Zapatista Quotes

We are sorry for the inconvenience, but this is a revolution.

Yes, Marcos is gay. Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying `Enough'. He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable -- this is Marcos.

As to whether Marcos is gay: Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal,… a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.

As people chat with me and learn that I have studied movements elsewhere, one question keeps coming up: “How do you think this will end?” I say that I do not know. In the mountains of Chiapas, I learned a Zapatista saying: “Preguntando caminamos.” It means “we walk while asking questions.

But I'll tell you more about that later... or maybe I won't, because some wounds just don't heal even if you talk them out. On the contrary, the more you dress them up in words, the more they bleed.

Dignity is a bridge. It needs two sides that, being different, distinct and distant become one in the bridge without ceasing to be different and distinct, but ceasing already to be distant.

If solidarity is unity of purpose or togetherness, how to span this great divide of inequality, privilege, universal rights, political agency, and even our seeing things completely differently? In constructing this great bridge of international solidarity across the globe, where do we even begin?

La oposición de izquierda... creyó necesario reconstruir la anatomía nacional, volver al nacionalismo revolucionario original (cardenista e incluso zapatista) y desarrolló una actitud populista de desconfianza ante la democracia electoral.

...un clavo en el muro es siempre un acto de esperanza sobre un lugar físico determinado, de esperanza y persistencia.

Existe un antiguo mito que sostiene que contar historias puede curar enfermedades o salvar; sin historias, viviríamos un presente viejo. Dame la mano, Camila, ven conmigo y te contaré alguna.

One of the most inefficient utopias I have ever seen was that of a humble Zapatista village in the mountains of Southeastern Mexico. I kid you not, the entire village sits down and takes days to make a single decision! Everyone gets a chance to hear and be heard, and some questions take eons of time, but everyone is patient and respectful. Things actually get done. It's as if time was suddenly transformed from the tickling of a Newtonian clock to something that revolved around ordinary folks.

Ya instalada, miré a mi alrededor y no pude reprimir un suspiro de satisfacción respaldado por los rayos de sol blancos y calientes que invadían el lugar. ¿Puede haber una sensación más excitante (y atemorizante a la vez, lo reconozco) para una mujer que el sentirse fuera del alcance de los demás, de los cercanos que la aman pero que simultánea y sutilmente la ahogan?

¿Puede haber una sensación más excitante (y atemorizante a la vez, lo reconozco) para una mujer que el sentirse fuera del alcance de los demás, de los cercanos que la aman pero que simultánea y sutilmente la ahogan?

[A]ll of the experiments in government from below, whether during the U.S. Revolution or recently in Oaxaca, were shortlived. They would be deemed to be failures by many but the very fact that they happened at all makes them small victories. [W]e must maintain the necessary humility to work out how to make these dreams more lasting, first of all by working together and combining what is best from the anarchist and Marxist traditions. Yet it is still important to remember the victories and the people who made them.

P.D. MAYORITARIA QUE SE DISFRAZA DE MINORÍA INTOLERADA. A todo esto de que si Marcos es homosexual: Marcos es gay en San Francisco, negro en Sudáfrica, asiático en Europa, chicano en San Isidro, anarquista en España, palestino en Israel, indígena en las calles de San Cristóbal, chavo banda en Neza, rockero en cu, judío en Alemania, ombusdman en la Sedena, feminista en los partidos políticos, comunista en la post guerra fría, preso en Cintalapa, pacifista en Bosnia, mapuche en los Andes, maestro en la CNTE, artista sin galería ni portafolios, ama de casa un sábado por la noche en cualquier colonia de cualquier ciudad de cualquier México, guerrillero en el México de fin del siglo XX, huelguista en la CTM, reportero de nota de relleno en interiores, machista en el movimiento feminista, mujer sola en el metro a las 10 p.m., jubilado en plantón en el Zócalo, campesino sin tierra, editor marginal, obrero desempleado, médico sin plaza, estudiante inconforme, disidente en el neoliberalismo, escritor sin libros ni lectores, y, es seguro, zapatista en el sureste mexicano. En fin, Marcos es un ser humano, cualquiera, en este mundo. Marcos es todas las minorías intoleradas, oprimidas, resistiendo, explotando, diciendo "¡Ya basta!". Todas las minorías a la hora de hablar y mayorías a la hora de callar y aguantar. Todos los intolerados buscando una palabra, su palabra, lo que devuelva la mayoría a los eternos fragmentados, nosotros. Todo lo que incomoda al poder y a las buenas conciencias, eso es Marcos.

