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UC Santa Barbara
Journal of Transnational American Studies
Title
Transnational Zapata: From the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional to Immigrant
Marches
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1tz2v712
Journal
Journal of Transnational American Studies, 4(2)
Author
Slaughter, Stephany
Publication Date
2012
Peer reviewed
eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library
University of California
Transnational Zapata:
From the Ejército Zapatista de
Liberación Nacional to
Immigrant Marches
STEPHANY SLAUGHTER
The following traveler’s reflection began in an airport—a space both national and
deterritorialized. As a U.S. scholar based in Mexico City from 2005–2008, for me the
waiting areas and shops of the Benito Juárez International Airport began to feel like a
home away from home. The airport is an ideal space to contemplate how a country
represents itself in the midst of global flows. To consumers, last-minute purchases in
this travel chronotope are objects that represent the country they have visited in the
form of a “souvenir.” At Benito Juárez you will find a combination of what vendors
believe to be representative of Mexico and what tourists imagine to be
representative of Mexico (such as the ostentatious sombreros that don’t resemble
any headwear I’ve ever seen worn by a Mexican outside of Hollywood movies).
Before boarding the flight, you can buy tequila, serapes, or a variety of items bearing
Mexican symbols and heroes such as Frida Kahlo, the Virgin of Guadalupe, or Emiliano
Zapata.
Among these images, I am especially drawn to representations of the Mexican
Revolution—especially those of General Emiliano Zapata. After spending some time
in the state of Morelos surrounded by his omnipresent image in museums,
monuments, license plates, restaurant names, and markets, I began to interrogate
the circulation of his image in different contexts. In the years leading up to the 2010
explosion of products related to the bicentennial of the Mexican Revolution, I ran
across a variety of merchandise in airport shops: 1910 tequila with Emiliano Zapata’s
face on the bottle, Pineda Covalin designer silk ties and scarves with miniature
Zapatas or neo-Zapatistas, and a shadow-box version of a Day of the Dead altar with
a reproduction of Zapata’s face, a skeleton, and a miniature Corona beer, all encased
in a red box with “Mexico” painted in white on the top edge of the frame, as if what
was behind the glass represented Mexico (see Figure 1).
1
Perhaps my favorite airport sighting was not one of the many T-shirts that
combined an image of Zapata with “Mexico” in different font sizes and shapes for
sale in a shop, but rather one worn by a fellow traveler on one occasion in 2005,
which had “Acapulco” below the image of “General Homero Zapata.” Though
Acapulco is a city seldom associated with Zapata, I was far more struck by the
contrast of Homer Simpson, an antihero of U.S. pop culture who satirically represents
unbridled consumption and consumerism, with Emiliano Zapata, official Mexican
hero best known for his fight for land reform against the powerful hacendados
(which we can equate at least on some level with today’s corporations) in favor of
the oppressed campesinos.
2
These two images seem to symbolize very different, and
even conflicting, worldviews in today’s neoliberal era (not to mention two different
models of masculinity). This transnational hybrid image, deterritorialized between
the U.S. and Mexico, can itself be read as a product meant and marketed for
consumers, but that also potentially questions/parodies the circulation of these
transnational symbols and the hybridization of culture across borders.
3
The impact
seemed even greater in the quasi-national space of the airport. Sitting there, even as
I began to consider the implications of the commodification of Emiliano Zapata and
to contemplate the intersections of culture and globalization, I also wondered if
other aspects of globalization might open the possibility for new meanings—
alternative revolutionary nationalisms. Drawing on the examples of the neo-Zapatista
movement and the pro-immigrant marches of 2006, I argue that in spite the market’s
appropriations and co-opting of Zapata, which seem to detach him from
revolutionary nationalism, other appropriations are attempting to resignify him—and
by extension revolutionary nationalism—for purposes that maintain a relationship
between Zapata and social change in transnational contexts.
4
These two forms of
appropriation highlight tensions at work in the contemporary neoliberal moment,
between the forces of the global economy and those of social struggle.
These two recent historical moments, with their conflictive relationships to
globalizing forces, can both be linked, in part, to the 1994 enactment of NAFTA (the
North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement), a prime example of neoliberal politics which
prioritized the trade of goods and products over the welfare of the humans involved
in production and labor. A key shortcoming of neoliberalism’s globalization—this lack
of consideration for the human toll of economic policies—has affected indigenous
people in Chiapas (who form the majority of the neo-Zapatista movement) and
immigrants in the United States, two groups that have struggled to participate in
(inter)national economies and be recognized as cultural citizens. Yet at the same
time, both groups have also benefited from certain recent technological
developments associated with globalization.
Although globalization has existed in some form for centuries and is intricately
enmeshed with processes of colonization, recent technological advances have
seemingly accelerated certain aspects. Gutiérrez and Young point to the effects of
intensified globalization processes on earlier conceptualizations of nation and
identity, insights I find particularly useful in understanding how the EZLN (Ejercito
Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, Zapatista Army of National Liberation) and
immigration protestors are rethinking these concepts: “The intense processes of
globalization that have gripped our planet over the last fifty years, though first
unleashed in the fifteenth century, have in our own historical moment compressed
time and space, erasing antique identities, nineteenth-century notions of belonging,
and what once seemed like timeless, sacred, God-ordained demarcations of self,
person, and nation.”
5
The compression of time and space is most evident through
advances in what Arjun Appadurai terms “technoscapes” and “mediascapes,” which
have launched the “local” discourse of revolutionary nationalism across borders and
onto the world stage through a variety of national and international (cyber)spaces.
6
These “scapes” contribute, rather like print culture contributed to a sense of national
belonging in the nineteenth century, to the formation of transnational “imagined
communities,” and to the reconfiguration of concepts of self, person, and nation.
7
These border-transgressive transnational heterotopias—“other spaces” for cultural
and political expression—have benefited from current technologies of globalization,
especially those that compress time and space in new ways and even invent new
relationships of time and space, contributing to an increased porosity of the border
between the United States and Mexico.
I am specifically interested in the uses of Emiliano Zapata, a Mexican national
hero intricately tied to post-Revolution nation rebuilding, as used within
transnational movements that “de/territorialize” his image, where the term
de/territorialize refers to “the lifting of cultural subjects and objects from fixed spatial
locations and their relocalization in new cultural settings” and “processes that
simultaneously transcend territorial boundaries and have territorial significance.”
8
Analyzing examples of Zapata imagery from the post-Revolutionary era (1920s–
1930s) against the neo-Zapatista movement of the 1990s and 2000s and the 2006
migrant protests in the United States demonstrates how the formation of
transnational “imagined communities” can destabilize traditional concepts of the
nation-state.
