Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional
The Zapatista uprising of January 1994 against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and against neoliberal policies in general constituted the inaugural point of a new conception of social antagonism in which social networks and tactical media played a key role.
The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) (Zapatista National Liberation Army) is a guerrilla movement born in 1984 in the Lacandón Jungle in Chiapas, a state of southeast Mexico that is the home of many indigenous Mayan communitiesTzotzil, Tzetzal, Chol, Tojolabal, Mam, and Zoque. The Zapatistas take their name from Emiliano Zapata, one of the leaders of the Mexican revolution of the turn of the 20th century who fought against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, demanding land redistribution.
The Zapatistas are considered the first postmodern revolutionary movement because they did not aim to take control of the country but to mobilize people to build a more fair and inclusive democracy in Mexico, where, since 1929, presidents were suspected of coming to power through electoral fraud in order to secure the one-party hegemony ruling.
The Zapatistas carried out a tactical use of media that proved instrumental in spreading the news about the abuses committed by the Mexican government against the indigenous communities in Chiapas. In order to gain international support, the Zapatistas combined digital media (at the beginning basically email) with traditional forms of storytelling. Even though in Chiapas many areas did not have access to electricity, the presence of several NGOs in the region facilitated the constitution of a network, ensuring that messages reached different crucial points. A first message sent by email to a group of supporters was distributed in different circuits through the then popular bulletin boards and listservsprecursors of todays blogs. These forums allowed activists and scholars from all over the world to follow the news about the conflict and to stay connected to create a collective response to it.
The movement also placed strategic value in structured, embodied behavior: they carefully crafted their public appearances to achievediscursively, visually, and performaticallya sophisticated poetics of presence. This fact turned them into fascinating epistemological objects for scholars and intellectuals working in the field of cultural production. Their use of ski masksaligned in a tradition of Mexican mask-performance that expands from popular entertainment in the practice of lucha libre to its parodic use in performers such as Superbarrio Gómezserved, pragmatically, to cover their individual identities and thus resist repression, and symbolically, it turned invisibility into a visual event. Marcos alluded to the relationship between the mask and Zapatista presence stating that theirs is a mask that reveals, the silence that speaks.
The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) (Zapatista National Liberation Army) is a guerrilla movement born in 1984 in the Lacandón Jungle in Chiapas, a state of southeast Mexico that is the home of many indigenous Mayan communitiesTzotzil, Tzetzal, Chol, Tojolabal, Mam, and Zoque. The Zapatistas take their name from Emiliano Zapata, one of the leaders of the Mexican revolution of the turn of the 20th century who fought against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, demanding land redistribution.
The Zapatistas are considered the first postmodern revolutionary movement because they did not aim to take control of the country but to mobilize people to build a more fair and inclusive democracy in Mexico, where, since 1929, presidents were suspected of coming to power through electoral fraud in order to secure the one-party hegemony ruling.
The Zapatistas carried out a tactical use of media that proved instrumental in spreading the news about the abuses committed by the Mexican government against the indigenous communities in Chiapas. In order to gain international support, the Zapatistas combined digital media (at the beginning basically email) with traditional forms of storytelling. Even though in Chiapas many areas did not have access to electricity, the presence of several NGOs in the region facilitated the constitution of a network, ensuring that messages reached different crucial points. A first message sent by email to a group of supporters was distributed in different circuits through the then popular bulletin boards and listservsprecursors of todays blogs. These forums allowed activists and scholars from all over the world to follow the news about the conflict and to stay connected to create a collective response to it.
The movement also placed strategic value in structured, embodied behavior: they carefully crafted their public appearances to achievediscursively, visually, and performaticallya sophisticated poetics of presence. This fact turned them into fascinating epistemological objects for scholars and intellectuals working in the field of cultural production. Their use of ski masksaligned in a tradition of Mexican mask-performance that expands from popular entertainment in the practice of lucha libre to its parodic use in performers such as Superbarrio Gómezserved, pragmatically, to cover their individual identities and thus resist repression, and symbolically, it turned invisibility into a visual event. Marcos alluded to the relationship between the mask and Zapatista presence stating that theirs is a mask that reveals, the silence that speaks.
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