So the greatest gods explained to the first men and women what 'looking' was and taught them to look. That's how men and women learned that you can look at others, know that they exist, they are there, they are other, and, in that way, not bump into them, hurt, step over, or trip them. They also learned that they could look inside another and see what their hearts are feeling, since the heart doesn't always speak with words that come from the lips. Many times, the heart speaks with the sink, with a look, or by walking. They also learned to look at those who see only themselves, who see only themselves in others' look. And they learned to look at those others who look at them looking. The first men and women learned every type of gaze there was, and the most important one they learned is the gaze that looks at itself and is aware of itself and knows itself, that sees itself both looking and looking inward, that sees paths and futures yet to be born, paths not yet walked, and dawns yet to break.

Then the lion stares at it. It stares at its prey. Like this.' (Old Antonio frowns and fastens his black eyes on me.) 'The poor little animal that is going to die just looks. It looks at the lion, who is staring at him. The little animal no longer sees itself, it sees what the lion sees, it looks at the little animal image in the lion's stare, it sees that the lion sees it as small and weak. The little animal never thought before about whether it was small and weak. It was just an animal, neither big nor small, neither strong nor weak. But now it looks at what the lion is seeing, it looks at fear. And by looking at what the lion is seeing, the little animal convinces itself that it is small and weak. And, by looking at the fear that the lion sees, it feels afraid. And now the little animal does not look at anything. Its bones go numb, just like when water gets hold of us at night in the cold. And then the little animal just surrenders, it lets itself go and the lion gets it. That is how the lion kills. It kills by staring.

to [David] Simon and his partner, Ed Burns, The Wire was explicitly a piece of social activism. Among its targets, large and small, were the War on Drugs, the educational policy No Child Left Behind, and the outsize influence of money in America's political sytem, of statistics in its police departments, and of Pulitzer Prizes at its newspapers. The big fish, though, was nothing less than a capitalist system that Burns and Simon had begun to see as fundamentally doome. (If Simon was a dyed-in-the-wool lefly, Burns practically qualified as Zapatista; by ex-cop standards, he might as well have been Trotsky himself.) In chronicling the modern American city, Simon said, they had one mantra, adapted from, of all sources, sports radio personality Jim Rome: "Have a fucking take. Try not to suck." Neither Burns nor Simon would ever seem entirely comfortable acknowledging the degree that The Wire succeeded on another level: as beautifully constructed, suspenseful, heartfelt, reasonant entertainment. [...] "It's our job to be entertaining. I understand I must make you care about my characters. That's the fundamental engine of drama," Simon said dismissively. "It's the engine. But it's not the purpose". Told that The Wire had trascended the factual bounds that, for all its good intentions, had shackled The Corner, he seemed to deliberately misunderstand the compliment: "I have too much regard for that which is true to ever call it journalism." The questioner, of course, had meant the opposite: that The Wire was too good to call mere journalism. As late as 2012, he would complain in a New York Times interview that fans were still talking about their favorite characters rather than concentrating on the show's political message.

en los expedientes de la PGR, donde levantan los cargos contra los presuntos zapatistas, pusieron “La Candona”.

His “real” identity became an obsession of journalists after the uprising, and when one journalist took him at face value that he had been a gay waiter in San Francisco, he wrote, “Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian on the streets of San Cristóbal, a Jew in Germany... a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the metro at 10:00 p.m., a celebrant on the zócalo, a campesino without land, an unemployed worker... and of course a Zapatista in the mountains of southeastern Mexico.” This gave rise to the carnivalesque slogan “Todos somos Marcos” (“We are all Marcos”), just as Super Barrio claims to be no one and everyone.

Zapatistas.

