Circumnavigating La Realidad

Article

Circumnavigating La Realidad

Memory Studies 4(1) 107–116 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1750698010382174 http://mss.sagepub.com

Paul Reade

Swinburne University of  Technology,  Australia

Abstract In the case of the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, memory has been imagined as a conduit for both the recurrence of trauma and the possibility of redemption. My travels through the order and chaos of Chiapas, which is in a state of counter-insurgency or ‘low-intensity warfare’, revealed a multiplicity of memories and forms of remembering. Focusing on anthropologist Michael Taussig’s ideas of the ‘death-space’ and ‘silencing’, I will show how through story-telling the idea of memory can be understood to transcend discourses of trauma and redemption.

Keywords chiapas, memory, silence, Zapatistas

El silencio en la recepción del hotel era tan grande que Petrone se descubrió a si mismo andando en puntillas. (The silence in the reception was so great that Petrone discovered himself walking on tip toes.) (Cortázar, 1983: 39)

In Chiapas, Mexico, the spectacle of control is on every corner. In the streets of the towns I see police and security guards with shotguns everywhere. As the bus begins its journey into the jungle, patrolling vehicles with men carrying machine guns pass every few minutes. Police and military checkpoints litter the countryside. Military bases are strategically placed around any zone of suspected resistance. It is hard to go more than five minutes, whether in a town or along a highway, without coming across some form of security outfit. Nothing is subtle about their menacing black uniforms and enormous guns; if such drastic law enforcement is needed, there must be a reason? Anthropologist Michael Taussig speaks of such a place, ‘a society shrouded in an order so orderly that its chaos was far more intense than anything that had proceeded it – a death-space in the land of the living ... – that great steaming morass of chaos that lies on the underside of order and without which order could not exist’ (1987: 4). Chaos is everything from drug running and illegal immigration to kidnapping and revolution. Ask anyone there and they are likely to tell you that they would rather run into a criminal than a policeman. You can never be sure at what point order begins and chaos ends: every checkpoint is meant to reassure you that you are being protected but every time you pull up to one of them you hope that

Corresponding author: Paul Reade, The University of Swinburne, Melbourne, Australia. Email: [email protected]

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it isn’t you that they pull off the bus. As a policeman or soldier patrols the bus, staring everyone in the eye, you don’t make a sound, you don’t smile and you try not to stare back. In such circumstances one quickly learns when to shut up and how to respond: a wrong word spoken here or there can end up having serious consequences. Everyone knows that they are looking for illegal immigrants from Central America or any suspicious looking Indio, but no one is going to make a principled stand in such an isolated spot. As Julio Cortázar told us in his short story, La Puerta Condenada, when surrounded by silence, one dares not make a sound (Cortázar, 1983). The Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) or the Zapatistas, emerged from the Lacandon jungle on 1 January 1994, taking over Chanal, Altamirano, Las Margaritas, Ocosingo and San Cristóbal de las Casas, all major centres in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico.1 Their demands – for work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, liberty, democracy, justice and peace – were included in their Primera Declaracíon de la Selva, which declared war on the Mexican Army, the ‘dictatorship of the government’ and the president (Comandancia General del EZLN, 1993). The mainly indigenous army may have been forced to quickly retreat, but it has retained a strong presence in the Mexican and international imagination.2 American social and political activist Tom Hayden sees in the Zapatista uprising a resurfacing of the repressed memory of the conquest ‘from the hidden depths of our continental history’ (2002: 4), which, at the same time, offers a chance of redemption. Historian Jan de Vos speaks about the Conquest in Chiapas, which began in 1524, and ‘the events of those twenty years which provoked in the victims a trauma of such magnitude that it still persist in their descendants’ (1994: 77), while historian Thomas Benjamin speaks about the uprising as being ‘an extended history lesson’ (2000: 446). Jan Rus talks of how this period of change is remembered by the communities of Chiapas, ‘as the time of “awakening”’ (2003: 7–8), while for others 1 January 1994 has become such a significant landmark that everything in Mexico must now be viewed through the ‘post-Zapatista cultural and political context’ (Hernández Castillo, 2003: 74). Tempering these views about the cultural and historical significance of the rebellion are the words of the renowned Mexican writer and poet Octavio Paz. His criticism is both of the rebels and of us, the viewers. He says of the public and media response to the events of 1994: The civilization of the spectacle is cruel. The spectators have no memory – because of that they also lack remorse and true conscience. They are tied to what is new, and it doesn’t matter what it is so long as it is new. (2002: 31)

