Narratives of Recomposition:
Sociopolitical Potentialities Addressed within Maya Citizens’ Media
Introduction
Walking toward San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Mexico, from the Bulevard—the Pan-American highway here widened to a four lane thoroughfare—there are two main arteries into the city: Calle Hidalgo and Calle Insurgentes. Two street names hint at the conflicted colonial and revolutionary history of highland Chiapas, Southern Mexico. Calle Hidalgo is named for Padre Miguel Hidalgo, one of the initiators of the Mexican independence movement, but it is also the traditional name for nobility or gentry of Spain, and Insurgentes (Insurgents) is a reminder of the historical continuation of rebellion in the Chiapas present. San Cristóbal maintains its old “New World” narrow colonial cobblestone streets and high-curbed sidewalks, or banquetas. The Cerros (the two town hilltops, east and west) come in and out of view, old Mexican colonial churches and chapels (some dating back to the 1600s) can be seen down some of the oblique angled streets; white-washed, giant ancient oak doors, statues of the Virgin Mary, and the saturated colors of houses changing kaleidoscopically one to the other.
The city of San Cristóbal de las Casas in highland Chiapas, Mexico, emerged onto the international news stage January1, 1994, when the city was taken over by Zapatista insurgents. Social discontent had been brewing in San Cristóbal with every gyre of national monetary devaluation throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Zapatismo or Neozapatismo as it is more properly defined, is a social movement mostly comprised of politicized Maya citizens. One notable exception is Subcommadante Marcos, who along with the Zapatista Good Governance Committee, helped to inaugurate a new era in the use of electronic media to voice political dissent. Since 1994, a diverse array of dissenting collectives and individuals has appropriated media technologies in order to make their voices heard or to articulate alternative identities in separate areas of the world. The scholarship dedicated to the media of social movements has also expanded considerably along with the media that has been produced.
Though modern hypermedia and social media have only been employed some twenty years by social movements, the quick dissemination of the narratives of social revolution—whether sent via word of mouth, radio transmission, or delivered in printed formats—have always been crucial to the mobilization of a citizenry. One only has to think back to Martin Luther who posted Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences on the Wittenberg Church door, or Thomas Paine who published his “best seller” political pamphlet Common Sense in 1776. This declarative media spells out sociopolitical grievances in short form that lead to social reformation when political ideologies mature into the goals and purposes of governance.
What I am specifically interested in exploring in this paper are sociopolitical ideologies and descriptions of lived realities expressed within “citizens’ media” created by Maya media producers in highland Chiapas, Mexico, since 1994. I am interested in looking at both the objective and subjective experiences that have shaped Maya media, media produced for political motivations and cultural revitalization in diverse manifestations and platforms. It is my contention that Maya media provide instructive samples for analyzing some of the sociopolitical potentialities expressed within global citizens’ media produced in the last twenty-one years. The output of Maya writers, photographers, poets, and videographers has signaled that indigenous media makers have turned “looking relations” around in significant ways. These media producers—many of whom were once research informants—began their creative journeys by recomposing narratives of older cultural texts and folklore from their own cultural inventory. The result of this wave of media production have been Maya texts that rewrite: colonial and neocolonial history from below, establish new Maya cultural aesthetics and moral sensibilities, and provide examples of “insider reportage” that have contributed to the diversity of citizen journalism. It is my contention the production of these new cultural texts are in essence narratives of political and social recomposition, carrying within them ideational frameworks and potentialities for building democratically solvent multicultural societies following sociopolitical upheaval and revolution.
Citizens’ Media in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico
The term “citizens’ media derives from the Clemencia Rodriguez’ work in mass communications. Rodriguez succinctly outlines how Latin America is witnessing the emergence of citizens’ media production, media produced primarily from media-producing collectives that seek to enact citizenship “by actively intervening and transforming the established mediascape.” Media producers at the community- level “are contesting social codes, legitimized identities, and institutionalized social relations.” For Rodriguez, citizens’ media is also significantly implicated in political empowerment, empowering the community involved “to the point where … transformations and changes are possible” (Rodriguez 2001:20). In recent articulations she also suggests citizens’ media research also vitally include “historical contexts” within the analysis of the politicized geographies and community mediascapes (Rodriguez 2014:150).
Four Maya Citizens’ Media Enclaves
Up until the year 2011, there were at least four media enclaves producing Maya media in highland Chiapas, Mexico: Sna Jtz’ibajom (House of the Writer), the Chiapas Photography Project, Promedios (formerly the Chiapas Media Project—a Zapatista-issue oriented video documentary center), and Taller Leñateros, a Maya print and bookmaking center.
Sna Jtz’ibajom began as a Maya language instruction center organized and run by Maya in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, located near the Maya market district of the city. This community-based organization is an indirect product of the longitudinal research projects mentored by eminent anthropologist Evon Z. Vogt. The Harvard Chiapas Project, begun in 1957, produced two generations (and counting) of dedicated doctoral students in a field school based in the Maya hamlets and villages surrounding the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas (Vogt 1994:89. The story of the founding of Maya citizens’ media production in highland Chiapas is a form of anti-colonialism “from within,” is one sense: the four citizens’ media centers described here were founded by American researchers who “stayed on” in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, and founded collaborative cultural projects designed to help revitalize Maya cultural production, literacy, history, and visual arts. One of these researchers was a student of the Harvard Chiapas Project, American anthropologist Robert Laughlin. Laughlin’s years of fieldwork with dedicated informants including Romin Teratol and Anselmo Peres resulted in The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantan, and Of Cabbages and Kings, Laughlin’s translation of dozens of Maya folk stories. The playwriting cooperative of Sna Jtz’ibajom, Lo’il Maxil (Monkey Business Theater) retains active members who continue to write and act in locally produced dramas. Playwriting began with the Lo’il Maxil actors to further Maya language instruction, a modest puppet theater group evolved quickly in the early 1990s into a live theater troop, performing and writing plays to the present day (see Laughlin et al. 2009).