Hegemonic Revolutionary Nationalism: Constructing the Official Zapata
The following examples of Emiliano Zapata’s role in post-revolutionary national re-
formation and the establishment of a hegemonic revolutionary nationalism will help
us appreciate the circulation of Zapata and revolutionary nationalism in today’s
transnational contexts. In the 1920s and 1930s, following more than a decade of civil
war and strife, the post-revolutionary state needed to deploy a new discourse of
nation in order to unite multiple dissenting factions. This discourse also aided in
presenting the new government as the legitimate heir to the Revolution’s ideals by
projecting its solidarity with the masses and interest in land reform. This nation-
building project invented new traditions and heroes to befit the new image, which
over time have taken on new meanings to fit new (trans)national contexts.
9
During the Revolution, Emiliano Zapata was demonized by the state as a
bandit and enemy of the state. Publications of the time helped create the official
myth of Zapata the villain, with the press branding him “The Modern Attila.” This
official negative version of the “Attila of the South” was propagated to counteract
popular versions of the “Caudillo del sur” in the hopes of rousing public sentiment
against Zapata and his followers in favor of the government. Yet he was
subsequently appropriated as one of the central images of post-revolutionary
nationalism, especially through public art projects, as a means to legitimize the
government and forge a hegemonic vision of the Mexican nation in a form that was
accessible to the illiterate masses. Álvaro Obregón (1920–24) sought legitimacy by
claiming to be the revolutionary “heir” of Francisco Madero and Zapata, and during
his time as president “a new, positive public image of Zapata” replaced the previous
image of the Atila del sur in order “to convince the campesinos that the government
was fighting for their cause,” according to historian Ilene O’Malley.
10
In 1931, Mexico’s
Congress declared this once-enemy of the state its official national hero and added
his name to the Muro de Honor (Wall of Honor) of the congressional chamber.
11
The official cultural use of Zapata, especially in public art projects, was an
important part of the state’s construction of the post-revolutionary Mexican nation
and identity. O’Malley analyzes the messages of power hierarchies present in the first
monument dedicated to Zapata, constructed in Cuautla in 1932 to commemorate the
anniversary of his death:
Zapata’s remains were transferred to a crypt in one of the
main plazas. Atop the crypt stood a granite Zapata on
horseback, looking down to and placing a hand on the
shoulder of a simple campesino, who looked up to him in
admiration. . . . Rather than the camaraderie and social
equality that characterized the relationship between
Zapata and his supporters, it showed a superior man who
helps the humble people, who depend on him, not on
themselves, for care and guidance. The statue, then,
symbolized a patriarchal concept of a hero as well as the
government’s concept of its relationship to the people.
Through its pronouncements and conspicuous adulation of
revolutionary leaders, the government strove to maintain a
revolutionary image, yet its relationship to the people was
authoritarian—at times benevolently so—but that did not
alter the imbalance of power in any fundamental way. The
government would lead, the people were to follow.
12
Visually, this statue places the campesinos in a position of passive subjectivity, inferior
to the state. In addition to hierarchies of ethnicity and class, the suggestion of a
“patriarchal concept of a hero” exposes the gendered hierarchy proposed by the
post-revolutionary nation that combined discourses of gender and nation.
Other public art projects contributed to the construction of the post-
revolutionary Mexican nation, the most notable being the Mexican mural movement
of the 1920s and 1930s led by José Vasconcelos (Minister of Education from 1921 to
1924 under Álvaro Obregón’s administration), which would later influence Chicano
muralists across the border. This government-sponsored public art movement played
a key role in perpetuating hegemonic revolutionary nationalism and included
representations of Zapata and other images of Mexican history as part of the official
nation-building process. The artists painted their revolutionary visions of Mexico,
visions that the government appropriated discursively to enhance its legitimacy even
if the ethos represented in those visions was not reflected in government programs
and actions.
Perhaps the public artwork that most contributes to post-revolutionary
discourse of the Mexican nation is Diego Rivera’s monumental “History of Mexico”
(1929–35), painted on the three adjoining walls along the main staircase of the
National Palace in Mexico City as part of the government mural program. Placing this
national narrative in the seat of the Mexican government “signaled the real
beginnings of the institutionalization of the Mexican mural movement. . . . Nowhere
was the dual process of cultural institutionalization and emergent national identity
more keenly articulated.”
13
What discourse(s) of the Mexican nation does this mural
represent?
Rivera’s vision of Mexican history depicts the advance of the nation
predominantly through male figures, including Emiliano Zapata, who appears with his
immediately recognizable slogan “Tierra y Libertad” as the top center image of the
central arch.
14
This prominent position contributes to Zapata’s significant place in the
Mexican national narrative. Not only is he the highest central image of the entire
mural, but he is also vertically aligned with national heroes from different armed
conflicts and subsequent periods of national (re)definition, what art historian
Desmond Rochfort refers to as “significant moments of resistance and heroism.”
15
From top to bottom in the same line as Zapata we first identify Father Miguel
Hidalgo, national hero of Mexican independence. Further down, below the eagle, is
Cuauhtémoc, hero of the Conquest. All three—Zapata, Hidalgo, and Cuauhtémoc—
are fallen heroes who died resisting authority and who are now part of the official
discourse of the Mexican nation. Rivera visually connected them to the nation by
aligning them with the central image of the eagle perched on a nopal cactus eating
the serpent, the symbol of the Mexican state found on the Mexican flag.
At the same time that Rivera presents us with a vertical reading of Zapata
among national heroes, making orthodox linkages that would seem to serve the
state and contribute to hegemonic discourses of revolutionary nationalism, a close
reading of his composition reveals a subversion of this hegemonic vision. There are,
in fact, two Zapatas in this mural, the second at the top of the arch just left of center,
holding his popular “Plan de Ayala”: an overt visual association with agrarian reform.
The two images of Zapata in these adjacent arches seem to be in dialogue with each
other, connected by a factory worker—a clear reference to Rivera’s Marxist leanings
(not shared by the state)—who faces Zapata in the central arch and points behind
him to the arch to the left, which features the confrontation between Porfirio Díaz’s
regime and leaders of the Revolution (including the other image of Zapata),
surmounted by images of foreign-owned oil rigs and oil companies. According to
Desmond Rochfort, these visual references “form an ambivalent setting, symbolizing
the modernity that Porfirio Díaz sought during his dictatorship, the annexation of
that modernity by foreign powers against which in part the revolution fought, and
the idea of the modern epoch, which the revolution itself heralded.”
16
Through these
juxtapositions, Rivera evokes 1930s tensions between modernity and progress
attributed to advances in oil production on the one hand, and foreign powers
represented through globalized oil companies, on the other.
17
The worker pointing
back seems to suggest that Zapata had unfinished business and that perhaps this
time the class conflict lay between workers and global companies rather than
campesinos and hacendados, foreshadowing the use of Zapata’s image decades later
in U.S. Chicano labor movements.
These cultural projects show one dimension of the government’s strategy to
influence the process of creating Mexican identities within a power hierarchy as part
of the post-Revolution discourse of the nation. Although alternative narratives were
also in circulation, as seen in Rivera’s example, the state recognized the potential to
influence emerging post-revolutionary nationalism and to create a sense of national
cohesion through cultural production. Not only did the Mexican muralists contribute
to the official image of Zapata and the Mexican nation, these and other mural
projects played a significant role in public art and art activism for later groups, such as
the neo-Zapatistas in Chiapas and Chicanos in the United States, who would take up
the art form along with some of the revolutionary iconography (like Zapata), recoded
for different social movements.