In the case of the Zapatistas, memory has been imagined as a conduit of both trauma and redemption, simultaneously ‘awakened’ and dispensed with in the name of the spectacle. While travelling through Chiapas in 2009, I found a multiplicity of memories and forms of remembering. From marches, commemorations and ruins to ghostly presences and stories, certain kinds of memories were acted out in militant and disciplined ways while others were transmitted in the most casual and creative contexts. What struck me most, however, was the juxtaposing of memories with silences and silencing.

Silences and stories A paved road encircles the jungle, but only dirt roads penetrate it. Its boundaries are clearly mapped and solidified but its interior is prone to floods and erosion. In 2009 I was circumnavigating the Lacandon Jungle in Chiapas looking for memories or traces of the Zapatista uprising. What I found were stories and silences.

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The jungle is the last ‘unconquered’ part of Mexico. Although quickly disappearing under pressure to exploit its potential wealth, it is now the last place onto which both Mexicans and westerners can project their fantasies of savage Indians, wild animals, magic and untamed nature. In his novel March to the Monteria, B. Traven describes the jungle of Chiapas as a place of violence, mysticism and exploitation. The hero of the story enters the jungle as a debt-peon – and it is the stories recounted that inspire his fear. All along the way the people whom he consulted told him the most terrifying stories about the jungle. These people, however, had never been in the jungle themselves; they had not even approached the thicket at the outer edges. All of them recounted merely what others had seen or lived through. (1982: 43)

Stories about the jungle are stories of horror and magic. For those arriving in Chiapas tales abound of indigenous rebels in the jungle, police brutality and disappearances, of mystical ruins and Indian magic, of indigenous mistrust and violence. Time and time again the jungle is re-imagined as a mystical and dangerous place, which has eluded modernity, ruled by prehistorical forces and utopian dreams.3 This is an interpretation and representation of Chiapas that sells. Wild landscape and wild people who refuse to accept the modern world. The place as a living museum in which you can step behind the glass, try out a bit of magic or a bit of revolution and take home a souvenir at the end. Revolution turned into postcards and t-shirts, the civilized turned savage, the eternal past in the costume and gaze of every Indio. Yet alongside these fantasies of the defiantly pre-modern, there are other persistent stories about the jungle – stories of silencing and silence. In Terror as Usual, Taussig tells us that ‘the point about silencing and the fear behind silencing is not to erase memory. Far from it. The point is to drive the memory deep within the fastness of the individual so as to create more fear and uncertainty in which dream and reality commingle’ (1989: 15). The Mexican government is expert in silencing. Their response to the 1994 Zapatista uprising after the initial military engagements has consisted primarily of denial, feigned dialogue, empty promises and, eventually, silence. All the while a campaign of ‘low intensity warfare’ has been waged: paramilitary units carry out assassinations, destroy towns and dislodge communities.4 Silencing is different from silence; it is not the lack of talk. It is the fear that stops one from talking. It is self-censorship provoked by fear. The people of Chiapas are free to remember, the constant police and army presence doesn’t let them forget.