So I sat there and listened and started disintegrating. This has happened twice before. The first time was in the Tiki Room at the Bombay Oberoi, listening to a Bengali play guitar and sing 'My Way.' The second time was in a Zapatista village in the mountains of Chiapas, listening to a young woman from Montana play guitar and sing 'Redemption Song.' Both times I was left in little pieces that took a long time to push back together. And there along the river, listening to our music, all about yearning for freedom, I again felt overwhelmed by the same juxtapositions and ironies.

We are woken gently at three in the morning and told that we need to leave. Guided by the light of the stars rather than the moon, we walk for half an hour before we reach a hut. We can just about make out the presence of three men inside, but it's almost as dark as the balaclavas that hide their faces. In the identikit released by the Mexican government, Marcos was de-scribed as a professor with a degree in philosophy who wrote a thesis on Althusser and did a Master's at Paris-Sorbonne Univer-sity. A voice initially speaking French breaks the silence: “We’ve got twenty minutes. I prefer to speak Spanish if that’s OK. I’m Subcomandante Marcos.

The question that confronts revolutionaries is never simply whether the workers (or peasants) are capable of taking control of the means of production, and reorganizing production on democratic and libertarian lines (like the workers and peasants collectives in Spain). Nor is it even whether they are capable of establishing within cities and villages organs of self-government (as in the many cases of workers councils). From the Paris Commune to the Zapatista rebellion we know that these things can be done. The question is almost always whether they can do these things over a prolonged period of time under conditions of war and general social breakdown. These are the conditions under which revolutionary opportunities are most likely to occur. It is precisely under these conditions that the limits of the revolutionary movement as a whole have revealed themselves.

The autonomous municipalities established by the Zapatistas represent in many respects only the latest chapter in a long history of revolutionary dual power. In this respect they offer a contemporary example from which certain general lessons can be extracted, much as lessons might be taken from the experiences of the workers councils that sprung up across Europe in the wake of the First World War, or during the Spanish Revolution, or the Shanghai Commune during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Or should we ask pardon from the dead, our dead, those who die 'natural' deaths of 'natural causes' like measles, whooping cough, breakbone fever, cholera, typhoid, mononucleosis, tetanus, pneumonia, malaria, and other lovely gastrointestinal and lung diseases? Our dead, the majority dead, the democratically dead, dying from sorrow because no one did anything, because the dead, our dead, went just like that, without anyone even counting them, without anyone saying "ENOUGH!" which would have at least given some meaning to their deaths, a meaning which no one ever sought for them, the forever dead, who are now dying again, but this time in order to live." - Zapatistas on being offered a pardon in exchange for their surrender

And in these accords, the bad government said it was going to respect the rights of the Indian peoples of Mexico and their cultures and that they would put it into a law in the constitution. But of course after we signed these accords, the bad government forgot all about them. Instead the government attacked the Indians to set back their struggle on December 22, 1997. That was the date the Zedillo ordered 45 men, women, old people, and children murdered in the town in Chiapas called Acteal.

Major Ana Maria led the celebrated takeover of San Cristobal on January 1, 1994.

Salinas proposed an overhaul of Article 27 to pave the way for U.S. agribusiness to buy up the Mexican countryside.

NAFTA is a death sentence for the Indians,

Once again, the civil society chanting "Todos somos Marcos" ("We are all Marcos") filled the capital's ZOcalo plaza, and support for the Mayan rebels ran so high that the Mexican congress was forced to pass legislation ordering Zedillo to open a dialogue with the Zapatistas.

What people are looking for is humanism. Human is a better word than any ‘ism.’ It’s about being human and treating each other with respect. With respect there’s the possibility of doing something that betters the quality of life for everyone. But right now it’s about exploitation and corporate greed. It has nothing to do with just everyday folks.

Un poco más allá, una zapatista se acerca a una niña indígena nasa colombiana. Se quita el pasamontañas y se lo pone a la chiquilla, que parece que se hubiera caído dentro. “Tienes que quedarte aquí, a luchar con nosotras”, le dice. “No, yo me voy a luchar a mi casa”.