“Zapata vive, la lucha sigue”: Neo-Zapatistas and Revolutionary Transnationalism
Let us keep present Rivera’s image of Zapata fighting against global companies as we
fast-forward to January 1, 1994, the day that the North Atlantic Free Trade
Agreement took effect.
18
On that day, the revolutionary promises of land reform
enshrined in Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution dissolved once and for all, returning to
the pre-Revolution Porfirian order to which Rivera’s image of foreign oil companies
alludes. Yet as traditional revolutionary nationalism was abandoned by the
government in favor of modernization through neoliberalism, it reemerged,
transformed, out of the Lacandon jungle. On January 1, 1994, in the early days of
Ernesto Zedillo’s presidency (1994-2000) and coinciding with the enactment of
NAFTA, the neo-Zapatistas raised an armed revolt against the neoliberal reforms that
further disenfranchised the indigenous poor.
19
The EZLN, an organization that
deliberately appropriated the name of revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata, directly
challenged traditional discourses of revolutionary nationalism by denouncing (even
as they capitalized on) globalizing forces. This section analyzes re-codings of Zapata
as part of strategies used by the neo-Zapatista movement to propose an alternative
discourse of revolutionary nationalism that included indigenous peoples as active
agents in the Mexican nation.
20
This seemingly regional struggle—with its strategic
use of technologies that have facilitated formations of transnational heterotopias
resistant to globalization’s injustices in the realm of human rights—further
destabilizes concepts of the nation.
From the outset of the Zapatista uprising, with the “First Declaration from the
Lacandon Jungle” (dated January 2, 1994), the movement claimed space within a
new imagining of the Mexican nation, declaring to their Mexican brothers and sisters
that they were “the inheritors of the true builders of our nation.”
21
Throughout its
seventy years as the ruling party in Mexico, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario
Institucionalizado, Institutionalized Revolutionary Party) had claimed to be the heirs
of the Mexican Revolution; with this statement the Zapatistas “staked a loud and
clear claim to a different vision of the Mexican nation than that imagined by the
initiators of NAFTA.”
22
In fact, this first declaration set the struggle as one against
foreign invaders (Spain, the United States, France) throughout five hundred years of
history and those who would “sell” Mexico to foreigners (Porfirio Díaz at the time of
the Revolution—as depicted in the Rivera mural—and the PRI at the time of
NAFTA).
23
At the same time, the text allied the neo-Zapatistas with the Mexican
people (not the state) who have struggled together in defense of the nation: “We
have the Mexican people on our side, we have the nation and our beloved tricolored
flag, highly respected by our insurgent fighters.”
24
This first communiqué, then,
established the beginnings of the neo-Zapatista discourse of the Mexican nation as
both inclusive and exclusive. It included indigenous people and those who would
defend Mexico, and excluded those who—like the PRI, a “dictatorship led by a clique
of traitors who represent the most conservative and sellout groups”
25
—would
betray the Mexican people in favor of the global market.
This and subsequent communiqués co-opt national symbols to create an
alternative discourse of revolutionary nationalism that claims a space for the
indigenous groups left out of the PRI’s discourse of neoliberal Mexico, reconstructing
nationalism from the periphery rather than the center and disrupting traditional
concepts of the nation-state. The neo-Zapatista response to long-practiced
exclusionary concepts of the nation proposes an inclusive multicultural Mexico. This
version of the nation recognizes and respects indigenous cultures by breaking with
the ways that indigenous peoples have been represented in official historical and
political narratives and claiming ownership of self-representation as exemplified by
their appropriation of national symbols.
26
The strongest example of this can be found
in the neo-Zapatista communiqués that rewrite the official history of the Revolution
by merging it with indigenous mythology, through the creation of Votán Zapata.
In “The Story of the Questions,” dated December 1994, Subcomandante
Marcos credited “el viejo Antonio,” a Mayan from the highlands, with the “real story
of Zapata.” Antonio corrected Marcos’s understanding of Zapata by explaining that
Zapata was actually an incarnation of the Mayan deities Votán and Ik’al, fused. The
neo-Zapatista discourse rewrites history through an alternative indigenous narrative
that values “the indigenous reconstruction of history more highly than the
hegemonic national and mestizaje-centered historiography.”
27
The mythic Votán
Zapata becomes a vehicle through which the neo-Zapatistas claim a space for the
indigenous peoples of Mexico in the national narrative and in the nation.
This hybrid figure strategically fuses not only two figures in indigenous
mythological discourse (Votán and Ik’al) but also a key character of Mexican
revolutionary nationalism (Zapata). As Jan Nederveen Pieterse warns in
“Globalization as Hybridization,” hybrids and hybridization are not inherently
subversive. They can serve to reinforce hegemony as well. Pieterse suggests “a
continuum of hybridities: at the one end, an assimilationist hybridity that leans over
towards the center, adopts the canon and mimics hegemony, and, at the other end, a
destabilizing hybridity that blurs the canon, reverses the current, subverts the
center.”
28
For example, while the mestizaje of Vasconcelos (the same man who as
Minister of Education commissioned the Rivera murals) appears to celebrate the
“hybrid” of indigenous and European cultures as the idealized “Cosmic Race” and to
incorporate indigenous “others” into discourses of post-revolutionary nation-
building, in its erasure of indigeneity it actually proposes an assimilationist sort of
hybridity.
29
In contrast, Votán Zapata resists assimilation, recalling Homi Bhabha’s
assertion that “strategies of hybridization reveal an estranging movement in the
‘authoritative,’ even authoritarian inscription of the cultural sign”—in this case,
Zapata. This is part of a strategy to open a “space of negotiation” that does not
assimilate, but rather allows “the emergence of an ‘interstitial’ agency” where hybrid
voices “deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of
community, and versions of historic memory, that give narrative form to the minority
positions they occupy; the outside of the inside: the part in the whole.”
30
The counter-version of historic memory posed by the hybrid Votán Zapata first
appeared in a communiqué commemorating Emiliano Zapata’s assassination on April
10, 1994, and tends to reappear each April 10, suggesting this figure as the
reincarnation of the murdered hero. The communiqué from April 10, 1995, further
connects the EZLN with Zapata’s struggle through the figure of Votán Zapata:
Emiliano died, but not his struggle nor his thinking. Many
Emiliano Zapatas were born afterwards, and now his name
is not that of one person. His name is the name of a
struggle for justice, a cause for democracy, a thinking for
liberty. In us, in our weapons, in our covered faces, in our
true words, Zapata became one with the wisdom and the
struggle of our oldest ancestors. United with Votan,
Guardian and Heart of the People, Zapata rose up again to
struggle for democracy, liberty and justice for all Mexicans.
