008: 166) has written that the issues raised by subaltern studies have received an unexpected boost from the Zapatista movement.

Rabasa argues that Gayatri Spivak’s foundational question “Can the subaltern speak?” “is pertinent only when the subaltern is expected to interface with the state” and inapplicable when “subalterns choose to remain outside the state and history” (4). If the subaltern cannot speak, how do we explain revolutionary action? He points out that the nonmodern is an alternative, neither contesting nor regressing—“an ‘elsewhere’ unbound by modern conceptions of history that privilege the institutions, historical events, and philosophical concepts that have defined the West” (5). For examples of this nonmodern externality he turns to political cartoons, codices, documentary films, and maps that locate the limits of history as part of a project that remains outside of or without it.

His essential argument is that the Zapatista insurgency must be understood as part of a historical arc while avoiding “the risk of essentializing indigeneity” because “the indigenous nature of the Zapatista rebellion has contributed to the redefinition of the duration of insurgency” (7–9). Chapter 3, “Of Zapatismo: Reflections on the Folkloric and the Impossible in a Subaltern Insurrection,” seeks to understand through subaltern insurrections how modern and nonmodern cultural and political practices become compatible. Here Rabasa critiques readings of letters and communiqués by both Marcos and the Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena–Comandancia General (Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee–General Command—CCRI-CG) that have attempted to discredit the Zapatistas by revealing “their links to the Archbishop Samuel Ruiz, Marcos’ appropriation of the Indian ‘voices,’ . . . and the absence of a ‘real’ army” (40). He deftly shows how these readings essentialize what it means to be an “army” and an “Indian” and suggests that when Marcos’s critics attempt to unmask him they “manifest a will to control the meaning of texts by means of the construction of their authors” (54). The communiqués, he says (54),

derive their authority and legitimacy inasmuch as they are the expression of a collective body that by definition is subaltern. For dominant discourse, Indians, as long as they speak and think “as Indians,” cannot write or formulate a coherent political program. Beyond the obvious racism, this dismissal of indigenous intellectuality entails structural determinants that date back to the early colonization of the Americas—the subjection of native knowledges as superstitious or idolatrous. Indians had to abandon indigenous forms of life in order to make sense. In this regard, the CCRI-CG manifests an instance of writing the impossible in its affirmation that the EZLN is an Indian-led insurgency.

Operating outside the Western framework, it is possible for the Zapatista insurgents to speak and to make claims for democracy, freedom, and justice, but any claim “resides paradoxically in the impossibility of being understood.” This reverses Spivak’s question and requires that the “discourse of power learn to speak to them” (61).

Rabasa’s use of Western theoretical concepts to read non-Western texts is likely to be a source of ongoing debate and criticism. His book is full of names and theoretical approaches: Jacques Derrida, Immanuel Kant, Antonio Gramsci, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Michel Foucault. For example, in Chapter 6, “Negri by Zapata: Constituent Power and the Limits of Autonomy,” one sentence reads: “Flores Magón and the intellectual tradition of the West—obviously including Kant’s conception of autonomy and constitutionalism, Negri’s concept of constituent power, and Derridean deconstruction—would have to be explained, clarified, interpreted in Tzeltal categories” (122). Perhaps these multiple voices are required for building a new interpretation of history from an indigenous perspective, but it seems to me that, by approaching the Zapatista rebellion as a text and using Western theoretical approaches to produce a nonmodern version of history, Rabasa loses touch with the everyday lived realities of the subaltern subjects he is studying.

Rabasa cites the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group’s (1995) founding proposal to pursue “new ways of looking at the subaltern” and build “new relations between ourselves and those human contemporaries whom we posit as objects of study” (83), and this is undoubtedly what he attempts in Without History. Rigoberta Menchú’s assertion (also cited) “Not even anthropologists or intellectuals, no matter how many books they have, can find out all our secrets” is a powerful warning, and Rabasa is conscious of this when he recognizes that “subaltern politics and revolutionary interventions are obviously not dependent on nor inspired by academic theory” (60). However, the self-appointed task of subaltern studies of including marginalized voices in a Western discourse may be a colonialist project. Have subalterns ever looked to academics to include them in history? Why would they want to?

What Without History ultimately offers is the legitimizing of the Zapatista insurgency as a representative narrative that remains outside of history. In the end, it shows us that the Zapatistas offer a model for other subaltern groups and that they “function today as a return of the repressed that reminds us that other rationalities could have very well informed other insurgencies in other times” (36). The author lays out the fertile theoretical groundwork from which scholars can build future research projects both in Mexico and with other insurgent movements throughout Latin America. The theoretical sophistication of the work is impressive, and it will be obligatory reading for scholars working with and interested in the Zapatista rebellion and the theory of subaltern studies.