The Chiapas Photography Project, founded by photographer and bi-national instructor Carlota Duarte in San Cristóbal, was created to harness the visual artistic expression of Maya students with the “unique intention of not imposing visual standards and [a] commitment to create and maintain a [Maya] photographic collection” (Duarte, interview by author, May 14, 2008). Some of the socially thematic, topical matter is based upon Maya literary re-inscription: taking age old “leyendas” (myths and stories), retelling stories using modern visual “aids” (Emiliano Guzman, interview, May 29, 2008). A significant basis for much of the photographic representation also derives from the photographer’s own biographic experience. The overriding goals of the photographers of CPP were to uncover the symbolic world of the Maya for the outsider. The photo albums also include expository textual narratives that provide the means for decoding information that concern cultural phenomena and symbols in the Maya spatial environment. Though the photos and texts in the books do not explicitly reference socio-economic conditions in San Cristóbal, there are “images that clearly speak of socio-economic conditions,” (Duarte, email communication, 5/18/10). The photographers’ intentions are to move past simplistic representations of the Maya to reveal a practicing cosmovision, and to decode the potent symbolism that influences the orbit of Maya lives.
Down the road and located with the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas proper lies the book andpaper arts making Maya media enclave, Taller Leñateros (the woodcutter’s workshop). The products sold at Taller Leñateros are Maya illustrated silk-screen calendars, book markers, journals, and small illustrated books for children—illustrated hand-made texts intended for the tourist market. The products are targeted at multiple price offerings in the merchandise room to encourage purchases at different price levels. A few of the book offerings at Taller Leñateros are comprised of ethnographic and literary research undertaken by the founder of Taller Leñateros, Ambar Past, her Maya collaborators, and Robert Laughlin. La Jicara (the gourd) is a hand printed folio of Latin American poetry created in a Maya codex format, “printed in silk-screen, wood block, and other experimental techniques.” Mayan Hearts is a Tzotzil dictionary created by Robert Laughlin and inspired by a 15th Century dictionary and “illustrated by Chilean block print artist Naúl Ojeda” (tallerlenateros.com). One of the books is a large volume with an imposing face of the Moon Goddess on the cover. Incantations: Songs, Spells, and Images by Mayan Women is a book composed of conjuros y ebriedades (conjurations and drunken chants), songs, chants, and “magic spells.” It is also a compilation of years of careful recording and translation of highland Maya women’s poetic testimony, an ethnographic project undertaken in highland Maya communities far and wide. The first half of Incantations, eighty-nine pages, is a carefully written orientation to Maya women’s culture and poetics in highland Chiapas. Part ethnography, part literary decipherment, the first eighty-nine pages is an introduction to highland Maya women’s sphere of culture, beliefs and poetics; sixty “Incantations” and “Notes on the Creators” follow. The literary collection is an enduring representative sample of Maya women’s poetic multivocality, of a “Little Tradition” largely ignored in the broader ethnographic research work completed in highland Chiapas up until 1994 (Gossen 1985:434).
Around the corner in an unmarked office-space are the editors and producers of the Chiapas Media Project (now Promedios), a unique media enclave in that producing media primarily by pro- Zapatista Maya. (Zapatismo as a movement is now more properly defined as Neozapatismo, or by the political acronym EZLN). Promedios was founded to provide a means of Maya self-representation and to counter the Western projections of the Zapatistas after the avalanche of foreign media coverage began in January 1994—“a press corps which sought to understand [yet] sometimes purporting to speak for Maya views” (Halkin 2008). CMP was created in 1998 by a filmmaker named Alexandra Halkin. As she narrates, soon after the outbreak of hostilities in the spring of 1995, she was “producing a documentary for a U.S.-based NGO taking a humanitarian aid caravan to a Neozapatista region” and undertook her first trip to Chiapas (Halkin 2006:74). It was a time in Chiapas when Zapatista-dominated regions in Chiapas were “swarming with press (both national and international)” (ibid.:74). What became immediately clear to Halkin was that Zapatistas had “the story,” yet what was lacking was “the means of transmitting that story themselves” (ibid:4.). She was approached by “several people in the community…clearly demonstrating an interest in and awareness of this technology” (ibid:4.). Within a few years, Halkin— working with other Mexican videographers like Guillermo Montforte—had established video training centers with video editing equipment within the Zapatista caracoles (ibid: 5). Monteforte worked for the National Indigenous Institute (INI) and founded an Indigenous Video Center in Oaxaca which proved to be a valuable partner for Halkin.
These four media enclaves engender a large corpus of community media and provide fuller historical and biographic contexts to the citizens’ hypermedia employed for and by Chiapas highland Maya. The comparative analysis of the media of the four enclaves provides a fuller contextual synthesis of the narratives of sociopolitical recomposition in Chiapas. They are in essence the whole scripts of Maya testimony and native exegesis, too often compressed into sound bites for electronic media from the U.S. or Europe.
History and Cultural Practices Readdressed from Below
Narratives of Ethic Inclusion
One of the more significant outcomes of the production of Maya media has been the recomposition of colonial and political history from below. On the one hand Mexico’s indigenous people are valorized as the ethnographic base of a national founding identity, part of the national mythology of the state represented on the Mexican flag. As Jackson and Warren point out, “state nationalism associates indigenous communities with the nation’s ‘glorious indigenous past’” (Jackson and Warren 2005:551).