Lacanja:The mischievous spirits of memory Fifty years ago the American missionaries arrived to Lacanja, a village in the Lacandon jungle of Chiapas, and taught the Lacandon Indians about God. In the 1970s the government gave them land.5 Their ancestors used to believe in the spirits of the jungle: they believed a certain bird call was the sound of the devil. So an old man at the crossroad tells me while I wait for a bus. His mother did not speak Spanish and as a child he hunted with a bow and arrow, now they hunt with guns, although the road and all the cars scare the animals away. He tells me that when he was 12 he got lost while hunting and went for two days without food or water. I think to myself that a hunter should be able to find food and water in the jungle but I say nothing. I ask about the politics of the area, he tells me that they don’t get along with the people from Nueva Palestina, a town half an hour away: they want to cut and burn the forest while the Lacandon communities are trying to protect it. He mentions that they have problems with the police who are looking for illegal Guatemalan immigrants and sometimes confuse them with the locals. ‘But now’, he says, ‘the

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police and military know who we are’. ‘And the Zapatistas?’ The Lacandons have no interest in them, he says, ‘here nothing happened but there are more military around since then.’ The town has been here for generations, since the time of his ‘mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’. He is a ‘Lacandon Indian’ first, then Mexican. I mention that this part of Mexico must have been one of the last parts to be conquered, ‘así es’ he replies. That’s the way it is. As the sun sets, the shadows grow. With the stars mostly blocked out by the canopy, the solitude and the humming jungle have me believing in mischievous spirits.

Palenque, campsite: The silence of civilizations. The silence of the gods weighs upon the camp of the Europeans as much as on that of the Indians. (Todorov, 1984: 97)

Amongst the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Palenque I am witnessing the ruination of the Mexican tourism industry. Every day fewer and fewer people come, scared away by the swine flu. Tour guides drop their prices from 600 pesos to 100 pesos. Restaurant staff sit around all day chatting, while the insects swarm around. Time has stopped. Decay is evident everywhere, in the jungle, amongst the ruins, and within the people as they continually consume a mixture of drugs and alcohol. The animals are the constant witnesses to the passing of time here and the signallers of the seasons. The howler monkeys spy from above: their roar is like consciousness itself, an antidote to oblivion. The beginning of the wet season is greeted by the frogs whose belches echo through the jungle. The birds and the insects join in to the chorus. Walking through the jungle is both liberating and claustrophobic. Infinity exists in every leaf and branch, under every footstep there is an entire universe, yet once inside it seems as though there is no escape. Looking from above the jungle seems infinite, yet all that space closes in around you once you find yourself inside. The seasonal burn off of the maze crop has filled the state with smoke and imposed a hazy filter over all. Light finds it difficult to travel through the jungle, yet sound seems to thrive. The monkey’s roar, the frog’s belching and the thunder during a storm roll through unimpeded. In the jungle life becomes ritualistic; day-to-day activities lose their routine nature, bounded in time and space, and become greater in their dimensions and force. Finding food, lighting a fire to cook on and washing clothes by hand, daily chores become sacred. In the camping ground I meet a friend of a friend from Argentina. I had heard she was riding a bike around Mexico and she happened to arrive at the same campsite a day after me. She gives me a photo of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the mothers who continue protesting the disappearance of their children during the Argentine dictatorship. A memory of a memory of something that the dictatorship tried to cast into oblivion: from Buenos Aires to Palenque, Chiapas, via a chance meeting. In return I give her an old mate (a gourd for drinking tea) I bought in Australia, which came from Argentina, and will now return there via Mexico, carried on a bike. Every night a band plays at the camp ground, sometimes in front of only two or three people. The band consists of three men who stay in hammocks out the back. One Mexican classically trained musician who speaks four languages, a hippy from Italy who has been here for seven years, and a Belgian. The seemingly endless days, altered only by heavy showers amidst the oppressive heat are capped off every night by the same song list, barely altered. Here it seems the slightest change in anything takes on giant proportions. A camp site beside the ruins of Palenque seems like the perfect place to forget: one’s family, friends, nationality, language. The solidity of the past seems to melt away here, and the concrete reality of the outside world has no impact: drug wars, indigenous revolution and swine flu do not

