Lajan lajan ’ayatik or “Walking in Complementary Pairs” in the Zapatista Women’s Struggle

The women’s struggle as articulated by women of the Zapatista movement in their Women’s Revolutionary Law is an insurgent, revolutionary, rebel, and autonomous feminism—a feminism in dialogue with popular feminisms in Latin America such as peasant and popular feminism and communitarian feminism. La lucha articulada por las mujeres del movimiento zapatista en su Ley Revolucionaria de la Mujer constituye un feminismo insurgente, revolucionario, rebelde y autónomo. Es también un feminismo en diálogo con otros feminismos populares en América Latina, tales como el feminismo campesino y popular y el feminismo comunitario.

K’usil balumil: ecología política y tierra en la autonomía zapatista

The zapatista movement is known for the construction of an autonomous existence that crosses the different spheres of their lives. In this article, based on fieldwork carried out in Los Altos de Chiapas, we propose to focus on the conceptions of political ecology and land in the own zapatista’s terms. When the relationship between the emergence of epidemics and deforestationis made explicit, the decolonial zapatista thinking becomes even more important. According to this perespective, humanity is not an entity isolated from the environment, but the k’usil balumil (earth) is a great network of relationships formed by human and non-human beings. For the planet to be healthy, it is necessary to respect the yajval (gods).

Zapatistas and New Ways of Doing Politics

Scholars of Latin American social movements since the 1980s have sought to explain the apparent upswing in cycles of contentious politics, the innovative characteristics of these new movements, and variations in how they interact with or sidestep conventional institutional politics. The regional context for these developments is very different from the postmaterialist conditions said to have spawned European “new social movements” since the 1970s revolving around identity and values, such as ecology, peace, gay rights, and women’s movements. Relevant causal factors for Latin America’s contemporary movements include popular reaction against neoliberal policies imposed by international financial institutions and brokered by national governments. Another factor was the transition from military authoritarianism in much of the region, inaugurating a struggle between political elites with a liberal-representative vision of democratization and social movements favoring radical/participatory democracy. The era of globalization also brought reexamination of the citizenship pact and of the hegemonic (mestizo) construction of the nation-state, fueling a reinvigoration of indigenous movements, some with their own cosmovisions of buen vivir (living well) that destabilized mainstream notions of the political. The interplay between party-electoral politics and grassroots movement activism took place against the backdrop of the “pink tide” of elected leftist governments, which swept much of the region in the first decade of the 21st century and subsequently appeared to recede. Throughout this period, scholars and activists alike debated whether fundamental change could best be achieved by movements pushing parties and governments to use state power to enact reforms or by movements themselves adopting radically horizontal and inclusive patterns of organizing—“new ways of doing politics”—that would transform society from below. The January 1, 1994, Zapatista uprising among mostly Maya peasants in the poor southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, launched the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, became emblematic of new ways of doing politics from below. What began as a rebellion of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [EZLN]) quickly morphed into a social movement that both criticized national and global power structures and sought to empower local communities through everyday practices of de facto autonomy. Negotiations with the state over indigenous rights and culture quickly broke down, but the Zapatistas proceeded anyway to develop their own structures of self-government, autonomous education, healthcare, justice, and agrarian and economic relations, among other innovative practices. The Zapatista movement continues to raise important issues such as the role of culture and identity in popular mobilization, the social spaces for organizing in an era of globalization, the new characteristics of movements that practice alternative forms of prefigurative politics, and the possibility of redefining power from below. Scholars of the Zapatista movement have also posed probing self-reflective questions about the adequacy of conventional definitions of politics and Western positivist epistemologies and about the need for decolonizing research in indigenous and other oppressed communities.