Yet historically Mexico has also been subject to deeply ingrained biases against it indigenous population, a level of “stratified relations” has underlain Mexico’s ethnic composition (Alonso in Jackson and Warren 2005:460). While Maya insurgents have sought the potential of limited forms of autonomy, these narratives of ethnic inclusion are a significant component of the story of Maya media, the reassertion that Native Mexicans are a vital part of the national origination mythology of Mexico.
The Lo’il Maxil Play Mexico with Us Forever! tells the story of how Maya village government was (and is) often usurped by operatives of the enduring establishment party of Mexico, Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI. PRI had been in control for more than seventy years (up until the year 2000), rewarding Maya caciques (town bosses) for gathering votes (bribing some, coercing others) by appointing them mayor. The drama iterates an interesting aesthetic of indigenous America, addressing the Mexican valorization of indigenes in Mexico by creating characters who subvert and manipulate a municipal town boss. Once “elected,” the mayor routinely pockets money distributed for public town expenses for himself or divide up among his cronies (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 2008:261). The title of the play Mexico With Us Forever! speaks to the commitment of indigenous people in Mexico to be recognized as part of Mexico’s founding identity, not just for their own role in the national imagined community, to be regarded as progressive citizens of a revolutionary national republic that has never lived up to constitutional promises given to its indigenous people. The play also reaffirms Mexican indigenous community values as well, such as the practice of redistribution, rearticulating in modern contexts the Maya meta-vice of self-interest above community service.
Mexico With Us Forever! also signals a shift in the broader Maya consciousness toward two of the primary Zapatista declarative issues: lack of a vital and trustworthy representative electoral process crystalized in caciquismo—indigenous bossism in government. In the play, the “Human Rights Commission,” tasked with overseeing a fair election and the practice of human rights, is seen by the state government representative as a body that “supports rebels and loafers,” while the corrupt mayor Jmanel, says they do “nothing” (ibid:261, 275). The play’s narrative is sympathetic to Maya cultural advocacy groups in Chiapas.
Part of the legacy in the wake of the Harvard Chiapas Project have been a number of Maya informants who were given in essence their own ethnographic toolsets for analyzing and commenting on their own society and trained observers. Maya media producers have taken these tools an applied them to translations and ethnographies of their cultural history. Modern ethnography of indigenous peoples particularly has consciously strived to open up the discursive space of ethnography so that the ethnographer does not “remain in unchallenged control of his narrative” (Marcus and Fisher 1986: 87). A “clear sign that” the writing of ethnography has changed after Writing Culture has been, according to James Clifford, the appearance of “two troubling figures: the indigenous intellectual and the tourist” (Clifford 1999: 643-5).
A Maya photographer of the Chiapas Photography Project, Petul Hernández Guzmán, was himself once a research informant on a long-term research project. His photographic study Carnaval in Tenejapa: a Tzeltal Community in Chiapas intentionally reaches beyond a book of captured images toward a larger purpose, a visual composition and study of Maya cultural legacies. Carnaval is a cultural exploration, an auto-ethnography of Petul’s home town. Born in a hamlet near Tenejapa called Ok’och, near the Tenejapa town center, Petul was introduced to ethnographic field methods by an anthropologist named Luisa Maffi who was conducting dissertation fieldwork when she hired Petul as a translator and interpreter. He soon began to utilize Carnaval to ethno graphe his own notes of village activity. Maffi found his field descriptions to be “perceptive and vivid, capturing the spirit of fiesta, the jokes, the parodies, the rituals, in a way that only an insider could” (Maffi quoted in Hernández Guzmán 2006:17). His photo compilation is a “result of research carried on in Carnaval” (Hernández Guzmán 2006:11).
Even as an “insider” Petul is cautious in his photography within Tenejapa, making sure to gain the trust of the Alfereces (fiesta organizers/participants) of Carnaval. His photos exemplify this trust capturing images verité, in the midst of the action and at ease with his subjects. The vivid scarlet colors of the ceremonial flags and huipiles make the fiesta among the most colorful celebrations of a colorful area. Petul chooses to take the viewer through the thirteen days of the festival, from the presentation of the flags, to the ceremonial sacrifice of a bull and distribution of its meat. The roles of the players in the grand performance are photographically documented, singers, priests, food preparers, and Maruchas– “men who dress up as Ladinos…and who joke around with everyone,” the actors of a festival of social reversal (ibid:68). The metaphorical mischief in the costumes of the Maruchas reveals an insightful sense of irony and well-established, refined sense of Maya political awareness and parody: the bald, suit wearing government administrators with walkie-talkies in hand, paramilitary soldiers hold down elders at gun point, the double chinned mustachioed ranchers, and the “wolfish” landowners. Carnaval is a ceremony of both the sacred and the ribald that Petul captures “in the hope that the people of Tenejapa over time do not forget this important custom” (ibid: 12).
Among all the CPP participants, Hernández Guzmán is arguably the photographer who identifies most strongly with the role of native historian. The outcome of six years of meticulous research, his book is a densely ethnographic tribute to Tenejapa’s Carnaval festivities (Earnshaw and Torres 2010). His work offers an elucidatory means to explore the specific uses and significance of photography, functioning as a work of cultural preservation, and demonstrating the value in linking “native” cultural exegesis with image and text. “His desire to convey his research both to his community and an uninitiated outside audience frequently locates him as both a passionate spokesperson for Tenejapans, and as a self- reflexive academic and documentarian” (ibid:103).
