Chiapas 2.

Time seems to have started flying by. After the first week, which seemed to take a month, there has been a steady telescoping of the days. Part of this is that all of us have had quite a fair amount of “down time” due to bouts of turista, which has hit most of the group of seventeen twice by now. The other part is the workload.
There are ten hours of Spanish class and five hours of academic class a week, plus at least one workshop, which involves having a discussion with some sort of local activist, such as the doctor who started the school (the one who listens to classical music) or a member of a group that enables indigenous communities to film and edit documentaries about their own lives. These are usually some of the most enriching experiences, as we are talking to people who in general are doing what we want to with our lives.
Other than that, it is reading all the time. Most of the study so far revolves around the competing theories of social arrangement, varying from neoliberal capitalism, to anarchism, Marxism, indigenism, nationalism, and so on. Of course, with the setting that we are in, many of these themes are related back to the Zapatistas. We seem to be surrounded by an atmosphere of Zapatismo. San Cris itself is full of reminders, but the school here is moreso. On the walls are posters from the Sixth Declaration (the sixth major communiqué by the zaps) and other Zapatista themes, and many of the students, too, wear t-shirts proclaiming their allegiance to La Otra Campana.
The other campaign, as it is in English, is a national tour undertaken by Subcomandante Marcos to discuss all of the issues not brought to the table by the presidential campaign currently underway in México. The three political parties in México, even that of “leftist” Andre Manuel Lopez Obrador, are quite similar to the two parties in the US, in that they promise different things to different voting blocs, but none offer real change to a deeply troubled country. Hence La Otra, as it is known here. Although Marcos has recently clarified that he is not trying to dissuade anyone from voting, he does lambaste all of the political parties on a regular basis. Troubling many of the nation’s leftists is the fact that he seems to reserve some of his harshest criticisms for Lopez Obrador, the populist former mayor of México City. To many Mexicans, he represents a real change to a political system not used to much change, including starting what amounts to a Social Security program. To the Zapatistas, he represents a party, the left-leaning PRD, which has repeatedly acted in cooperation with the efforts of the establishment parties to stifle all of the efforts of the Zapatistas. But it is not strictly personal. He is also financed by Carlos Slim, one of the richest men in the country, and has basically admitted that he will abide by the guidelines of the neoliberal program.
Anyway, we watch all of these events from our little leftist sanctuary tucked away in the woods outside of town, the same town where Marcos launched La Otra back in January. While we are all trying to be serious students of political economy and capitalist hegemony (sorry, I just had to throw out some of those class terms), we all find ourselves being taken away at times by the romantic myth that Marcos has swaddled himself in. We found out, for instance, that the two dormitory rooms that all seventeen of us stay in sandwich a third room that is always empty and locked, and that that third room happens to be the room where Marcos stayed when he was in town. This, of course, set us all abuzz, trying to peek in the windows, and asking Freddy, a nineteen year-old basically in charge of keeping an eye on things, what it was like when La Otra was here.
Of course, being the group of politicalcorrectophiles that we are, with our classic leftist cynicism, none of this is done without full recognition of the irony involved. A bunch of American kids coming down to Chiapas, studying an indigenous movement, and swooning over the image (since it is an image more than a face) of their shadowy masked leader, who happens to not even be indigenous. Are we interested in the struggle, or just attracted by its romantic aspects? Are we all ready to apply our new knowledge of the way of the world to serious activism, as we all dutifully swore in our application papers, or is it just a nice semester abroad that provides more interesting stories than most? Is it a jump-off point, or nothing more than a coming of age ritual for people who fancy themselves some sort of revolutionaries, a couple of months in a developing country.
These are the bitter, cynical ways of looking at it, and almost all of us are unable to keep these thoughts out of our heads. But we try to combat it with one pieces that we picked up from one of our first readings, a piece by John Holloway. In it, he talks about how the Zapatistas have chosen to ignore the bitterness of history, and opted instead to confront the fear of ridicule, and so we see their communiqués so full of humility and optimism, and, for a lack of a better term, cheesiness. For really that’s what the bitterness of history has left us with, is an overwhelming sense of how cheesy anything done in earnest seems these days. And so it is with the group, all of us trying to overcome our own fear of ridicule, and believe that there might be something to the saying “We are all Zapatistas.”
If anything, two more weeks in San Cristobal and a month in a Zapatista community should be able to answer these questions.