Even though he has indigenous blood, Votan-Zapata does
not struggle just for the indigenous. He struggles also for
those who are not indigenous but who live in the same
misery, without rights, without justice in their jobs, without
democracy for their decisions, and without freedom for
their thoughts and words. Votan-Zapata is all who march
under our flag. Votan-Zapata is the one who walks in the
heart of each and every one of the true men and women.
All of us are one in Votan-Zapata and he is one with all of
us . . . Votan-Zapata has all the colors and all the languages;
his step is along all of the roads and his word grows in all
hearts . . . Brothers and sisters, we are all Votan-Zapata; we
are all the Guardian and the Heart of the People.
31
This reimagination of the nationalist revolutionary Zapata as Votán Zapata constructs
a collective identity that includes “all colors and all languages” in the continuation of
Zapata’s struggle. This mythic vision of Zapata unites the people in the struggle for
“democracy, liberty and justice,” asserting that “we are all one in Votán Zapata.” At
the same time, this inclusive discourse sets limits: Votán Zapata is in the hearts of
“true men and women,” implicitly suggesting that he is not in the hearts of “false”
men and women. Votán Zapata’s support of non-indigenous people who experience
“the same misery, without rights, without justice for their work, without democracy
for their decisions, without freedom for their thoughts and words,” implies that
these are the “true” Mexicans who contrast with the unnamed “false” Mexicans
who oppress them.
These communiqués are available worldwide in Spanish, English, French,
Portuguese, and many other languages, in large part thanks to technology. In fact,
the English translation to the above communiqué, which first appeared in Spanish in
the newspaper Jornada on April 10, 1995, was found in January 2011 on a website that
exemplifies the ways that the Zapatista struggle has reached beyond the local. The
Social Struggle Site, dedicated to archiving “pages concerned with the struggle for
freedom,” including “social struggles in Ireland” and the Zapatistas, puts social
movements from across the globe in dialogue with each other.
32
Although this
website is not officially affiliated with the movement, the neo-Zapatistas themselves
have also found ways to turn certain globalizing forces to their advantage. Adrienne
Russell argues that the neo-Zapatistas made use of technological advances to “help
to offset the traditional power structure, so globalization is not strictly a matter of
transnational domination and uniformity but also a potential source of liberation of
local cultures from conventional state and national controls.”
33
Indeed, the Internet
provided the insurgent group the means to circumvent other forms of media that
often refused them coverage. Early on in the rebellion, a concerted effort by the
Mexican government to silence the voice of the movement meant that before long,
“the Zapatistas [had] practically disappear[ed] from the national press,” except for
La Jornada, Proceso magazine, and Chiapas’ regional newspaper, El Tiempo. Instead,
the Internet became “the lifeline for the movement” as it reached out, grew, and
spread.
34
Not only do these transnational spaces—to return to Appadurai’s
terminology, “technoscapes” and “mediascapes”—give an otherwise-silenced group
a voice, these technologies also allow the movement to reach and interact with
international audiences by disseminating “local” neo-Zapatista discourse far beyond
a local context. The alternative spaces—heterotopias—became platform to the
movement’s alternative message and forced a questioning of traditional concepts of
local and global, national and transnational.
Technology not only provided a forum for sympathizers worldwide to
communicate but also inspired new forms of transnational cyber-activism. San Diego-
based artist, activist, and scholar Ricardo Dominguez has used his performance
pieces “Electronic Civil Disobedience” and the “Electronic Disturbance Theater” to
stage electronic sit-ins and protests supporting the Zapatistas.
35
From Brazil, cyber-
artist Latuff used digital art technologies to show solidarity with the neo-Zapatista
cause. As he explains on his website, “[i]n 1998, after seeing a documentary about
the Zapatista Movement, I decided to support them producing copyleft artworks
which could be used by the Zapatistas themselves as well the solidarity groups
worldwide. Primarily I sent some cartoons by fax to the office of Frente Zapatista de
Liberacion Nacional in Mexico City. Soon I’d realize that publishing them on a website
could be more effective.”
36
Latuff’s use of the Internet and digital technologies to
show solidarity with groups beyond his country’s borders (including the Zapatistas
and also more recently Palestinians, Kurds, Iraquis, and Egyptians) contributes to a
transnational cyber-heterotopia that extends beyond the U.S.-Mexico centered
spatial frame that is the main focus of this article.
37
One image from Latuff’s Zapatista Art Gallery, “Zapata vive en Chiapas!”
(1998), superimposes Zapata’s head on the body of a widely distributed photo of
Subcomandante Marcos, suggesting that unmasking Marcos reveals Zapata (figs. 4
and 5). Zapata’s face links the image with traditional revolutionary iconography,
calling to mind collective and perhaps nostalgic (as suggested by the sepia tone)
memories of indigenous struggles associated with Zapata and the fight for “tierra y
libertad” as it reappears in the neoliberal era with the neo-Zapatista uprising. By
placing Zapata’s head on Marcos’s body, the artist recodes a traditional image that
has often served the Mexican state to suggest that Marcos is leading a “new”
agrarian revolution, picking up where Zapata left off. Alternatively, this substitution
can be read as a response to criticisms that Marcos is prioritized in the media more
than any other member of the movement and at times more than the struggle itself.
In this reading, removing Marcos’s head and replacing it with Zapata’s suggests that
the focus is not Marcos himself, but rather the continuation of Emiliano Zapata’s
ideals.
The image also demonstrates the power of the Internet to circulate neo-
Zapatista images and create support networks through new networks, new spaces,
of de/territorialized cyber-art. The original photo that Latuff recodes appears on
multiple websites from the United States, Italy, Brazil, Chile, Turkey, Spain, Great
Britain, Mexico, Cuba, Scandinavia, among others, revealing the possibilities for
technology to advance and dialogue with the neo-Zapatista cause.
38
Culture crosses
borders in ways and at speeds that were not possible before advances in
“technoscapes.”
Not only have technoscapes allowed for international solidarity with the
“regional” struggle of Chiapas, but they have also formed a platform for the neo-
Zapatistas to disseminate expressions of solidarity with other groups in similar
situations outside of Mexico, forging a broader heterotopia for social protest. “The
Undocumented Others,” a communiqué dedicated to “the ‘café’ men and women in
the United States,” tells the story of Don Durito the beetle, who crosses into the
United States as a “mojado.”
39
With this message, the EZLN reaches across the
border to connect with Mexicans (and other immigrants) in the north. Vanden
Berghe sees this story as creating a parallel “between two types of indocumentados,
the indigenous people in the south and the undocumented immigrants on the other
side of the northern border. In a sense, Marcos suggests that all Mexicans, wherever
they live, are the victims of a degrading marginalization.”
40
Indeed, in solidarity with
these “undocumented others,” the Zapatistas formed part of another movement of
“visibilization,” seeking to participate in the forming of collective political identities in
the context of globalization: that of immigrants in the United States in the spring of
2006.
Today We March, Tomorrow We Vote:
Transnational Zapata in the 2006 Migrant Movement
Closed shops, crops left untended in the fields, schools practically empty: streets
filled with unprecedented protests, stirred up by the global currents of migration,
cultural reformation, and the resulting reconfigurations of collective identities.