The discussion continued after that first agreement, because it is one thing to recognize that there are others who are different and something else entirely to respect them. So they spent a long while talking and discussing how each of them was different from the others. They didn't care that they were spending so much time talking, because, as it happens, time didn't exist yet. Then they all fell silent as each one spoke of their own difference. Each of the other gods realized that the more they listened and recognized the differences of the others, the more they discovered what it was within themselves that made them different. That made them very happy, and they started to dance.

To look and to struggle, it is not enough to know where to direct your gaze, patience, and effort," old Antonio said to me as he got up. "One must also get started, reach out, and meet other gazes, which, in turn, will get started, reach out, and met yet other gazes. In this way, looking at the other looking, many gazes are born, and the world sees that it can be better, and that there is room for all gazes and for those who, though different and other, look at others looking and see themselves walking a history yet to be made.

The brutality of "The Story of the Lion and the Mirror" refracts the violence of this historical moment. The lion, intoxicated by the taste of blood, mistakes his own blood fort hat of the calf he wants to devour and ends up bleeding to death. We wonder if this story is perhaps a parable about how counterinsurgency fails: thinking it is consuming the blood of its enemy, the state bleeds itself out.

...as Marcos reminds us, "When Mexican government officials say land, they precede the word with an 'I buy' or 'I sell,' since for the powerful land is just a commodity. When the Indigenous say land, no word recedes it, but with it they also mean nation, mother, home, school, history, wisdom.

We can look to Mexico, where a vision for social change has been powerfully affirmed by the Maya people of Chiapas. They named their vision "Zapatismo," in memory of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and startled the world with an armed uprising on January 1, 1994. That day, and ever since, the Zapatistas have posed the basic problem: how to establish both identity and democracy? How to achieve a new life of dignity for indigenous people while also creating a Mexico of justice for everyone? Always the Zapatistas have said they do not want one without the other. At a 1996 meeting of Chicanas/os with some of the Zapatista leadership, Comandante Tacho began his presentation by saying: "We don't want power. What we want is decent homes, enough to eat, health care for our children, schools." At first I thought to myself: how can you gain those things without power? Then I realized that by power he meant domination. The Zapatista vision does not find the answer to injustice in the replacement of one domination by another, but in a vast change of the political culture from the bottom up that will create a revolutionary democracy.

I remind you that divisions between countries serve only to define the crime of contraband and to justify wars. Indeed, there exist at least two things that transcend borders: one is the crime disguised as modernity that distributes misery on a global scale; the other is the hope that shame will exist only when someone misses a dance step, and not every time we look at ourselves in the mirror. To bring an end tot he crime and make hope bloom, we need only to struggle and to become better. The rest falls into place on its own and is what fills libraries and museums.

Old Antonio says that the eldest of teh elders told him that the assembly of the first gods, those who gave birth tot he world, happened very long ago, so long ago, in fact, that time didn't exist yet. And the elders said that in that assembly each of the gods spoke their word, and each said, "The thoughts I have are different from those of the others." At that point, the gods fell silent, because they realized that when each of them said "the others" they meant different "others." After they had been silent fora while, the first gods realized that they now had their first agreement: there were "others", and those "others" were different from themselves. In this way, the first agreement reached by the very first gods was to recognize difference and accept the existence of the other. But, then, what choice did they have since they were, after all, dogs, first gods, and so they had to accept one another, not as greater or lesser but as different.

La auténtica vocación de la Ciudad de México es el martirio. La arrasaron los españoles en 1521, la violaron los yanquis en 1847, la manosearon los franceses en 1863. Eso sin contar a revolucionarios y contrarrevolucionarios: la Decena Trágica y el bombardeo de la Ciudadela, los zapatistas en el Sanborns, Pancho Villa sentado en la silla presidencial, el saqueo carrancista de la colonia Roma.

El sueño de escapar es sólo eso: un sueño. Ligados al imperativo de crear una ganancia, los negocios controlados por trabajadores sólo pueden ser tan tiránicos y dañinos para el entorno como cualquier negocio de gran escala, pero sin la eficiencia de dicha escala. Problemas como éstos son generalizados en toda la experiencia de las cooperativas y han surgido no sólo en Argentina sino en el modelo zapatista y en todo el continente.65