Shared Histories of Suffering
Part of the long term need recompose history from below in highland Chiapas stems from the collective cathartic need to document shared histories of Maya suffering that have been under-disclosed across the five countries and twenty-five extant Maya language groups. In Xunka’ Lopez Díaz’ book of photographs my little sister Cristina, una niña chamula, Lopez Díaz creates a portrait in miniature of her little sister who lived a very different life from that of her older sister. As evangelical faiths found their foothold in Chiapas in the late 1970s and early 1980s, community tension rose. There are dozens of small hamlets and villages within Chiapas that have been established by flocks of converts and their parish priests. Xunka’ was a small girl when her parents converted to the Presbyterian faith. After threats of violence by town authorities, and violent acts committed upon her evangelical neighbors, Xunka’s family decided to leave the Tzotzil village of San Juan Chamula and moved to one of the peripheral settlements of San Cristóbal. Xunka’s sister was born after religious expulsions subsided.
Mi hermanita Cristina is about Cristina and Xunka’, sisters whose two stories are “interwoven, that of yesterday and that of today” (Paquel quoted in López Díaz 2000:15). Christina’s visage and disposition reflect some of the unburdened nature of a child destined not to sell woven goods on the street. This is part of the story told by Xunka’, as a street vendor she was obliged to confront aggressive men while selling textiles in San Cristóbal. Mi hermanita Cristina also tells a story about the transformative potential of the Maya women of Chiapas who have had to endure economic hardship and who have had to change their role within their families and within Maya communities. They have taken on the enormous challenges of providing for families while creating and redefining their own identities and potentialities as dramatists, photographers, and small business owners. Cristina is “portraitized” as a snapshot of innocence. She is posed head on, to the side, at her back, in sequences, with her kitten, and with different items of her traditional Chamula clothing. Xunka’ is looking at phases of her own life, to her own loss of innocence, reconciling the sights and sounds of expulsion and the violence that surrounded her early life as an evangelized Maya in the environs of liberationist Catholicism.
The Zapatista uprising brought with it an upsurge of paramilitarism in Chiapas, producing a counterforce of mestizos and Maya loyal to the establishment government party PRI. The Promedios video Walking Toward the Dawn: Memory, Resistance and Hope of Displaced People in Chiapas documents ongoing and underreported paramilitary violence in Chiapas. In 1997, a small village of pacifist Catholic refugees in Acteal who had emigrated from a nearby municipal center at Chenalho brought paramilitary violence into the forefront of national and international new coverage. Paramilitary pro-PRI party members from the neighboring community of Chenalho gunned down forty-five women, children, and men in their church. This massacre brought international attention to the problem of entrenched bossism within communities that supported establishment policies. It also brought into focus the political crucible into which townspeople are brought during times of heated political rhetoric and dissention across Maya villages.
“I am originally from the town of Los Chorros…We arrived and gathered at X’oyep [refugee] Camp because we don’t want the killers with their bosses to do anything to us. They stole a lot of things. They burned many houses, they stole cattle, horses, turkeys, pigs…everything we had.” (testimony of Lorenzo López Mendez from Walking Toward the Dawn)
The video is narrated by the pro-Maya conscience of the establishment hierarchy of Chiapas, Monsignor Samuel Ruiz. The latter portion of the video records the workshops of FRAYBA after Acteal, the community-based human rights organization Centro de Los Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, a San Cristóbal human rights organization that provided counseling for victims and a forum for cathartic testimony to those who suffered during displacement. Walking Toward the Dawn is effective because the video documents the direct consequences of violence and reprisal in Maya villagers, humanizing the militancy of Zapatista demands and rhetoric, and documenting the results of partisan hostilities.
New Aesthetics and Moral Sensibilities
At a deeper level, the dramas of Sna Jtz’ibajom implicitly, and at times explicitly, make public deeply embedded Maya codes of morality and moral transgressions while infusing the narratives with contemporary moral sensibilities. The play Deadly Inheritance, for example, concerns the death of a father and the usurpation of his property granted to his daughters. The father’s two sons seize the property from their sister’s and conspire to “rid” themselves of them. Greed and associative arrogance are “meta- vices” in Maya folklore, writ large in the literature of the Maya and specifically in the fall of the underworld gods in the Maya creation myth Popul Vuh. Deadly Inheritance speaks to Maya people about egregious behavior, individual and collective action that falls outside the moral code. It is a reflexive story about Maya for Maya. Another more subtle theme of the play is the implicit equality of women as inheritors or co-inheritors of the Maya cultural legacy. This social standing is a significant departure from 20th century notions of Spanish land inheritance, and a re-pronouncement and assertion that women are equals of men. This implicit assertion runs through Popul Vuh: women as co-creators, mothers-fathers.
The plot was adapted from a 1987 incident of domestic violence in the Tzeltal township of Tenejapa” which contributing playwright Diego Mendez Guzman recounted to his colleagues (Frischmann and Montemayor 2007:30). “Following their parents’ death, two brothers apparently killed the most defiant of their two sisters and hid her body in order to obtain her share of the inheritance. The sister’s body was never located, and the suspected assassins were soon released from jail” (ibid)
The writers of Lo’il Maxil decided to drastically alter the plot and the conclusion of the play. In the altered plot of the play, the town mayor comes to believe the testimony of the surviving sister and her neighbor and orders the accused brothers arrested. Since the “brothers are already known as troublemakers, and their alibis for the crime are flimsy,” the mayor decides to flog a confession out of them publicly. (Public flogging is still a Maya village punishment in Guatemala. Mexican law prohibits this practice [Flores, presentation AAA meetings, November 24, 2008].) The weaker brother confesses and the cowardly husband of the witness also finally breaks down and provides testimony. In the end, the mayor sends all three men off to jail, “thus providing the survivors with redress and punishing the guilty” (Frischmann and Montemayor 2007:30). Deadly Inheritance also provides a less but nonetheless potent analogy to the implementation of NAFTA in 1994 as structural readjustment programs stripped collective ownership from Maya, privatizing land once held in indigenous ejidos.