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seem to exist here. Conversations about politics and society become abstract and bleed into broader philosophical topics of life and travel. Politics seem insulting and beyond comprehension. Nothing here could possibly be concrete. There are a couple of crazy old gringos, Argentineans, a couple of young boys from Sydney. There are Germans in camper vans and on motorcycles, and a Canadian riding his bike from Quebec to Tierra del Fuego. A Mexican who does massages and makes jewellery has assumed the position of the local mystic type, the bearer of ancient wisdom. His place in the campsite has a blanket with a romanticized depiction of an archetypal Indian, a noble savage; everyone thinks he is a fraud. Bearing witness to this menagerie of madmen are the local staff, who waiver between amusement and disbelief. Beside the ruins of the Mayan empire the flotsam and jetsam of the western world seems to filter through this campsite. Some gets through, some gets stuck here. No one seems to know what they are doing here: some are artists, some musicians, some are on a Latin American odyssey and some just have a few weeks off work and ended up here. In this refuge from the past and the future there is a menace that drifts around the site with the smoke from the fires, cigarettes and marijuana. Every now and then the cracks appear, someone enters into a depression for no apparent reason, someone is gripped by panic; a fragment of a painful past or some fear of the uncertain future sneak in. As the girl from Argentina tells me, ‘oblivion is full of memory’.

The ruins of Palenque: Memory caricaturized Walking along the road to the ruins I come across a puffing and panting Mexican; he is a bus driver from Oaxaca. Every time he is in Palenque he walks the 9 kilometres from the town to the ruins and back. He does it to lose weight. Today he has spent 20 minutes speaking to a snake along the way. He never enters the ruins, just walks there and back. Over the years he has lost an incredible amount of weight – the ruins have changed his life. At the entrance to the ruins there is a banner protesting against the INAH, the government organization that manages historic sites. It decries the planned light and laser show it wants to build on the ruins of Teotihuacan. The show will do irreparable damage to the pyramids, but the idea is that it will attract more Americans. Old stones just aren’t enough anymore. Out the front they sell all the usual Mayan relics you would expect, plus postcards of subcomandante Marcos, the most visible face of the Zapatistas. Guides offer various tours, starting with one hour or the special all day tour, which includes a walk into the jungle, tequila and magic mushrooms – a different type of journey through time and space. Walking through the ruins you can find points where the chatter of the tourists and employees does not reach, the only sound there is that of the birds and the insects. In such places silence, darkness, oblivion and forgetting feel not as the absence of something, but as an infinity enfolded on itself. The ruins are now fenced off and guarded by security. In the past you used to be able to walk into them through the jungle, you still can but will probably be caught by the guards. Now nearly everyone enters along the main road by kombi or bus. Increasingly the ruins seem cut off from their surroundings, almost superimposed onto the jungle. People follow the paths through the site, climb up and down the designated stairs, no one ever seems to walk around behind the buildings. It is almost like a Hollywood set of Mayan ruins: the facade that has no depth or relationship to their surroundings. Apart from the obligatory photos of the family in front of the ruins, everyone tries to get the perfect photo of the buildings with no one else on them. When framing photos people do not aim for a close-up. Instead they step backwards, trying to fit everything in, to frame an entire civilization in one photo.

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Out the front of the museum there are a couple of police officers with machine guns. I’m not sure what they are expecting. No one seems to know who or what precisely they are protecting: the cultural heritage, the people with their cameras or the state.

San Miguel? Memory that isn’t, wasn’t I notice a town with a Zapatista sign out the front declaring that ‘you are now in Zapatista territory’ and return there the next day. Some of the signs with the town’s name have been erased, but you can make out on others that it was (is) called San Miguel. I enter the town through some dirt track, passing the shabby houses with their chickens and turkeys. Heads pop out of windows every now and then to see who is passing, a few on the street say hello. School kids stop their studies to stare and shout out ‘Gringo!’ An old woman stops and I ask where I could find someone to talk to about the town. ‘’There is no one’’ she says. ‘‘Is this a Zapatista town?’’ I ask. ‘‘No’’, she says. Are there Zapatista towns around? ‘‘No’’, she says again. In a store I buy some tobacco and ask one more time. At first the storekeeper says ‘‘No’’, but after a while he tells me to look for a man at the entrance to the town. At the house I am sent to, a woman tells me everyone is out working. I leave the town of San Miguel and wait for a ride in front of the giant sign that declares, ‘You are now in Zapatista territory’.