Between March and May of 2006, more than three million participants filled the
streets of more than 160 U.S. cities in more than 40 of the 50 states to support the
rights of immigrants (documented or undocumented) and denounce HR 4437, the
anti-immigration bill approved by the House of Representatives in December 2005.
41
As a U.S. academic living in Mexico, I “experienced” the protests of the spring of
2006 thanks to global technology. I traveled to Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, and
other U.S. cities through the images transmitted by the Mexican television network
Televisa, and I participated “virtually” thanks to the Internet, where I could read the
New York Times, the L.A. Times, Reforma, La Jornada, and blogs from various
organizations that showed solidarity with the movement. My three years in the
Mexican capital had shown me multiple public protests where people had taken to
the streets as part of their civic participation to claim rights, but in my thirty-nine
years, I have never seen any public demonstrations of such magnitude in the United
States. Certainly my reaction to the size and importance of the protests was colored
by my access to media reporting. On several occasions, Televisa dedicated most of
Carlos Loret de Mora’s three-hour morning show to coverage of the marches, with
field correspondents reporting from multiple U.S. cities. Had I observed these
marches through technology in the United States, where they received far less
airtime, I might have had very different impressions. Images broadcast by dominant
U.S. media also tended to emphasize symbols of foreignness (especially Mexican
flags and the Spanish language) as signs of non-integration, of disrespect, and even
of invasion.
42
The series of protests marked a form of public civic expression not common
among U.S. migrant communities, who may seek invisibility as a safeguard against
deportation and reprisals, even among documented immigrants.
43
Claudio Lomnitz
makes a similar observation, explaining that “the massive demonstrations of a multi-
generational nature are a usual form of political expression in Mexico, but they are
truly exceptional in the United States.”
44
According to Lomnitz, the protests
exemplified hybrid strategies of civic participation in which the Mexican culture of
public protest, “a fundamental form of democratic expression” in Mexico, mixed
with U.S. practices of “elections and related practices—such as writing letters to
congressmen and signing petitions.”
45
Many of the participants did not have access
to official civic participation in the U.S. due to their legal status, but the many signs
reading “Hoy marchamos, mañana votamos” (Today we march, tomorrow we vote)
demonstrated what Jonathan Fox observes as “the emergence of Mexican
immigrants as civic and political actors.”
46
The migrants’ strategy included a symbolic attack on the U.S. market on May
Day. First, protesters did not report to their jobs, so that—as in the film Un día sin
mexicanos (directed by Sergio Arau, 2004)—people would realize the important role
immigrants (with or without documents) play in the U.S. economy.
47
The second
aspect was a boycott; many declared they would not buy anything on the day of the
protest to demonstrate further how immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy as
consumers. There was an effort to cross the border with a binational boycott, but in
Mexico City there was not much of a visible reaction. May 1 is a national holiday in
Mexico, with most people enjoying the day off anyway. Further, according to both
Mexican and U.S. newspapers, few responded to the call to boycott U.S. products in
solidarity with the migrants.
48
In Mexico City, La Jornada reported that “the common
denominator . . . was the indifference that prevailed in dozens of Mexicans who
turned up without a second thought to subsidiaries of foreign self-service stores to
stock their pantries.”
49
A notable exception was the gathering near the U.S. embassy to show
solidarity with migrants, headed by Subcomandante Marcos, who joined the
Zapatista struggle with that of the migrants: “We are fighting so that in our land and
below our skies there is housing, land, work, food, health, education, justice,
democracy, independence, information, culture, freedom and peace for all. We are
fighting for another Mexico, one that does not oblige its workers to leave everything
to go to another country in search of a life that is impossible here right now.”
50
Like
the Don Durito story, these words unite the two struggles, exemplifying the ways
that Mexicans in and outside the nation’s borders are connected.
This transnational connection existed on the other side of the border as well,
where organizations such as the Zapatista Solidarity Coalition—formed on January 3,
1994, in Sacramento, California—have supported the neo-Zapatista cause over the
years. They state that they “extend a hand to Zapatista groups and their allies all
around the world, in the common struggle for humanity and against neoliberalism
(the corporate global order).”
51
This organization also combined the neo-Zapatista
struggle with that of migrants in the U.S. when it called people to participate in the
March and April 2006 protests in support of immigrant rights and in opposition to HR
4437. Photographer Gabriel Romo captured images circulated by this group, which
include a small likeness of the masked Subcomandante Marcos (see Figure 6), and
shared them, along with his other artistic interventions, on his MySpace page.
52
While
the image invokes neo-Zapatista codes, reterritorializing and recontexualizing
Marcos in this way disconnects the voice of the EZLN from the neo-Zapatista cause in
Mexico and reconnects him to a different transnational incarnation of revolutionary
nationalism. Through this alternative discourse Mexican immigrants declare their
right to participate in the national discourse of the United States, reminiscent of the
Zapatistas’ declaration of the right of indigenous people to participate in the national
discourse of Mexico.
Like the neo-Zapatistas, the protestors also appropriated the image of
Emiliano Zapata as part of their fight. In this they joined a long tradition of Chicano
artistic production that has included Zapata’s image as a champion for the oppressed
and made him “a symbol of revolutionary resistance in the defense of lands and
culture for the Chicano Movement.”
53
At first glance this choice might seem
surprising—of the revolutionary heroes whose images have circulated in the United
States since the time of the Revolution itself (an event that spurred widespread
immigration northward), Pancho Villa has been far more popular. According to T.V.
Reed, in The Art of Protest, both Villa and Zapata “became folk heroes to young
Chicanos who saw themselves as involved in a similar guerrilla struggle of poor farm
laborers and industrial workers against Anglo domination in the United States.”
54
Villa’s reputation in Anglo culture as a bandit, however, reinforced by “wanted”
posters that circulated at the time of his famous 1916 raid of Columbus, New Mexico,
would have given the wrong message, risking a visual link between migrants and
criminal invasion.
In April 2006, among images of Che Guevara, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and
Martin Luther King, Jr., Emiliano Zapata reappeared, reinvented yet again in a
transnational context.
55
Gabriel Romo posted another photo on his blog related to
the protests that this time recoded a popular neo-Zapatista slogan, “Zapata vive, y la
lucha sigue” (Zapata lives, and the struggle continues), accompanied this time not by
an image of Marcos (as in Figure 6), but by a painting of Emiliano Zapata’s face. In
this context, the “struggle” is no longer the agrarian reform championed by Zapata,
nor the neo-Zapatista cause, but rather that of Mexicans in the United States against
anti-immigrant sentiment. Where this banner could easily have been photographed in
a neo-Zapatista rally in Mexico, a different banner with a de/territorialized,
transnational image of Zapata loomed above a crowd in Chicago that more clearly
reinserts the image in its new context (see Figure 7). This hybrid image, screen-
captured from a Televisa news broadcast, combines both Mexican and U.S. icons
through an easily recognizable portrait of Zapata (a reverse image of the famous
Casasola photo of a presidential Zapata shown in Figure 3) who has traded his
weapons for a U.S. flag.