Without History characterizes the academic discipline of anthropology as a “one-way street in which the anthropological discourses of the West assume the privileged position of explaining the life forms of the rest of the world” (122). Shannon Speed’s Rights in Rebellion is a response to this stereotype, revealing that much of contemporary anthropology does not fit this narrow description. It gives readers a multifaceted look at the everyday lived realities of Chiapas’s paramilitary forces, Zapatista communities and good-government councils, and an indigenous human rights organization. Speed examines the effects of the various manifestations of human rights and indigenous rights discourse on local culture, identity, and resistance and advocates for an activist research agenda.

In the preface, “Activist Research in the Chiapas Conflict,” Speed delivers a thoughtful and insightful account of the role of an activist researcher in the context of the Zapatista revolution. She has a solid grasp of the benefits of activist research, but she is also conscious of the difficulties that arise from it. “One practical issue for conducting research that was absolutely unavoidable in Chiapas,” she writes, “was that of being positioned as a human rights activist and hence a Zapatista” (11). She recognizes that, whether one arrives with one’s own political program for social justice or is positioned by others, it is impossible to remain a neutral observer in the conflict zone.

Speed makes her political position transparent from the very first page. In this respect, Rights in Rebellion adds to previous anthropological scholarship that advocates for activist research. Duncan Earle and Jeanne Simonelli’s Uprising of Hope (2005) paved the way for future fieldworkers to speak openly about the difficulties they face; they write, “Though many of us typically conducted research on tourist visas, . . . this was a gray area and left us subject to possible expulsion” because “the only research or program acceptable to the PRI [Partido Revolucionario Institucional] government was the classic ethnographic study of an essentialized Maya, an image of the indigenous that conservative voices in anthropology constructed during years of Chiapas fieldwork” (70). Speed, like Rabasa, sees politics as imposing a singular societal role on the indigenous population that allows for greater control of them by the state. Doing ethnography in Chiapas, she says, was often treated as neutral, but “anything else was viewed as human rights related and therefore political” (70). Elsewhere she writes, “Unfortunately, showing up to interview them (‘Hello, I’m a foreigner who’s writing about human rights in Chiapas’) would at that time have been—possibly quite literally—turning myself in to the authorities for expulsion” (13). Other researchers document similar experiences in negotiating the uncertain terrain of being positioned as a participant, an observer, an activist, a researcher, or all of these at once. Aaron Bobrow–Strain (2007: 18) writes, “Like many U.S. and Mexican researchers, I entered the study of Chiapas through activism.” María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (2003: 198) says that she “participated as a human rights observer on delegations sent to investigate areas of conflict . . . [and] was able to conduct a number of interviews and engage people in more informal conversations.” Finally, Niels Barmeyer (2009: xiii) explains, “I somehow had to weave my way into the semiclandestine world of pro-Zapatista support stuctures, the only access route into the rebellious pueblos de base that I had come to study.”

Central to Speed’s analysis is the way different political actors put rights into practice. Having been present for the celebration of the creation of the five Zapatista caracoles, she analyzes their function and the reappropriation of rights discourse in Chapter 7, “ ‘Improving the Paths of Resistance’: The Juntas de Buen Gobierno and Rights in Their Exercise.” The creation of the good-government councils in 2003 signaled a transition from military to civilian governance and the formal end to the Zapatistas’ petition for state recognition of their collective right to autonomy (155). The councils were established in Zapatista rebel autonomous regions in opposition to the Mexican government or what the Zapatistas call the mal gobierno (bad government). Their creation was a result of Zapatistas’ lived experience, which has proved to them that rights established in law “are functionally nonexistent” (172).

Discussing the approval by the Mexican Congress of the Law on Indigenous Rights and Culture, which effectively denied indigenous peoples territorial rights and political representation, in the office of a human rights NGO in Chapter 3, “Global Discourses on the Local Terrain: Grounding Human Rights in Chiapas,” Speed is captivated by a Tzeltal woman’s take on the situation: “Our autonomy doesn’t need permission from the government; it already exists” (38). This statement is reminiscent of Comandanta Ramona’s often-reproduced assertion “We don’t need to ask for permission to be free.” These citations are examples of “the process by which local indigenous people reappropriate global discourses of human rights (indigenous rights, self-determination) and redeploy them based on their own understanding and goals and, in so doing, reshape the very terms” (178). The process Speed demonstrates is found in practice, in action. Even without state recognition of indigenous autonomy, Zapatistas claim this right by calling on society to act on its own behalf. Thus, in order to understand the contemporary Zapatista project what we need to understand is that indigenous rights “existed because they were already being exercised in practice” (161).