Reconsideration of Equality and Complementarity of the Sexes
One of the central shared tropes within the Maya media of San Cristóbal is the reawakening of Maya women’s voices. Zapatistas have readily empowered women as community leaders, and spokespeople within their own governing committees. Elsewhere, Maya women have been given the poetic license to broach disquieting subjects, addressing social ills like spousal abuse and alcoholism, new spaces for social-psychological emendation. These new equalities between sexes, represented in small Maya media, have become resonant with a greater Maya women’s sphere in San Cristóbal; in women from diverse backgrounds, educational levels, and nationalities. One of the primary factors for the evangelical conversions cited for Maya families is that the conversion process empowers women in the family, removing alcohol as a factor of dysfunctional living, for example (Eber 1995). Local employment opportunities for Maya men have dwindled since the implementation of NAFTA, and Maya women have had to assume multiple roles in unprecedented numbers, and they have responded.
The reawakening of women’s voice is also carried into political dialogues and anti-neoliberal rhetoric. Suffused with a communitarian ethic, Zapatistas from the start placed women in important leadership roles. We Are Equal: Zapatista Women Speak (The Life of a Woman in Resistance) readdresses the cultural expectations placed on Maya women in Mexico. Zapatista women speak about what their lives were like before the uprising in 1994 and how their lives have changed (and not changed) since:
Before, our grandparents were peons, they allowed themselves to be treated as peons, because their eyes were closed in ignorance; that’s why they were peons…. They did all the work for the landowner’s wife. They ground her corn, washed her clothes…men do not help us with our work, we wake at three o’clock in the morning to start work…What about our rights to a good life with our children? (testimony in We are Equal: Zapatista Women Speak)
We Are Equal: Zapatista Women Speak is an upfront look at gender relations, surprisingly frank talk from Maya women who rarely engage openly with public media. Zapatista women in these videos talk about their own realities, working hard to make food, doing laundry by hand. In the background of the video music is heard with lyrics from male rancheros who ironically sing the praises of women. The video is an honest depiction of the philosophical ideal of equality versus the documented reality of impoverishment in the lives of Maya women who work from 3 A.M. to “sometimes ten at night.” The Zapatista women testify that their lives have changed in significant ways: they are able to organize, and to speak out.
In Taller Leñateros book Incantations, Past discusses how the speech of one of the female leaders of the Zapatistas, Comandante Ester sent “chills of emotion down our spines” as she addressed the Mexican congress on behalf of the Zapatistas (Past et al. 2007:24). Ester’s speech before congress is printed whole in Incantations, a summation of the conditions that Maya women in Chiapas endure.
This is the way of life and death for us indigenous women. This is why we decided to organize ourselves to fight as Zapatista women, in order to change the situation. …We have struggled to change the situation, and we will continue to do so. First off we need to be recognized as human beings. This is where we need to start (Comandanta Ester Quoted in Past et al. 2005:25).
Interior Worlds Revealed
The explicit pronouncements and extrinsic declarations the modern rights of highland Chiapas Maya women of intersect with the intrinsic explorations of women’s interior lives in Maya-produced media, a world heretofore that remained largely unexplored up until 1994 with notable exceptions (see Nash and Eber). One of the more realistic proposals for looking for “dialogue[s] between [Maya] past and present” has been anthropologist Gary Gossen’s idea that Maya cultural continuity is located in cultural arenas where beliefs and practices were historically “’unthreatening’ to the dominant Hispanic Christian world, and relatively “‘invisible’ to its authority structure” (Gossen 1999:161). These “Little Traditions” as Gossen calls them, are cultural traits that were able to continue beyond forced abolishment: cultural rituals and practices that seemed innocuous to Spanish colonials, “domestic social life and economic production and in the art forms, belief systems, and cosmology surrounding the domestic unit” (ibid:162). To Gossen, Maya languages were the “anchor point” for the Maya Little Tradition, local knowledges that were carried within Maya oral vernaculars of the domestic arena and were “clues to continuity that guide our dialogue between the past and present” (ibid).
In the photographic book Creencias (beliefs), Maruch Sántiz Gómez uses photography in an original way for her personal interests and those of her community” (Duarte in Sántiz Gómez 1998:10). Sántiz Gómez communicates visually in concert with use of text narrative, creating text/photo stories—a novel form of intertext, consistent with traditional storytelling practices, yet a form that decodes its own narrative. Like many visual communicators she has discovered a visual voice: “photos can be read, and it is easier than understanding texts. Sántiz Gómez carefully demystifies Maya folk knowledge, superstition, and creencias.
Nup’uxte’, (a branch from a tree laid onto the ground): “It is not good to use as firewood the wild tree call Nup’uxte’, in Tzotzil / Because if we use it as firewood, people will often slander us” (Sántiz Gómez 1998:34)
In Creencias , Sántiz Gómez visually unmasks a world of essential meanings in the “ordinary” objects of the Maya domestic arena. Griddles, baskets, tree boughs re-present an alternative universe of symbols and significations. She “constructs” images, as Gabriela Vargas-Cetina points out, from what in Maya life cannot readily be seen (Vargas-Cetina in Sántiz Gómez 1998:13). In carefully constructing her own Maya exegesis of pictures and the meanings underlying them, Sántiz Gómez goes to the heart of the process of mediation. In Tzotzil, to draw or make a likeness (lok’ta) is also mixed interchangeably with “to write, to paint” the verb, “tzib”. Creencias like much of the photography of CPP intently combines visual communication and textual communication, text with art. Every picture is part of an extended story, part of a cultural matrix of ancestral, communal, familial associations. Creencias also benefits from the exegesis of a journalist of Neozapatismo, Hermann Bellinghausen, who looks at the pictures as “illustrated tales,” a “compendium of common sense brought face to face with the quirks of fatality and belief” (Bellinghausen in Sántiz Gómez 1998: 17). Emotive visualizations, they work as “conjurations” of “fears, dreams, and misunderstandings” (ibid). This animism is consistent with Maya interconnectedness of humans to the living earth and to ancestors who still occasionally people the earth. Images of burning split logs become imbued with warning, cautions:
It is bad to burn first the tip of the firewood, because one could die very thin. Also pregnant women will have a miscarriage…” (Sántiz Gómez 1998: 26). Maruch Sántiz Gómez reveals the Maya subtext of accompanied objects, anima in the Maya world, combining “art and ethnography” (Earnshaw & Torres: 2001:234).