Official symbols of both countries are present through visual references to the
flags of each, indicative of the transnational context for this recoded Zapata.
56
In
place of the top cartridge belt that appears in the Casasola photo, the colors of the
Mexican flag cross his chest, but, significantly, no actual image of the Mexican flag
appears. While a connection to Mexico is evoked through the use of Spanish, the
image of Zapata, and the green, white, and red of the flag, the importance of the
connection to the U.S. is emphasized through the very recognizable national symbol
of the U.S., the flag in full color (in contrast to the black and white image of Zapata).
That Zapata holds the flag in his hand instead of his rifle suggests a pacific allegiance
to the flag, and by extension to the country. At the same time, in a visual counter-
narrative, the image of the marginalized migrant forces the viewer’s focus as it
accounts for more than half of the poster. The image’s text provides another layer of
meaning. Across the top, the words “Trabajo y libertad” replace Zapata’s well-known
slogan of “Tierra y libertad.” This linguistic substitution of “work” for “land”
detaches Zapata from both the physical land of Mexico and from his original agrarian
discourse. Though much work performed by undocumented immigrants is agrarian in
nature, without a tie to a specific land, Zapata more easily crosses borders. This
semantic change is also significant to the message that the fight is not about staking
claims of territory—this is not the reconquest that some Anglos may fear—but
rather a demand to work. The words combined with the image of Zapata holding the
U.S. flag can be read to suggest that migrant workers prop up the United States
through their labor, just as Zapata props up this flag. The reference to “trabajo” and
the poster style also link this image to a tradition of Chicano posters within the
struggle for labor rights. For example, Chicago-based artist Carlos Cortéz designed
multiple posters promoting labor issues that included historical figures associated
with class struggles, including Emiliano Zapata.
57
Other banners combine Zapata with other national icons from several nations
as part of a discourse of revolutionary transnationalism, some of which recall other
Chicano artistic traditions, such as muralism. A banner in Chicago, seen here from a
screen-capture of a Televisa news broadcast, places Zapata as the central image
between Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon (see Figure 8).
58
Well-known
phrases associated with each accompany the depictions of these three unlike
leaders. Both MLK and John Lennon are accompanied by references to easily
recognizable lines that emphasize a united country without racism—“I Have a
Dream” and “Imagine”—joining their messages of tolerance and inclusion where
multiple races and cultures “live as one.” Zapata stands between the two, in yet
another representation of the Casasola photo, with the words, “Es mejor morir de
pie que vivir arrodillado; por la dignidad! Sí a la reforma migratoria” [It is better to die
on your feet than to live on your knees; for dignity! Yes to immigration reform]. These
words, next to the armed Zapata, seem to contradict the pacifist images of Martin
Luther King Jr. and John Lennon. However, the first line of this particular version of
“Imagine” reads “Imagine there is nothing to kill or die for.” In this context, the
Zapata image suggests that the people are ready to stand up for their dignity and
fight, but the recoded Lennon line suggests they would rather not have to take up
arms, literally. The overall message of the banner imagines a united multicultural and
international country without racism, as represented by three ethnically and
nationally diverse icons.
The spring 2006 protests, like the many public protests of the neo-Zapatistas,
have given visibility to invisible groups that have not accepted the role of passive
subjects constructed for them by their respective governments and the mass media.
Through the example of Mexican national hero Emiliano Zapata, we can see how
these groups have appropriated cultural symbols and practices as part of their
strategy to participate in the reconfiguration of conceptualizations of self and nation
in transnational contexts that have destabilized traditional concepts of the nation
state. We have seen that both the 2006 protesters and the neo-Zapatistas have taken
advantage of certain aspects of globalization, such as technoscapes and
mediascapes, which have aided in the formation of transnational heterotopias,
“other spaces” where they have resisted and denounced global processes such as
neoliberal economic policies that would construct them as passive objects of the
global market. NAFTA has negatively contributed to this process by not considering
their needs or recognizing them as active subjects, by consolidating their
“undocumented” status. The workforce, the human side of trade, is not adequately
considered in the prevailing Agreement. Chicano protestors and neo-Zapatistas
staked claims of visibility in the face of neoliberal erasure and remind us, as NAFTA
and CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) return to the political arena for
debate under current U.S. and Mexican administrations, that even if money and the
market seem ever to take precedence over human beings, they will not remain
invisible, but will march forward out of the shadows as active subjects.
Figure 1. Mexican souvenir purchased in one of the duty-free shops of Benito Juárez
International Airport, Mexico City, 2006. Photo by the author.
Figure 2. “General Homero Zapata” t-shirt at a market in Coyoacán, Mexico City, Mexico,
2004. Photo by the author.
Figure 3. Reprint of the “Presidential” Casasola photo for sale in Cuernavaca, Mexico,
July 2006. Photo by the author.
Figure 4. Image by Latuff. Figure 5. Photo of Subcomandante
Marcos.
Figure 6. Detail of photo by Gabriel Romo. April 10, 2006. Sacramento, CA.
Figure 7. “Trabajo y Libertad,” captured from April 10, 2006, Televisa broadcast covering
protests in Chicago from April 9, 2006.
Figure 8. “Imagine Banner,” image captured from April 10, 2006, Televisa broadcast.
Notes
A previous and substantially different version of this article was published as “El
zapatismo transfonterizo: los casos del EZLN y los migrantes en los EU,” in Los
contornos del mundo: Globalización, subjetividad y cultura (Mexico City: UNAM, 2009).
Both the current and previous versions of the article are adaptations and expansions
from the chapter “Discourses of Revolutionary Nationalism: The Case of Emiliano
Zapata,” in my doctoral dissertation, “Performing the Mexican Revolution in
Neoliberal Times: Reinventing Icons, Nation, and Gender” (The Ohio State University,
2006). I wish to thank the editors and reviewers of this special edition, as well as my
colleagues Kate Blanchard, Deb Dougherty, and Jamie Smith for their insights that
helped to shape this current iteration. All translations from the original Spanish are
mine unless otherwise noted.
1
2010 marks Mexico’s bicentennial of independence from Spain and the centennial of the
Mexican Revolution.
2
Brian Ott, “I’m Bart Simpson, Who the Hell Are You? A Study in Postmodern Identity
(Re)Construction,” Journal of Popular Culture 37, no. 1 (2003): 56–82 (esp. pp. 64–66).
3
The Homer/Zapata image becomes more layered with more reflection. After that trip, I
discovered a series of caricatures by Mexican artist Martín López in markets around
Mexico City, including the above mentioned “General Homero Zapata” (see figure 2),
that seem to detach Zapata from his roots in revolutionary nationalism through parody.
Unfortunately an in-depth analysis of these images is beyond the scope of this article.
