On New Year’s Eve 1994, a ragged army of soldiers seized San Cristobal de las Casas, a small city in Mexico’s poorest state Chiapas. Wearing ski masks and homemade army uniforms, the rebels carried rifles and pistols, though many of them were actually carrying wooden sticks made to look like guns. The rebel army was the EZLN, also known as the Zapatistas, and they were primarily made up of Mayan Indians. Some people took them to be a low-level threat and some tourists weren’t happy about the uprising disrupting their travel plans. Some might have even said the EZLN were quaint. But the Zapatista uprising shook Mexican society to its core, sparked a few other insurrections, and brought attention to the problems faced by the poorest people in the country. Although incomplete in ts scope, Bill Weinberg’s Homage to Chiapas puts the rebellion into context and looks at its short term consequences.
The book starts off with a whirlwind tour through Mexican history going back to pre-colonial times, detailing the relations between the indigenous Mayans and the Uto-Aztecan empire that conquered and assimilated them. By Weinberg’s account, rebellion has been a part of Mayan heritage from the beginning. After the Spanish Conquistadors and the Catholic church arrived to do the dirty deeds of the Castilian empire, the tradition of Mayan uprisings continued. Some elements in the church had humanitarian sympathies and defended the Mayans against the excessive cruelties of the colonialists and this alliance between Catholic activists and the indigenous people of Mexico continues to this day. Weinberg’s history of Mexico is brief and serves the purpose of setting a historical context for Mayan and Indian political resistance in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. He strongly emphasizes the history of the Mayan people. If you’re familiar with Mexican history, this part of the book might feel incomplete. If you’re not, it might feel a little muddled and confusing. But this book isn’t about the grand scope of Mexican history and the opening chapters do serve their purpose of drawing a connecting line from the Mayan past to the present.
The same can be said for the chapters on modern Mexico. The Mexican Revolution gets explained, especially the cause of land reform heralded by Emiliano Zapata, the guerilla fighter that inspired the EZLN in the 1990s. A lot of attention is also drawn to the domination of Mexico by the American government and multinational corporations during the industrialization and modernization process. Weinberg goes into great detail about how outside interference in Mexico’s culture and economy led to the widespread environmental damage, economic displacement, and loss of ancestral lands for Indians and campesinos. He brings us up into the 1990s when the corruption of Mexico’s dominant PRI political party and American free trade agreements under Reagan and Bush, like GATT and NAFTA, were ratified and exacerbated the unresolved problems the Mexican Revolution was meant to correct. These chapters are heavily detailed and the reader may feel lost in the weeds, especially in sections detailing environmental sciences and economics. Weinberg overdoes his explanations in a way that could alienate his audience.
Then we come up to New Year’s Day of 1994, the day that the NAFTA treaty went into effect, giving oil companies and other multinational corporations sweeping rights over Mexican natural resources, manufacturing in the maquiladoras along the border, and industrialized agriculture that killed off varieties of traditionally grown produce and further disinherited Mexicans from privately and publicly held land all for the sake of making money for American businessmen.
A decade previous, in the mountains of Chiapas and the Lacandon jungle along the border of Guatemala, a mysterious figure arose and began preparing armies of Mayan people to fight the Mexican government. His name was Subcomandante Marcos and no one knew who he was at first since he hid his identity behind a black ski mask. The New Year’s uprising of 1994 led to some small skirmishes with a small amount of casualties, mostly EZLN fighters. The Zapatistas realized they could not fight Mexico with arms so instead they captured the media’s attention and Marcos reached a global audience by posting dispatches on the internet that gained worldwide sympathy. The Mexican middle classes took sides with Marcos and the Zapatistas and their message caught on in all continents and regions of the world. Their message was simple: they wanted land, they wanted self-governance, and they wanted all the material benefits of modernity. They wanted political participation in the Mexican government and desired to be like a semi-autonomous nation within the nation. They eventually built a parallel government in rural Chiapas and refused to recognize the official governments run in the urban municipalities of the state. The conflict between the EZLN and the government was unresolved at the time this book was published. Weinberg is successful in defining the goals of the EZLN, but falls short on writing about their history. A lot of his account is bogged down with descriptions of his travels into Zapatista territories, hidden in the mountains and jungles, and his attempt at getting an interview with Subcomandante Marcos himself, which eventually happens but doesn’t lead to any great insights.
The next section of the book looks at other indigenous uprisings that happened parallel to or after the EZLN uprising of Subcomandante Marcos. The most interesting chapter gives an account of indigenous people rebelling against oil companies in the state of Tabasco who wrecked the environment and contaminated their drinking water making farming almost impossible and causing a wave of health problems. The author again bogs the reader down with excessive details. You might need to be an expert in chemistry or biology to fully understand everything he writes. He could easily make the point abut environmental destruction and its impact on the agricultural economy without going into such fine, technical details. But it is a good section because it documents some attempts at revolutionary activism that probably will otherwise be forgotten due to lack of attention from other writers.
The rest of the book moves sideways into accounts of the intersection between the Mexican government, landowners, the military, law enforcement, and the drug cartels in the North, especially in Sonora. The Tarahumara or Raramuri Indians get caught up in this mess due to poverty and lack of political power. These chapters get to be frustrating because the author introduces a lot of government officials, law enforcement officers, military generals, and hacendados who made the mistake of involving themselves in drug trafficking. Most of these people get assassinated soon after they enter the narrative and a lot of this just reads like lists of people you know close to nothing about getting murdered. It barely has any connection to the EZLN, indigenous people, or the state of Chiapas. It should probably have been left out of the book altogether.
Bill Weinberg gives us an interesting glimpse into the world of indigenous political activism in Mexico. As mentioned before, the main issues of the narratives get somewhat obscured by too much extraneous information. A lot of the information gathered by Weinberg is incomplete which isn’t entirely his fault. The historical roots of these indigenous uprisings, especially those of the Zapatistas, was not well known at the time of writing. Furthermore, he also wrote this too close to the time of the events themselves. There isn’t enough historical distance on his part to give these uprisings the clarity they deserve. But still it’s good to read about how indigenous people can organize and challenge the injustices of the Mexican political and economic system.
Despite all its many flaws, including sloppy writing and a thick jungle of arcane details that is hard to see through, Homage to Chiapas is worth reading once just because it draws attention to struggles that are not well-documented elsewhere. On a final note, the title should probably be changed as very little of what takes place in these pages happens in Chiapas. Besides, it is more of an homage to Mayan people and the EZLN than it is to Mexico’s poorest, but also one of the most fascinating, states. The dense jungle, the highlands, its ancient temples, its history, and the culture of its peoples make it a place worth visiting and learning about all on its own.
No comments:
Post a Comment