Comitan: Inescapable memory Entering Comitan I am greeted by the tourist police. In a town with no tourism a band of uniformed characters patrol the streets with little maps, accosting anyone with a backpack and hauling them off to a hotel or museum. After the isolation of the jungle this town has a quiet desperation about it. Everyone seems to be eying-off everyone else, subtle glances speak a thousand words and illuminate an entire social structure: as Taussig describes it, ‘paranoia as social theory. Paranoia as social practice.’ (1989: 11) You cannot cross the main plaza without being stopped by someone wanting to speak to you. A migrant worker recently returned from the USA wants to practise his English with me. ‘The blacks are all thieves’, he tells me, and then asks if Australia is near Russia. I guess it is. In the hotel the buzzing of the insects is replaced by the screaming of children in a place startlingly sparse and dirty. The bathroom is so filthy that after a month without a shower I decide to wait a few more days. Such poorly built hotels or apartment blocks play wicked tricks. Sounds come from below and above. They enter from all sides, bouncing off the walls. Their origin is always impossible to trace, as is their veracity. Sound feels as disturbing as silence. The plaza of Comitan is the Mexican colonial past brought into the present. The rich landowners parade up and down, occupying huge tables in the restaurants where the usually boisterous staff turn as meek as sheep when the ‘patron’ approaches. The patron plays the ‘man of the people’ role, shaking hands and joking with the staff. He is one of them but his posture and gaze remind them that he owns them. If they play the role of grateful and pleasant servants they will be rewarded. An old American approaches me in a restaurant; he is desperate to speak English with someone. He has spent the last nine years in Guatemala, compiling a dictionary in six different languages of all the goods and services one may need when in a foreign country. He only speaks English and has pieced it together by using dictionaries. No one will publish it. Now he is wandering around Mexico killing time and trying to figure out whether or not his life has been wasted and what it all means. The next day I see him again and he repeats the same stories as the day before. Another American approaches me in the plaza, ‘Are you American?’ ‘No, Australian’ ‘Oh, they’re OK, you having a good time?’ He is in constant war with the local Mexicans: he hates them

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and they hate him. Once they tried to run him over for being a gringo, he tells me. He received 5000 pesos from a local human rights agency as a result. His prostitute girlfriend in Tijuana is dying from hepatitis and is on the run from the law. He tells me he has paid for a boy to walk again and for a blind woman to see again. He is thinking about going back to Tijuana where he knows a nice place three blocks from the ‘whorehouse’ or going to Honduras for a black girl. He tells me the other American I had met earlier is still a bit unnerved about something that happened in Guatemala with an underage girl. Meanwhile the Mariachis stand beside the restaurants as the sun goes down, waiting for the clients to come along and request a song.

Las Margaritas: The migration and exchange of memory Nothing much seems to happen in Las Margaritas. People endlessly circle the main plaza. Tonight they are voting in the local beauty pageant. State elections are coming up, but the potential ‘Miss Margaritas’ seem to have had access to greater campaign funding. Their posters dominate the public space. Everything else in Las Margaritas seems to speak of migration. Every three seconds boys yell out ‘Comitan, Comitan’, advertising the destination of the multiple bus operators. There is only one destination but they scream it out as if the Apocalypse is coming. Other signs point to the most important migration routes; buses direct to Tijuana and Western Union offices. The offices are next to each other and it is not hard to understand why. Workers leave to cross to the USA from Tijuana and the money comes home via Western Union. Wetbacks exchanged for greenbacks.