Since its publication in 2008, Rights in Rebellion has been one of the most important books written on the topic of rights discourse in Chiapas and the nature of armed resistance in the conflict zone. It is concise and accessible for anyone interested in understanding the complexity of the Zapatista rebellion and will be sure to continue the debate on the scholar’s role in fieldwork and research. It sees the “spread of the discourse of human rights” as giving “new form to indigenous resistance throughout the Americas” (29). It views the Zapatista rebellion as a model for other resistance movements in the region but also as a window onto the everyday workings of resistance and rights discourse, expertly drawing out the points of tension.

Ramor Ryan’s Zapatista Spring combines narrative, journalism, testimony, and political philosophy. It is divided into three parts with a brief “prelude” and a final section entitled “Aftermath.” At the beginning there is a cartoon-style map of the region locating San Cristóbal de Las Casas, the Zapatista caracol of La Garrucha, and the Zapatista community of Roberto Arenas. Caricatures of backpackers and what looks to be an inebriated tourist taking photographs, a campesino tending his land, Zapatistas with their trademark ski masks and paliacates, and military roadblocks are vivid images of many of the players in the conflict zone. Photographs complement the wonderful descriptions of the Chiapas landscape.

Ryan was drawn to Chiapas as an activist in solidarity with the Zapatista insurgency helping to construct a water system in a rebel community. On the verge of reading like a diary or memoir, his book details the work of a group of solidarity activists who voluntarily and knowingly involve themselves in the everyday life and culture of the community no matter what the political cost. Zapatista Spring is a concrete example of many of the trials and tribulations experienced by human rights observers and activist researchers who make their way to Chiapas and find themselves, as Niels Barmeyer (2009: xiii) puts it, “with that peculiar tribe of globalized utopians who had lost their hearts to someone else’s revolution.” Ryan’s descriptions of solidarity delegations are genuine and true, reminding me of the active, participatory, and sometimes uncomfortable and contradictory human rights observation missions that I participated in from 2007 to 2009. It is “an instructive story” (210), he claims, for all those who find themselves participating in the world of international solidarity work.

Intertwined with Zapatista Spring’s meditation on international solidarity work is Ryan’s reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which provides him with an experiential framework from which to understand his own subject position as a white European venturing into an alien culture. He begins by asking the question that guides many participant-observers and activist scholars: “What can we do to help the Zapatistas?” Once he has arrived in rebel territory, however, the question becomes “What is it that the Zapatistas want us to do?” (12). Later, his purpose becomes an attempt “to portray Zapatistas as they are, at the grassroots, beyond the mythologizing of Marcos and the public face of the rebellion” (48). He not only gives us an inside look at everyday activities in small Zapatista communities but also provides us with a glimpse of the lives of outsiders working in rebel territory. What he describes is a Zapatista rebel territory not unlike the one described by Marcos in his crime novel Muertos incómodos (2005). ¹ In the novel, a solidarity activist like Ryan describes the relationships forged by internationals participating in the rebellion: “Although we’re from different countries and languages and most of the time differ in our interpretation of Zapatismo, we create more or less solid bonds of cameraderie” (Marcos and Taibo, 2005: 42, my translation). Marcos, as a character in the novel, goes on to describe how these activists should behave (Marcos and Taibo, 2006: 64):

Campamenteros should not enter into metaphysical considerations. Campamentistas are supposed to count battle tanks and soldiers, they’re supposed to get sick from the food, they should fight amongst themselves over nothing, they should play soccer, they should lose to the Zapatistas, they should help with the projects, they should listen to Radio Insurgente, they should criticize El Sup for not being or doing what they think he should be and do, they should plan how they are going to export Zapatismo to their own countries, they’re supposed to be bored most of the time. All those things and many others.

Ryan sheds light on an important perspective from a cast of characters that is rarely discussed or heard from. He shows how difficult it is for these actors to deal with the tensions created by their presence but suggests that, despite all the obstacles they face, they help sustain the Zapatista rebellion. For example, on first meeting the Zapatistas of Roberto Arenas they explain why they have come and are addressed as compañeros. ² Ryan describes them as “two foreigners [who] violated tourist visas by entering the designated conflict zone” (13) because, as Article 33 of the Mexican Constitution reads, “Foreigners may not in any way participate in the political affairs of the country.” Yet a steady flow of human rights workers continues to pass through Chiapas.

Speed and Ryan understand the dangers of their projects. They also understand the human costs for the Zapatistas of engaging in a rebellion against the state and of foreigner’s participating within that context. Thus, they do what they can to protect the identity of their subjects and their compañeros. Ryan tells his readers that all names of Zapatistas and water technicians have been changed. Speed, aware of the trust afforded to her by her subjects, omits information that she thinks could compromise them and gives the majority of people who spoke with her pseudonyms. Both risk expulsion from Mexico in order to deliver readers timely, in-depth accounts of the inner workings of Zapatista projects on the ground and the representatives of international solidarity networks who arrive in rebel territory to provide aid. The result is a scholarship that reaches the core of subaltern studies: giving agency and voice to those who are being studied.