CAMINHAR PERGUNTANDO: A EDUCAÇÃO AUTÔNOMA ZAPATISTA. WALK ASKING: THE AUTONOMOUS ZAPATISTA EDUCATION

O movimento zapatista é conhecido mundialmente por construir um modo de existência anti-capitalista e autogestionário chamado autonomia zapatista. Neste artigo, pretendemos enfocar um de seus pilares fundamentais: a educação autônoma zapatista. Esta se constitui como uma proposta de descolonização radical, o que passa pela experimentação de diferentes tipos de educação a partir de um denso aparato conceitual dos indígenas do movimento. Em um mundo onde todos os seres que existem têm ch’ulel (alma), a educação verdadeira (chanel) é um aprendizado com a comunidade e o cosmos baseada na arte do caminhar perguntando. The Zapatista movement is known worldwide for building an anti-capitalist mode of existence called Zapatista autonomy. In this article, we intend to focus on one of the fundamental pillars of this autonomy: autonomous education. This constitutes a proposal for radical decolonization, which involves the experimentation of different types of education from a dense conceptual apparatus of the indigenous movement. In a world where all beings that exist have ch'ulel (soul), chanel (true education) is a learning with the community and the cosmos based on the art of walking asking.

The right of the Ch´ol children of Chiapas to live in peace in their territories

In this article, we expose the kind of relationship that exists between the indigenous children of two villages of Chiapas, Mexico, and their natural environments. Although both communities belong to the same (Ch’ol) ethnicity and are located at a short distance from each other, we observe significant differences between them according to the organization of each community and to whether or not they are affiliated to the Zapatista movement. We discuss, on one hand, the view of nature of these two communities, their relationship with productive activities, their ethics in relation to animals, and the stories of the oral tradition associated to beings whom they consider to be “keepers of the jungle”.

The Zapatista Movement and Mexico's Democratic Transition

What happens to insurgent social movements that emerge during a democratic transition but fail to achieve their goals? How influential are they? Are they able to survive their initial mobilizing boom? Using the development of the Zapatista movement during Mexico’s democratic transition in the 1990s, this book seeks to answer these questions. The Zapatista movement is probably the best example of an influential and salient insurgent social movement emerging during a democratic transition that successfully mobilized sympathy and support for the indigenous agenda inside and outside of the country, yet failed to achieve its goals vis-à-vis the Mexican state. Why did such an influential movement fail to have its demands fully met? The answer is illustrated using a sliding door analogy to explain how the Zapatista movement developed within almost simultaneous openings and closings of political opportunities for its mobilization, success, and survival. Framing the relative achievements and failures of the movement within Mexico’s democratization is essential to understanding how social movements develop and survive and how responsive an electoral democracy can actually become. As such, this book offers a test of the quality of Mexico’s democracy and the resilience of the Zapatista movement, identifying the extent to which emerging political forces have incorporated dissident and previously excluded political actors into the new polity.

Opportunities for Survival

This chapter reviews the assumptions that the literature makes about the role that mobilizing networks and discourse framing play in sustaining and achieving a social movement’s objectives. It compares these assumptions to the development of the Zapatista movement. Using illustrations from Zapatismo, the chapter shows how despite lacking opportunities for success, mobilizing opportunities can be enough for a movement to construct a transnational solidarity network of support to maintain its campaign. In doing so, it also highlights the long-term effects of transnational organizations in shaping a local movement’s discourse through time, which in turn may contribute to the movement’s survival. The ability of the movement to reframe its discourse also enables it to adapt to changing national and international political environments.

Opportunities for Success

This chapter first identifies democratization processes in which insurgents have successfully achieved their goals. It then compares those scenarios to one in which insurgents failed to better distinguish the conditions that might work as opportunities for them to succeed. These conditions are (1) being able to negotiate directly with the authorities, (2) having their interests included within democratizing pacts, and (3) counting with allies among elite actors negotiating peace and democratizing reforms. By applying these expectations to the case of the Zapatista movement, the chapter argues that when peace negotiations between insurgents and authorities occur separately from democratizing pacts among political elites, concessions to insurgent interests can be limited. Although insurgents might have allies in power and among those negotiating the new, more democratic order, if they are excluded from democratizing negotiations, their demands can easily be ignored.

Zapatistas between Sliding Doors of Opportunity

This chapter summarizes the main arguments of the book and offers an explanation of why a seemingly successful insurgent social movement might be able to mobilize sympathy and support for its agenda but fail to force state authorities to address its demands. The conclusion is that despite relative failures, through protest mobilization and the support of solidaristic social movement organizations, insurgent social movements like the Zapatista movement may be able to survive as salient actors within a new democratic regime and as iconic figures among other social movements around the world. This chapter also compares the fate of the Zapatista movement to the outcomes of other social, indigenous, and guerrilla movements within different transitional conditions and offer some expectations for the future of Mexico’s democracy.