The Zapatista Experience of Direct Democracy and The Culture of Anti-Power

• In Event: Otras políticas

Abstract

With the rapid dissemination of neoliberal philosophy in its disguise of the “free market,” the indigenous struggles around the world have adopted a strategy that views culture as a way of sanctioning resistance for autonomy and self determination. Since 1994, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico have built their long-term struggle on the cultural front mixing an indigenous cosmology that offers an alternative socio-political vision for social existence and autonomist-Marxist discourse that argues for local autonomy and resistance through self-empowerment.
I examine the visual representations of the Zapatista Movement in the form of photographs and murals of the autonomous indigenous communities of the Chiapas State in Mexico. The imagery of the Zapatistas is important because it demonstrates the individuals’ or locals’ ability to process information, interpret cultural differences, and develop resistance based on their own particular social, cultural and cosmological framework. Rather than repeating a discourse on the Zapatistas image making strategies and how they utilized the media to sustain a popular, bottom-up struggle, I divert attention to their vision and practice of alternative politics and discuss why their struggle for equal representation is based on the construction of forms of visibility and speech. I conclude that the Zapatistas have not only challenged modern Mexico’s notion of political subject but they also have created an alternative way of being a political subject.

Author

• Tijen Tunali, University of New Mexico