Emiliano Zapata and the Laguna Miramar Just before arriving in the town of Emiliano Zapata we pass San Quintin. ‘Son todos cabrones, violan mujeres’, the driver tells me. They are all bastards, they rape women. In the town there is a huge military base. In the place where every other building would struggle to call itself a hut the army barracks seem somehow out of place. The strategic value of such a complex is questionable: no invading army would be stupid enough to come along the road I just travelled, so it must be something to do with ‘internal issues’. In Emiliano Zapata a restaurant has been set up with the aid, a sign proclaims, of the European Union. The town has been here for ‘un buen rato’ or ‘muchos años’, a good time or many years, no one seems to know. The kids are running around and fishing all day. I ask them why they aren’t in school as I saw the school on the way in. They tell me that they don’t have a teacher because they ran him off. They look happy. A 16-year-old boy comes to talk to me. He can’t understand where Australia is, he asks if it is further than Queretaro. He wants to know if there is work in Australia or if we all have to go ‘North’ as well. I try to explain the visa and passport situation and the fact that there is no bus there but I can see on his face that it makes no sense. Here everyone has to go ‘north’ to look for work. Only the elderly and the very young stay. The boy hopes to leave soon for the ‘North’. ‘I am a Zapatista’, he tells me. Every now and then he goes to meetings in La Realidad. He is too young to remember the uprising of the Zapatistas but he tells me that he has ‘the DVD’. There is no money and a lot of distrust and conflict amongst the communities as well as the intense distrust of outsiders. The Zapatista towns fear that they may be spies of the government. ‘An American girl was gang raped by a bunch from San Quintin while staying here’, the locals tell me as I put up my hammock beside the lake. Some tourism students and their teacher from San Cristobal are doing a day trip/research, but leave early as they are too scared to stay.

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That night an old man takes me fishing with his two young boys. We paddle back and forth across an immense lake checking the nets that they have left out. The two young boys sleep most of the time at the front of the boat and we barely say a word. The crystal clear water of the day has turned into a black marble, reflecting every known and unknown star and constellation from millions of years ago and for millions of years to come. Everything has dissolved. The past and the future are laid bare and there is nothing there but space. We catch one fish that we later have for breakfast.

La Realidad Un momento de la realidad que le había parecido falsa porque ere la verdadera … Lo que acababa de presenciar era lo cierto, es decir lo falso. (A moment of reality that had seemed false because it was true … What he had just experienced was real, that is to say, false.) (Cortázar, 1983: 89)

The truck arrives at San Quintin an hour late, I think, but it isn’t. It is the ‘hora del gobierno’ here, the time of the government, otherwise known as daylight savings and affectionately known as the ‘hour of Fox’, in honour of the former president. Towns in the jungle accept, or not, the time change depending on their allegiance to the government; you can start at one town, go twenty minutes down the road and lose an hour, then another 20 minutes and be back where you started. The non-government time is known as the ‘hora vieja’, the old time, a time innocent of government meddling and corruption. The driver tells me that La Realidad is ugly and asks why I am going there. I forget what I say back to him. La Realidad is a small village of wooden huts and dirt roads with a small stream running through the middle where women wash their clothes. There is no plaza but the centre of the town has a small grassed area with the public buildings and school surrounding it and a giant tree in the middle. The school and other public buildings are covered in murals celebrating the Zapatista uprising in 1994. There are pictures of Che, Zapata, and Marcos6 as well as the dates of important moments in the revolution painted in bright colours everywhere. This public space is a museum to everything post 1994. The children eerily fight mock battles using wooden sticks as imaginary guns under the gaze of these revolutionaries. They are re-enacting the uprising with surprising accuracy. Many of the militants used sticks in 1994 because they didn’t have enough guns for everyone. I meet the Junta,7 who allow me to stay. They tell me that they will come and find me later on to talk about the town. I meet the driver from the other day who had taken me to Emiliano Zapata. His family moved to La Realidad in the 1980s. His father spoke three languages but he only speaks Spanish. There is a couple from Chile who have been living there for six months. They have been given a piece of land to work but tell me of the difficulties in being accepted in the community. Bit by bit people are starting to talk to them. For months the children called the girl a witch and ran away but now some are becoming curious. They tell me of the people who come here, usually from Spain, Italy and the Basque country. There is graffiti on the wall of the communal kitchen, ‘turismo es terrorismo’. The older men in the town gradually become curious and begin to talk. They speak about the drought eight years ago and about the price of coffee, beef and corn. Everyone mentions how the town has reached its limits. There is no more space. As the sun sets, smoke drifts through the mountains, the burning off of the maize creates a ring of fire around the jungle, steadily penetrating further and further towards the centre. The kids go home to eat and the sounds of babies crying and dogs barking are both comforting and melancholic,