The photographs of CPP reflect not only personal history but personal transformation. Petul Hernández Guzmán conducts his own ethnography of Carnaval, which in turn becomes a reexamination of the festival gathered from his own new knowledge. His aesthetic is one of re-translation from the insider’s perspective, taking their photographic art beyond what Bennet and Blundell have called the “innovative traditionalism,” of the First People of America; the idea that indigenous people create their own culturally hybrid technologies from a basis of traditional cultural media resources (2003:145). As we see in one of Petul’s photograph (p.45) of an embarrassed musician who is being grabbed and “possessed” for the first time by the new Alfereces (festival leaders), such ineffable moments were easily overlooked in the academic ethnographic gaze.
Education in Resistance
The reawakening of the importance of Maya women to be heard is also spurning a newly found education ethic. Education in Resistance is a testimonial documentary of Zapatista community leaders and teachers that looks critically at the grammar school education the Mexican government provides some village Maya in Chiapas. It explains why Zapatista villagers decided to create an autonomous educational system (promedios.com): “Autonomous education is culture, the work we do. It is our thoughts and ideas, it’s not the government’s ideas anymore” (Maya instructor in Education in Resistance). Elders describe their experiences in Mexican schools, schools in which they paid to attend though they often experienced physical and psychological abuse. A few of the elders and parents talk about the absence of any schooling in their own childhood, lives spent “playing in the woods.” Literate members of the Zapatista community step up to teach children to read. Through dozens of Maya reflections on their own education (or lack thereof), Education in Resistance carefully constructs a “story” of a need being met through collective experience focused upon a central goal: to bring education to the Zapatista village, the caracol. This goal is bolstered by hope of educational empowerment, tempered in the experiences of the uneducated, and collectively molded by a common attitude of resistance.
Citizens’ Media as Self-Reportage and Strategic Framing
It is well known that within the first few days of their uprising, the Zapatistas were able to quickly disseminate their Declarations to international news outlets and sympathetic national newspapers. “Marcos reportedly used the cigarette lighter in his pick-up truck as a power source for his laptop computer to write… messages, ostensibly emanating from the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee General Command” deep in the heart of the Lacandon jungle (Knudson 1998:507). Unlike armed rebellions of the past where news and information at the national level could be tightly controlled to some extent by accessibility and the advantage of better communications technologies, the speed with which Zapatista leaders were able to reach mainstream press outlets was instantaneous. What was ostensibly begun in 1998 with the videos of the Chiapas Media Project was the ability for the Neozapatistas to “cover” themselves and their own newsworthy events in longer, more in depth platforms, and with their own brand of evangelic Zapatismo.
“Self-coverage” has become a common practice for indigenous people around the world. To citea well-known example: helping to provide the Kayapo of Brazil with video cameras and the means for video self-expression, Terence Turner witnessed Kayapo videographers turning their cameras toward recording their own “major political confrontations with the national society” in Brazil (Turner 1992:12). They also began to document “more exotic encounters such as their two recent tours to Quebec to support the Cree Indians in their resistance to a giant hydroelectric dam scheme that would have flooded their land” (ibid). To the Kayapo and Zapatistas alike, however, political confrontations are “personal” at the communal level, since there is no way to separate the direct result of state indigenous policy intervention from the livelihood of indigenous people. Kayapo videos and CMP videos are often shaped by personal statements and testimonials, and video camerapersons are often included in the action “not merely as recorders of the event but as part of the event to be recorded,” as participants of their own congregation (ibid:11).
Self-coverage for the Zapatistas has also enabled them to be self-defining, creating for themselves new forms of symbolism derived from Mexico’s ancient past, and new spaces and places to embody progressive visions of a new Maya society. CMP self-coverage videos from the year 2000 bear witness to the start of a sustained effort of the Zapatistas to create a united left front for the Presidential elections of June 2006. A Very Big Train Called The Other Campaign calls for persistence of vision: “It is a very Big Train called the Other Campaign, one that we have already boarded We are going far, Companions, there are those who will want to get off at the next corner But not us, we are going very far” (voice over, Subcomandante Marcos, CMP – A Very Big Train Called The Other Campaign 2006) The Other Campaign also speaks to the social and political evolution of the Zapatistas, who in 1994, condoned a policy of political indifference stressing abstention from voting in what they considered “rigged” elections. In point of fact, local election results were fraudulently obtained by cacique (political boss) ballot stuffing. The 2006 video documents a distinct reversal in tactics as the Zapatistas mobilize to involve themselves in a stronger unified liberal front nationwide, trying to subvert right wing politics—a tactic that helped create a rainbow coalition for left wing presidential candidate Andres Obrador. Though the Zapatistas did not openly support a candidate, in calling for an “enactment of a new national constitution that would bar privatization of public resources” to ensure “indigenous autonomy for Mexico’s 57 distinct Indian peoples,” Zapatistas created room in the middle for Obrador’s leftist party PRD (www.counterpunch.org). This election was a closer race than expected; the winning party was Vicente Fox’s conservative pro-business PAN.
