Abstract
With a few notable exceptions, most books, articles, and chronicles on the Zapatistas and their leader, Subcomandante Marcos, tend to frame the indigenous uprising in Chiapas within the extended mural of revolutionary Latin America. More than the particularities of a group of armed campesinos who stand against capitalism, oppression, and inequality on January 1, 1994 in the Lacandón rainforest, what seems to catch the attention of several academics and analysts who write at a safe distance from southern Mexico and its peripheral zones is the Zapatistas’ resemblance to other revolutionary leftist groups and guerilla movements of the turbulent 60s, 80s, and 90s. Inevitably, then, a good number of studies chronicle the original uprising of 1994 in reaction to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); the collectivity of a group that is nonetheless led by a new, charming, and postmodern Che Guevara, whose army unexpectedly seizes San Cristóbal de las Casas, Altamirano, Ocosingo, and Las Margaritas; the central participation of women; and its Marxist ideology, or what is best described as a mixture—as Marcos himself asserts on television, national radio, and the internet—of patriotic values and elements of Mexico’s indigenous culture, the historic heritage of the Mexican Left, Mexico’s military history, and lessons from national liberation movements.
He risks his life for what he believes […] It must be hard to be a guerilla. Being Marcos must be harder than all of that. Even if he jokes, even if he’s already a celebrity.
Elena Poniatowska, “Entrevista al Subcomandante Marcos”1
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© 2014 Debra A. Castillo and Stuart A. Day
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Estrada, O. (2014). The Masked Intellectual: Marcos and the Speech of the Rainforest. In: Castillo, D.A., Day, S.A. (eds) Mexican Public Intellectuals. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137392299_10
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