4
Transnational and transnationalism, terms with disputed meanings among academics,
can work to destabilize traditional academic concepts of the nation. Briggs, McCormick,
and Way suggest that “transnationalism can do to the nation what gender did for sexed
bodies: provide the conceptual acid that denaturalizes all their deployments, compelling
us to acknowledge that the nation, like sex, is a thing contested, interrupted, and always
shot through with contradiction.” Gutiérrez and Young also conceive of the transnational
as exploring “the dynamic tensions created by experiences and processes that overflow
the boundaries of the nation-state” and, in contrast to more traditional approaches to
theorizing history and the nation, “question[ing] the conceptual and enforced
boundaries of nation-states by showing how they have always been constituted by
economic, political, and cultural forces within, outside, and beyond real and putative
borders.” A transnational theoretical grounding helps illuminate ways in which the EZLN
and the 2006 marches have both destabilized traditional concepts of the nation and
highlighted the porosity of borders by recoding icons (specifically Emiliano Zapata)
associated with hegemonic revolutionary nationalism in public spaces to stake claims of
cultural citizenship. Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way, “Transnationalism: A
Category of Analysis,” American Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2000): 627; Ramón Gutiérrez and
Elliot Young, “Transnationalizing Borderlands History,” Western Historical Quarterly 41,
no. 1 (2010): 3.
5
Gutiérrez and Young, “Transnationalizing Borderlands History,” 1.
6
Arjun Appadurai defines globalization in terms of a series of “-scapes”: ethnoscapes
(movement of people), finanscapes (movement of money), mediascapes (movement of
information), ideascapes (movement of images), and technoscapes (movement of
technology). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 297, 298–9.
7
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991).
8
Jonathan Inda and Renato Rosaldo, eds. The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 12.
9
See Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).
10
Ilene O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the
Mexican State, 1920–1940 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 44.
11
Venustiano Carranza and Emiliano Zapata were named official national heroes at the
same time in 1931, but Carranza never shared Zapata’s popular appeal. Pancho Villa was
and is a popular hero, and his cultural representations in film and literature are more
ubiquitous than Zapata’s on both sides of the border. However, he was not adopted by
the Mexican state as an official national hero in the same way as Zapata, with not even
an official statue erected to him until 1969. Ibid., 144.
12
Ibid., 60. See also Thomas Benjamín, La Revolución: Mexico’s Great Revolution as
Memory, Myth and History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), esp. pp. 125–6. Brunk
agrees with O’Malley’s reading of the statue as paternalistic and describes this
monument as the location of the commemorative speech of Zapata’s death delivered by
Miguel Alemán in 1950 as an example of state uses of Zapata to claim continued
legitimacy. Samuel Brunk, “Remembering Emiliano Zapata: Three Moments in the
Posthumous Career of the Martyr of Chinameca,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78,
no. 3 (1998): 470.
13
Desmond Rochfort, Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siquerios (San Francisco:
Chronicle Books, 1998), 84.
14
There are few women in the entire mural, and none in the narrative of the Mexican
Revolution. The majority of women depicted are faceless, anonymous indigenous figures
who look toward the men as spectators rather than actors in history. Similarly, though
Rivera glorifies the distant indigenous past as a prominent part of Mexico’s history, he
ignores contemporary indigenous issues.
15
Ibid., 87.
16
Ibid., 88.
17
These oil companies would later be expropriated and nationalized by Lázaro Cárdenas
in 1938, just a few years after the completion of the mural.
18
Negotiations for NAFTA began in 1990 under the administration of Carlos Salinas de
Gortari (1988–94). In setting the stage for NAFTA, the Salinas administration launched
Mexico further into neoliberalism and “killed” agrarian reform by revoking article 27 of
the Constitution in order to allow the sale of ejidos (cooperatively-held plots of land).
Although previous presidents did not enforce the article to the letter (with the notable
exception of Lázaro Cardenas, president from 1934-1940), administrations repeatedly
returned to the revolution and its promises, at least discursively. According to Joseph
and Nugent, Salinas and his successors had “effectively abandoned even rhetorical
commitment to many cherished ‘revolutionary’ principles, including land reform.” Others
such as Ignacio Corona, however, assert that this rhetoric was not so much abandoned
as “domesticated” and modernized in such a way as to support neoliberal policies. Lynn
Stephen explains how Salinas and Zedillo employed a double-voiced discourse of the
revolution, both using “Zapata and the Mexican Revolution as a framework for
demonstrating their continued commitment to Mexico’s rural population, while
simultaneously dismantling land reform and some of the services that supported the
rural population.” Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State
Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1994), 5; Levy and Bruhn, Mexico, 51; Ignacio Corona, “Intervenciones en
el imaginario posnacional: nacionalismo, ensayo cultural y estrategias de resistencia
cultural,” Estudios: Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales 13/14, no. 26/27 (July
2005–June 2006): 7; Lynn Stephen, Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern
Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), xxxiii.
19
For more on the consequences of the reform of Article 27 and especially with reference
to the ejidal system and effects of NAFTA, see Levy and Bruhn, Mexico, 80-1; and
Stephen, Zapata Lives! xxvi–xxxii.
20
The EZLN, FZLN (Frente Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, Zapatista Front of National
Liberation), and the neo-Zapatistas are not the only groups that have appropriated
images of the Mexican Revolution as part of their cause. See, for example, Kristine
Vanden Berghe, “Ethnocentrism, Nationalism and Post-Nationalism in the Tales of
Subcomandante Marcos,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 20, no. 1 (2004): 127;
Stephen, Zapata Lives!; and Brunk, “Remembering Emiliano Zapata,” 477–8.
21
Subcomandante Marcos, Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings (New York: Seven
Stories Press, 2003), 13.
22
Stephen, Zapata Lives! xxvi.
23
Marcos, Our Word is Our Weapon, 14.
24
Ibid.
25
Ibid., 13.
26
It is worth problematizing the role of Marcos, the non-indigenous spokesman, in the
concept of self-representation, but I believe that is for another paper. Here I am
interested in how the neo-Zapatistas have deployed the figure of Zapata, and in that,
Marcos has played a crucial role.
27
Vanden Berghe, “Ethnocentrism,” 128.
28
Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Globalization as Hybridization,” in Global Modernities, eds.
Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (London: Sage Publications, 1995),
56–7. Scholars who debate the existence of the Votán figure in indigenous mythology
include Olgún, Ponce de León, Brunk, Rabasa, and Stephen.
29
José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race / La raza cósmica, trans. Didier Jaén (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
30
Homi Bhabha, “Cultures In-Between,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Stuart Hall
and Paul du Gay (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 58.
31
“Emiliano died, but not his struggle or his thinking,” Cindy Arnold, trans., The Social
Struggle Site, accessed January 29, 2011,
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/ezln/ccri_zapata_apr95.html.
32
The Social Struggle Site, accessed January 29, 2011,
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/revolt.html.
33
Adrienne Russell, “The Zapatistas Online: Shifting the Discourse of Globalization,”
Gazette 65, no. 5 (2001): 401.
34
Juana Ponce de León, “Editor’s Note: Traveling Back for Tomorrow,” in Our Word Is
Our Weapon, ed. Juana Ponce de León (New York: Seven Cities Press, 2003), xxvi.
