>A bunch of coy, deceptive, educated, urban cosmopolites are "really"
>running things in Chiapas. Now I get it: Marcos et. al. are really
>Elders of Zion!
I assume this is a joke.
>I've heard many impressions at odds with your Turkish friend's, and
>it raises the question: under what circumstances could one take a
>visit to Chiapas and obtain an accurate idea of the relation between
>the Zaps and local communities? I don't know. My guess is it would
>be pretty hard - especially if one doesn't happen to speak Tzotzil
>or Tzeltal (which presumably your Turkish acquaintance does not).
You're right, though you don't have to speak any language to notice when women are not talking in the presence of men.
>Yet your friend's impression, combined with your a priori distrust
>of savvy cosmopolitans mixing with locals,
I must have expressed myself rather badly if that's what you think I think. I find the idea of cosmopolitan radical intellectuals mixing with locals to be an excellent idea, with great potential benefits for both parties to the transaction.
> has you quickly dismiss what the non-indigenous Zap members have
>consistently said. That they came to the region more as
>vanguardists wanting to organize a guerilla army to overthrow the
>state. But when they were exposed to the local scene and actually
>asked what the people themselves wanted, they soon discovered that
>seizing state power wasn't it. Local communities thought that would
>be pointless because the state was bound to remain an oppressive
>institution. What they wanted was communal autonomy, an army to
>protect their own local communities, the use of their local,
>consensus based political decision-making processes rather than a
>party structure, etc.
Having just read Judith Adler Hellman's fascinating Socialist Register piece <http://www.yorku.ca/socreg/hellman.txt>, I'm not sure that "communal autonomy" is an unproblematic thing. The communities themselves are deeply divided by ethnicity, religion, and political preference. Hellman quotes an anonymous source:
"This concept of autonomy is illusory because it suggests that caciquismo, the divisive forces of class, religion, political affiliation, and all the corrupt and violent people are external to indigenous communities and can be shut out once the communities gain autonomous control over their affairs. But these forces don't lie outside of indigenous communities. They are already deeply rooted inside these communities, and autonomous administration will only reinforce the divisions and the dominance of the powerful over the weak, of rich over poor, of men over women."
She quotes another:
"What I think is needed is not autonomy but a serious redistributive policy. Autonomy would only mean that these impoverished people would be even more enclosed in their misery. What we should be demanding is that the poorest, disadvantaged regions receive a greater proportion of the national wealth. It's little wonder that this proposal on autonomy is the only part of the San Andrés agreement that the Mexican state was willing to sign on to. It costs the state nothing if the indigenous people close in on themselves."
Hellman also points out that Mexican nationalism has historically used reinvented myths about the indigenous as part of the nation-building exercise - which complicates the picture a lot.
>So there is something weirdly circular about pulling inauthenticity
>out of the fact that the local communities wouldn't have just risen
>up "on their own." Had they done so they would have been instantly
>slaughtered.
I'm not making any kind of claim about inauthenticity; it's claims of authenticity that frequently make me nervous, in fact. And one of the reasons I like the meeting of cosmopolitans and rural peasants is that had it not been for the publicity the Zaps earned around the world, the Mexican state would have slaughtered the rebels.
>By this way of stacking things, Mayans can only be authentic by
>living up to some first-world notion of self-enclosed, static
>tradition (and in so doing becoming slaughtered martyrs).
True. I don't think that Mayans are static, or under any obligation to be authentic. Not sure where you got the idea I did.
Doug