One of the critical issues raised in The Other Campaign is the need to democratize video making, to “break the vertical structure where information is imposed upon us” (The Other Campaign). A need strongly demonstrated in the very fabric and purpose of the CMP videos is the rejection of media imperialism. Zapatista media, in covering its own news events, counters practices of invisibilization that have plagued indigenous people throughout the 20th century (Colop 1996). By reiterating their quest for autonomy within the broader national sphere, they are uncompromisingly rejecting assimilation policies in the Latin American countries which “until the 1980s and 1990s discouraged politicized indigenous identification” (Gordillo and Hirsch quoted in Jackson and Warren 2005:551). In the grasp of a war of harassment by oligarchal paramilitaries, Zapatistas are issuing direct communiqués from their caracol centers. This constant outflow of self-reportage is essential, as they have testified, to fighting the “discourse of concealment” endemic in Latin American capitalism (Jackson and Warren 2005:551).
While the visual of rural Maya Zapatistas and their international rainbow coalition of supporters dancing in a jungle village may seem incongruous, both groups are similarly aligned in their dogged quests for political transparency—a quest being realized in many respects by the production of media and the potentialities of self-reportage.
The Trip to Immokalee, Florida
A few months after the Zapatista uprising, Florida Rural Legal Services invited Sna Jtz’ibajom to perform in Immokalee, Florida. There, in 1994, 30,000 undocumented Mayan workers from Mexico, Guatemala, and workers from Haiti harvested tomatoes, chili peppers, and oranges. Allan Burns, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida, with Laura Germino of Guadalupe Social Services and with Greg Absted and Lucas Benitez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, helped to arrange the trip (ibid:33). The recently formed coalition CIW was confronting the abuses inflicted on immigrant laborers. Laughlin recorded round table discussions on the working conditions that the dramatists of Sna Jtz’ibajom group observed. During the course of this visit, members of Sna Jtz’ibajom were confronted with some of the ugly truths about living and working in the U.S. as an undocumented worker. They “reported” on the condition they observed, posting these observations at http://anthropology.si.edu/maya. “Xun” (de la Torre Lopez) reached out to the workers as they arrived in Immokalee. When the playwriting/performing group walked around the camp, they asked the workers about the problems facing them. They realized that many of the workers were other “Mayas who either had no work or were paid starvation wages in their own countries” (de la Torre Lopez in Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 2008:37). “They told us of their suffering, which was almost as bad as the abuses they have experienced here” (ibid). De la Torre Lopez, now director of Sna Jtz’ibajom, was able to find out that the workers were badly treated by the contractors, paying them subminimum wages. With some of the details of the workers’ lives and stories, Sna Jtz’ibajom members were able to improvise and perform a play for the migrant farm workers called “El Largo Camino a $4.00” (The long road to $4.00). De la Torre Lopez explains the inspiration behind the play:
Our play would reinforce [the workers] demand for a raise in pay, from $4.00 to $5.25 an hour, the basic minimum wage. That was the idea and that is what happened. The workers told us that after one day of not working the ranch owners lost thousands of dollars. The following day the contractors offered $5.25 an hour. We changed the title of the play to $5.25.
The play that eventually emerged from the members of Lo’il Maxil’s experience in Immokalee was the play Workers in the Other World (Trabajadores en el Otro Mundo). Using “raucously grim humor,” this play charts the travels of a pair of poor Chamulans (Maya from the village of San Juan Chamula) who go to the border only to be tricked by a coyote (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 2008:225, 226). After they finally cross the border, they are driven across the country packed in a van. Arriving in Florida, they are set to work picking tomatoes. Though they suffer physical abuse, “they also discover that there is no legal aid for undocumented workers” (ibid). At a bar Don Tomate, a gringo rancher drops his wallet. It is picked up by one of the Chamulans, who buys flashy gringo clothes for himself and his wife. The finale of the first version of the play, El Largo Camino a $4.00, written in Immokalee, celebrated the foundation
of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The revised play, directed to a Chiapas audience, ends with the Chamulan immigrant returning home to die of AIDS (ibid). Of the history of this play’s reception, Laughlin states that the subject matter remains very relevant “to the present situation, with thousands of Chamulans having traveled to the States…six years after its creation there have been requests from various communities [within Chiapas] anxious to see it again” (ibid:225).
Evangelizing Insurgence
Seeking to create a lay Maya Catholic ministry in remote villages in Chiapas, in 1970 Catholic clergy including Monsignor Samuel Ruiz began to teach bible passages to literate Maya to encourage the evangelization of other Maya. The resulting dialogue between Maya catechists and Catholic clergy was the book We Are Seeking Freedom: The Tzeltales of the Jungle Proclaim the Good News, a document fundamental in establishing an “indigenous form of the theology of liberation” (Womack 1999:135).
Written by Maya catechists, translated into Spanish and printed by the Catholic diocese, the book of affirmation and liberation was issued by the diocese in 1971. We Are Seeking Freedom comprises one hundred pages of readings, lessons, prayers, and songs. The tone of writings is at times confessional, as though an entire people were admitting to defeat, and affirmation-al at other times. There are three themes embedded within the writing: 1) cultural and economic oppression, 2) maintenance and restoration of community, and 3) the Exodus as a larger metaphor for the new Tzeltal settlers and catechists. The syncretic mix of Old Testament references, liberationist spirit and affirmation, and the cathartic community self-castigation combines to form a novel spiritual framework for communitarianism:
I discovered one day that I am unique in the world, But that I need the others. Being on my own is of no use. Being on my own kills me. My true life is to live with my brothers, they give me life, and do the same for them. Community is life. Community is life. It takes me to freedom. (Womack 1999: 134). The book is also comprised of testimonial readings, stories and conversations about maltreatment and open racism, tempered with a tone of Catholic forgiveness. At times, there is a palpable sense of collective low esteem expressed as castigation: “There is a thing that I do believe, and it is that we are crushed and we accept being a crushed people” (ibid:137). There is also an imperative for Maya language expression: “In our language is how we can think best” (ibid).