35
See Ricardo Dominguez, “Electronic Disturbance Theater,” in Corpus Dilecti:
Performance Art of the Americas, ed. Coco Fusco (London: Routledge, 2000), 285–6. See
also his website, “Electronic Civil Disobedience,” http://www.thing.net/~rdom/.
36
“The Zapatista Art Gallery,” deviantART, accessed May 6, 2011,
http://latuff2.deviantart.com/art/The-Zapatista-Art-Gallery-105694036.
37
Latuff’s image is not meant to represent a “Brazilian” vision of Zapata. Exhaustive
research on the circulation of Zapata and images of the Mexican Revolution in Brazil is
outside the parameter of this study, which focuses more on exchanges between the U.S.
and Mexico; however, preliminary research suggests that Zapata imagery has not been
as widely circulated in Brazil as through the Chicanos in the U.S. It would not be
surprising for a country with a long history of land struggles and home to the MST
(Movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra or the Landless Rural Workers
Movement), an organization formed in the 1980s, to find resonance with the Mexican
hero most associated with land rights. In the 2000s the neo-Zapatistas have expressed
transnational solidarity with the MST cause and vice versa. Latuff himself, however, does
not make any correlation between the two groups and at the time he created this image,
according to scholar Malcolm McNee, the MST was trying to establish itself as a peaceful
resistance group in contrast to more violent groups such as Peru’s Sendero Luminoso
and Colombia’s FARC. The association between Zapatistas and armed revolt in the early
90s would not have been attractive to the MST. Malcolm McNee, e-mail message to
author, April 28, 2011.
38
Jornada/Canal seis de Julio, “Zapatistas: Crónica de una rebellion” (2001), gives credit to
Frida Hartz for the original photo, taken in 1996.
39
Marcos, Our Word Is Our Weapon, 332–3.
40
Vanden Berghe, “Ethnocentrism,” 135.
41
As part of the publication “Invisible No More,” Xóchitl Bada, Jonathan Fox, Elvia
Zazueta, and Ingrid García compiled an extensive database about these events. A
summary is available on p. 36; the complete database can be consulted at
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/docs/Database%20Immigrant%20Rights%20Marches.
pdf. The bill, known as the “Sensenbrenner Bill” after the senator who proposed it, was
never passed by the Senate. Some of its provisions included a 700-mile border wall, a
redefinition of undocumented migrants as criminals, the criminalization of any kind of aid
to undocumented migrants, increased fines and penalties, and directives to require
employers to verify the work status of their employees. The complete text of the bill and
its history are available at http://thomas.loc.gov/ and http://www.govtrack.us/. Parts of
the Sensenbrenner Bill have been written into other bills, such as HR 2638, which was
approved by the House and the Senate in 2007 and which includes the “Border Law
Enforcement Relief Act,” the “Border Infrastructure and Technology Modernization
Act,” and the “Border Security Act.”
42
For an analysis of U.S. media representation of the 2006 marches, including negative
reactions to Mexican flags and singing of the “Star Spangled Banner” in Spanish, see Leo
R. Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008).
43
It is worth noting that though some Chicano and Mexican Americans joined the
protests against these laws that would also potentially affect them, especially in terms of
racial profiling, others reacted negatively to the protests and the media coverage they
generated, not wanting to be labeled “migrant” or “immigrant” and lumped in with
assumptions made about undocumented Hispanics.
44
Claudio Lomnitz, “Las Movilizaciones de inmigrantes en Estados Unidos” Metapolítica:
México-USA ¿Cómo nos ven, cómo los vemos? 11, no. 51 (Jan.-Feb. 2007): 31.
45
Ibid., 32.
46
Jonathan Fox, “Ciudadanos binacionales,” Metapolítica: México-USA ¿Cómo nos ven,
cómo los vemos? 11, no. 51 (Jan.–Feb. 2007): 49.
47
The title and premise of the film inspired references to the movement as “A Day
Without Immigrants” (“Un día sin migrantes”) in various publications and as a result, the
film enjoyed renewed interest in the U.S. and Mexico.
48
The New York Times reported that the call for a boycott “got a lackluster response” in
Mexico City, “despite widespread circulation on the Internet and in the media.” New York
Times, May 1, 2006, accessed January 29, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/us/01cnd-rallies.html.
49
Alfredo Mendez Ortiz, “Desairan el boicot antiestadunidense en supermercados del
Distrito Federal,” La Jornada, May 2, 2006, accessed January 30, 2011,
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/05/02/index.php?section=politica&article=015n1pol.
50
“Avalancha humana hizo aparecer lo invisible en EU,” La Jornada, May 2, 2006,
accessed January 29, 2011,
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/05/02/index.php?section=politica&article=003n1pol.
51
“Zapatista Solidarity Coalition,” accessed January 30, 2011, http://zsc.org/.
52
Gabriel Romo, hERMANO Blog, accessed June 23, 2006,
http://www.myspace.com/2hermano.
53
CARA (Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation) brochure, quoted in Alicia Gaspar de
Alba, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA
Exhibition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 53.
54
T. V. Reed, The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the
Streets of Seattle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 106.
55
Zapata was far from the lone non-U.S. symbol in these marches, deterritorialized,
transnational spaces that they were. Che Guevara, long raised to the status of
transnational revolutionary, was also present, and maybe more problematic. Unlike
Zapata’s tale, the Che narrative, as Michael Casey remarks, “counts on an ever-present
foil figure,” the United States, “an ‘other’ against which Che’s image is contrasted” (16).
As a result, images of Che are often read as anti-American, and “[s]ome anti-immigrant
groups, such as the Minute Men, tried to claim that the Che T-Shirts at the rallies that
swept the nation in May 2006 were proof of the protesters’ ill intent against the nation.”
Yet “the number of Che T-shirts was not overwhelming,” and they, like all other icons,
were “clearly outnumbered” by the American flag; Michael Casey, Che’s Afterlife: The
Legacy of an Image (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), 16, 263.
56
The most common national symbol at many of the protests was the U.S. flag; the
Mexican flag was, according to Leo Chavez, most often waved by students, “many of
whom were U.S.-born citizens,” who used them to represent “renewed pride in their
heritage rather than a symbol of disloyalty to the United States”; Leo Chavez, The Latino
Threat, 158. For more on U.S. and Mexican flags in these marches and their portrayal by
the media, see Chavez, The Latino Threat, 156-59.
57
Carlos Francisco Jackson, Chicana and Chicano Art (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
2009), 67.
58
This banner is not the first time that images of Emiliano Zapata and Martin Luther King
Jr. have been depicted together as part of a rights movement. One of the first murals of
the Chicano mural movement, painted in 1968 by Antonio Bernal in Del Rey, California,
portrays Black Power leaders standing alongside Chicano and Mexican leaders. In it,
Zapata is placed within the context of the U.S. agrarian movement led by César Chávez.
Shifra Goldman, “The Iconography of Chicano Self-Determination: Race, Ethnicity, and
Class,” Art Journal 49, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 168.
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