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suggesting the warmth of family and home yet also the isolation of the town. Later on, fireworks echo through the valleys like canons. The Junta never got back to me ... ... But the various stories related to Celso all contributed, without exception, to inspire in him a terrific fear of the vast jungle. Nobody of course had any definite intention of making Celso desist from his task. Nobody really cared whether Celso perished in the jungle or not. The narratives were made mostly to enjoy the changing expressions of the interested listener, to pass the time away and to get excited over one’s own story. Ghost stories, tales of spooks, are not told at night to make someone desist from crossing the cemetery if that is his road home. They are told to spend a pleasant evening by watching with delight the terrorstricken faces of one’s audience. (Traven, 1982: 43).

Notes 1. For histories of the Zapatistas and the uprising excellent books have been written by Carlos Tello Díaz (2005), and John Womack Jr (2009). 2. The indigenous communities of Chiapas are not homogenous. In the highlands and the Lacandon Jungle where the Zapatista Uprising is centred there are four main ethnic groups: Chol, Tojolabal, Tzeltal, and Tzotzil. Migrations into the jungle for a range of political, religious and economic reasons over the last 50 years have created an extremely complex cultural landscape. For a fantastic collection of essays on indigenous cultures and identity and their relation to the uprising see Jan Rus et al. (2003). The term indio (Indian) has mountains of literature written about it. For the purpose of this essay I will use italics to recognize the complexity of the term and the contexts in which it is used. Throughout Mexico and Chiapas it is frequently used in both positive and derogatory ways. For insights into the original conception of the Indian in the New World see Tzvetan Todorov (1984), and Nicolás Wey Gómez (2008). For the history and development of the concept and its politics in Mexico see Guillermo Bonfil Batalla (2008), and Carlos Montemayor (2000), Roger Bartra (2005), Enrique Florescano (2005). 3. For a history of indigenous uprisings in Chiapas see Antonio García de León (2002). 4. For more information on the human rights situation in Chiapas in the aftermath of the uprising see the reports produced by: Centro de derechos humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (1997, 1998, 1999, 2000). For information on the peace dialogues see, Marco Antonio Bernal Gutiérrez and Miguel Ángel Romero Miranda. (1999). 5. For a brief history of Chiapas see Emilio Zebedúa (2003). 6. Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Argentine revolutionary. Emiliano Zapata, Mexican revolutionary, after whom the Zapatistas are named as well as the above-mentioned town. Subcomandante Marcos, Zapatista leader and poster boy. 7. La Junta de Buen Gobierno (The Junta of Good Government) Autonomous governing bodies initiated by the Zapatista communities.

References Bartra R (2005) La Jaula de la Melancolía. Identidad y Metamorfosis del Mexicano. Mexico: Debolsillo. Bernal Gutiérrez AM and Romero Miranda MA (1999) Chiapas: Crónica de una negociación. Diciembre de 1994–Marzo de 1997. Mexico: Rayuela Editores. Bonfil Batalla G (2008) México Profundo. Una Civilización Negada. Mexico: Debolsillo. Benjamin T (2000) A time of reconquest: History, the Maya revival, and the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. American Historical Review, April pp. 417–450. Centro de derechos humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. (1997) Camino a la massacre. Informe especial sobre Chenalhó. San Cristóbal de las Casas: Centro de derechos humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas.

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Author biography Paul Reade is currently undertaking a PhD at Swinburne University, Australia. His research revolves around Chiapas, Mexico, and the Zapatista Uprising of 1994. He is particularly interested in the spectacle of resistance and the spaces in which this theatre is acted out.