The meetings of the Maya catechists and liberationist Catholic clergy created, for the first time, an open platform for Maya campesino expression, creating indigenous public sphere discourse which was to carry over into the 1974 Indigenous Conference in San Cristóbal. This in turn spawned Maya cultural conscientization that grew in the 1970s. With the spilling over of the information and involvement of Native leaders in the indigenous conferences of the 1970s, and the start-up of indigenous union organization, the Catholic diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in the 1980s began to take a more active role in human rights organization. This was due in part to the massive influx of Guatemalan refugees surging over the border from the Guatemalan Civil War, and in part to the trickle-down effect of the 2nd Vatican Council and the new doctrines of liberationist theology.
We Are Seeking Freedom: The Tzeltales of the Jungle Proclaim the Good News documented Maya activism and the inscription of their social concerns and issues into printed materials and other forms of media. During the Indigenous Conference of 1974, Maya groups were able to consolidate their grievance on the abuses of land usurpation and development, lack of education and health policies, voicing consensus across Maya cultural language barriers in Tzeltal, Chol, Tzotzil, and Tojoabal (ibid:149).
The evangelical voice of this document is echoed in the video The Other Campaign: Indigenous Voices of the North, which documents the activist oriented conversations between Zapatistas and “four indigenous groups in Sonora State who met with members of The Other Campaign: the Papago, Seri, Yaqui, and Pima” (chiapasmediaproject.org). The four videos of this collection are testimonial, as are many of the Promedios videos. Promedios videos are often told in the first person, or to be more precise, in the first person as we. The Other Campaign speaks to the broader community of North and South America’s indigenous people addressing common environmental and ecological concerns. Corruption, paramilitary violence, and state and private economic development are but a few of the political and economic issues brought into the walk-and-talk discussions and conferences with tribal members. In one scene in Tiburon Island Marcos himself holds the microphone as he goes about working as a production assistant to help with the interviews and testimony. With members of the National Indigenous Congress speaking before gatherings, Indigenous Voices of the North documents a new Zapatista dialogue directed to Mexico indigenes. It is a Maya press statement of sorts announcing a new indigenous front, one of communication. The video also represents the inheritance of liberationist discourses that still “Proclaims the Good News.”
Conclusion
Zapatista media is meant for viewing by other community members, by supporters, and very importantly, by potential supporters and educators wishing to look beyond the headlines and sound bites of Western news coverage of the Zapatista uprising. It is community media for both a local place, and for a localized community “space.” By producing media themselves, the Zapatistas have “demystified” the power of media, and in so doing have demystified the power of representation and turned it to their own advantage. Zapatista media as a more politically radicalized Maya media than the media found in other enclaves, works more assiduously to “expose the gaps between liberal ideals and the daily reality for most Mexicans,” and opens up new potentialities for a more “radical understanding of citizenship and democracy” (Harvey, 1998:12).
Though the Zapatista Uprising of 1994 was a sudden news development that took all but a handful of Zapatista organizers and militia by surprise, the socioeconomic conditions for revolution were familiar insofar as socioeconomic and political oppression is understood. From a skeptical foreign and national view, the Uprising did not produce its intended consequences, since legislation for indigenous rights was either watered down to the ineffectual or defeated in legislation in Vicente Fox’s administration in 2001. Yet at the municipal level, political transformation did occur, too rapidly for Western media to report. Utilizing the momentum of widespread international sympathy, within a few short months Mayas in the villages surrounding San Cristóbal had mobilized to take over thirty-four town halls a replace established corporatist Mayors with new representatives. Twelve days into the Zapatista Uprising, the armed hostilities ceased and the conflict became what has been called the world’s first “netwar.” Zapatistas were able to instantly disseminate their declarations and press releases to international press outlets, greatly undermining the ability of the Mexican government to launch retaliatory armed strikes, or to launch retaliatory political narratives that rang hollow as economic and political subjectivities poured out of Zapatista encampments.
Citizen media producers in Chiapas are composing a quilt from the remnants of antiquity, in a way, weaving together disparate threads of folkloric narratives while repurposing these narratives onto new media platforms, adding new social sensibilities. In its most essential form, citizens’ media is the media of the testimonial, the first-hand accounts that were once stories between villagers—now stories between global villagers. Citizen media producers of highland Chiapas are reevaluating gender roles and reprising Native intellectualism. They are also retelling history from their own collective experiences and shared histories of suffering, creating solidarities across villages, language groups, and political world views. The narratives within of Maya media are rebuilding the architecture for a new moral outlook, newly inscribed but deeply embedded in oral history. Highland Chiapas Maya media producers have also shown themselves to be individually reflective and politically persistent: continuing to refine for themselves what is to be an individual auteur, while refining the potentialities for what can be achieved collectively and when. The evolution and formation of Maya citizens’ media provides an instructional case study for analyzing the narratives of recomposition of diverse societies that have undergone political and social upheaval. Interpreting these culture-texts, narratives that emanate from “native” voices, will help to explain the fuller context of political insurrection as it occurs and the composition of its ideological evolution.
Work Cited
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Chicago, IL : Chiapas Media Project. 2003 Caracoles: New Paths of Resistance. A production of the Caracoles with the support of Chiapas Media Project. 42 min. Chicago, IL.: Distributed by the Chiapas Media Project/Promedios.
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