In Entre La Luz y la Sombra unx camarada from the EZLN claims: Su mirada se había detenido en el único mestizo que vieron con pasamontañas, es decir que no miraron. Growing in the south of Mexico City, the window I had into the Zapatista thought, labor, and aesthetics was the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at UNAM. As the daughter of two Pumas, I spent many days walking the triangle between la Facultad de Economía, la Facultad de Derecho, la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras and most importantly, Las Islas. As a young girl I would stop to listen young universitarios talk about Marcos, or adopt Zapatista communal practices of resistance within the university. The figure of the indigenous Zapatista woman was, and will always be, the most important symbol of resistance in Mexico. However, I quickly noticed that even in its purposeful and tactical ambiguity, the figure of El Subcomandante, would often cloud the essence of la lucha. Visually, the image most often circulated of the Zapatista movement is the one of this mestizo man, front and center. Which is why, in spite of the ways the Zapatistas used and co-opted their own narratives in the media, I personally appreciated the performative gesture Prof. Taylor mentions in this weeks text in which el Subcomandante performs the death of el Subcomandante Marcos and the birth of Subcomandante Galeano. This metamorphosis invites us to ask what Chris Hedges wonders via Taylors text: What do the Zapatistas need us to be?
As Ricardo Dominguez highlights the aesthetic avant- garde practices of the Zapatista movement, I wonder if we can position the guerilla practice of naming, and renaming as a fundamental performative tool which not only functions as an act of remembrance, or rather a re-living of a fallen comrade, but also as an aesthetic manifestation of reinvention which fights against the narrative which always positions indigeneous communities as windows into our origins, and our past, rather than as a contemporary and futuristic form of existence with endless potential of revolution, reinvention, and rebirth. Thus, I turn to Jill Lane’s and Ricardo Dominguez’ re-telling of the “discursive missile” from Zapatista Air Force to describe the Zapatistas body: (it is) a difficult thing to stop and arrest, it’s like a poem.