According to Ryan, reading Heart of Darkness in the jungle keeps him mindful of his role as a visitor and as an outsider. He writes, “While we may be the first outsiders/foreigners to step foot in this hamlet we are not extracting mineral wealth, enslaving the locals or whipping them to work harder, but volunteer comrades who support the revolt and are working with them” (57). This statement seems self-congratulatory, bespeaking his position of privilege. The volunteers do not have to stay and live the difficult lives of Zapatistas. They enjoy the freedom to come and go, moving in and out of Zapatista communities as they please. There are other moments when Ryan comes across as self-righteous. Of the two delivery men who come with a truck to help deliver the plastic tubes, cement bags, and tools necessary for the water project, he writes, “They are . . . not at all informed. Not unusual for urban mestizos, they have a racist attitude towards the indigenous and consider themselves superior. Of the Zapatistas they know next to nothing” (36). Elsewhere his descriptions read like the colonial texts of Columbus, Cortés, or Bernal Díaz del Castillo: “The three campesinos look like . . . well, three campesinos. Dark rugged faces burnt from the sun; strong, short, angular bodies clad in well-worn, much scrubbed and somewhat ragamuffin clothes” (14). In contrast, describing himself and his cohort of volunteers he explains that “actually it is about clothes that are appropriate for the rugged terrain, not just rebel chic. OK, maybe the Zapatista paliacates tied around the neck do make one look pretty cool. The romance of the situation lasts about ten minutes before we are knee deep in swampy mud” (127). I believe that Ryan understands the tendency to romanticize the rebellion and lose sight of the task at hand, but at the same time these commentaries often seem unnecessary and misguided.

In a section near the end of the book, “Road Hazards and Group Psychosis,” the group dynamic begins to erode, and the pages are increasingly full of petty spats among the activists. Readings of Karl Marx and Immanuel Wallerstein, discussions of how hard the trips to and from the Zapatista communities are, and the placing of a dead snake in one volunteer’s sleeping bag are recounted at length. During the last evening of their stay they escape a celebration and make their way down to the river for a late-night swim. Ryan confesses that they are breaking community rules about nudity. Two volunteers even have a romantic encounter, but while frolicking nude in the moonlight they can hear themselves being thanked and congratulated by a village leader through the speaker system. Their dedication to the water project feels secondary, and readers may get the sense that the volunteers are just there for the adventure and the opportunity to tell some good stories when they return home.

Finally, there are lessons to be learned. At one point, the group awakens one morning to find water gushing out of a pipe that has been chewed through by a mole and decides to wait to fix it the next day. The cement foundation for the water tank has cracked, and they are forced to tear the structure down and start over again, mainly because of “shabby work” done by teenagers whom Ryan himself has been supposed to be overseeing. Later, they successfully install the water system, and each home now has running water. Earlier Ryan has called attention to the fact that the Zapatistas had effectively turned “the NGO-recipient relationship upside down” and it was the “indigenous peasant campesinos themselves, through their own organization, who decided where and how the national and international solidarity workers went” (12). Even given the sincerest intentions of the solidarity workers, however, the project still resulted in a form of neocolonialism. When three of the original activists returned to the community some years later they found that the community was no longer committed to Zapatismo: “We worked our arses off for three whole months building up the infrastructure of an anti-Zapatista community” (202). The lessons of international solidarity may often be learned the hard way.

The books reviewed here add to a growing area of active field research that can be useful to its objects of inquiry and bring richness, depth, and purpose to scholarship. Rabasa’s strictly academic project aims to revive Latin American subaltern studies and does so with vigor. He builds new theory using Spivak as a point of departure, injecting new life into Latin American subaltern studies and contributing to Latin American cultural studies by bringing together the strategies of resistance and living knowledges of indigenous peoples from the conquest of the Americas to the present day. Speed and Ryan enter the arena of field research combined with advocacy. Both follow scholars such as Earle and Simonelli (2005: 10–11), who claimed that, having no concrete research methodology, they were required to give up some of their power, thus creating a transformative experience for all the subjects involved. Their project became collaborative through “processes of observation, participation, and documentation” with the result that, rather than studying others, they learned from them through a “combination of knowledge, theory, and action” and ultimately asked the question “Can an objective anthropology and advocacy coexist?” Whereas Speed’s answer is an emphatic yes, Ryan’s experience illustrates the potential pitfalls of combining activism and scholarship.