Comandanta Ramona, officer of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (date unknown) | Heriberto Rodriguez / CC BY 2.0
The so-called “first postmodern revolution,” the Zapatista uprising of 1994, came at a time when the internet was becoming a worldwide phenomenon. And with this Pandora’s box of widely accessible imagery and information newly opened, people were able to witness the uprising in more-or-less real time.
Based in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (also known as EZLN, or the Zapatistas) was made up of Indigenous peoples who took up armed resistance against the Mexican government. At the time, despite Chiapas’s significant agricultural contributions to the federal economy, many locals didn’t have access to drinking water, electricity, education past the third grade, or indoor plumbing. The leftist Zapatistas knew that these conditions and the poverty of Indigenous people would be worsened by the Mexican government’s plans to enter the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which promoted, among other reforms, the privatization of communal farms. In Compañeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories (Seven Stories Press, 2015), Hilary Klein and her interviewees describe the collective’s response: On January 1, 1994, the Zapatistas covered their faces with balaclavas and red bandannas, slung rifles over their shoulders, and seized control of seven towns across eastern Chiapas, issuing a declaration of autonomy that was read around the world.
Decades later, the Zapatistas would come to influence movements ranging from the 2013 Brazilian protests against high public transit fees to the international Occupy movement of 2011–12.
But when I first saw images of the uprising, what I noticed about the Zapatistas was that they looked cool.
I grew up in Chicago, which has a large Mexican population, and heard about the Zapatista movement from my more politically aware Mexican American friends, many of them young women. We talked about common struggles between Latino/Mexican and Black communities—conversations we’re still having today.
Of course, the Black Panther Party often came up, especially the assassination of Fred Hampton and his colleague Mark Clark by the Chicago Police in 1969. My father, who, like many young Black Chicagoans, knew of Hampton’s work, told me that he visited the building where the slaughter occurred and saw the bloodstains and bullet casings that had yet to be collected.
The Zapatista “uniform” reminded me of the functional yet culturally relevant nature of the BPP uniform that made revolutionary action stylish and attractive. For the Panthers, a black-on-black aesthetic and natural hair were acts of resistance and visibility: an in-your-face rejection of white beauty standards and respectability politics. The black leather jackets, berets, and Afros were also part of the group’s public relations strategy to convey their militancy, celebrate the natural hair that we are still criticized for having, and encourage camaraderie. There were also practical aspects to the fashion of the BPP: The jackets were easily purchased and shared among young Black people and did not serve as a strong marker of gender in dress. Embracing the natural features and characteristics that white society denigrated as ugly, unprofessional, and unsightly linked the BPP to other movements in the Black American community. The BPP embraced our Blackness by entwining artistic, cultural, and political ideas.
Similarly, when I think of the Zapatistas now, I picture an army of Indigenous peoples, faces covered, clad in both traditional dress that reflected the groups’ cultural history and military-style fatigues. The Zapatista movement was a clandestine movement leading up to the January 1 occupation; the masks not only served as a way for people to conceal their identities but showed solidarity within a diverse gathering of people, as Klein points out in Compañeras.
A mask functions as a practical tactic for those who may need to conceal their identity when taking action against the state. Anonymity is also practical in that it can provide a sense of collective identity, which can help unite people engaged in a struggle. In both cases, even as they adopted a movement uniform that obscured individual identity, these communities of resistance wanted to be seen. As Subcomandante Marcos wrote of the Zapatistas, “In order for them to see us, we covered our faces.”
As the collective EDELO write in their introduction to Zapantera Negra: An Artistic Encounter Between Black Panthers and Zapatistas (Common Notions, 2017), “Although the Black Panther and Zapatista movements occurred in distinct cultural, political, and historical milieus, the two share a common appreciation of the power of the image and written word to translate their respective social movements into personal, collective, transformative, and public experiences.” The collective EDELO (En Donde Era La ONU, “Where the UN Used to be,” in full) was established in 2009, when artists Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte repurposed an abandoned United Nations building in Chiapas, Mexico. (The UN left the building after displaced Indigenous locals occupied the space to bring awareness to humanitarian issues). In collaboration with the local community, Rollow and Duarte redesigned the building to create spaces and residencies for artists challenging institutional failures to serve people and countering oppression.
Zapantera Negra describes how EDELO invited Emory Douglas, the BPP Minister of Culture who created much of the movement’s powerful imagery, to Zapatista communities in Chiapas to work on the land and create art with them in 2013. Douglas often utilized thick lines, bold colors, and collage to produce work that was meant to inspire not only Black people but also marginalized people across the globe; his aim, he said, was to “construct a visual mythology of power for people who felt powerless and victimized.”
Zapantera Negra contains transcripts of conversations between the EDELO collective, Douglas, and Zoque artist Saul Kak about what the experience of collaboration was like between the two revolutionary movements. Both Douglas and Kak reiterate the power of revolutionary art to bridge differences. In the words of Kak: “The Zapatista demands of … earth, education, health, food, life, work, liberty, justice, democracy, independence, culture, information, [and] peace … They’re the same things that the Black Panthers were asking for.” While Douglas noted the differences between the movements (urban versus rural, for example), he emphasized that the groups are linked by promoting self-determination and “good government” for oppressed peoples against an unforgiving state.
Zapatista women play an active role in Zapatista society as organizers, leaders, and messengers—indeed, when I picture a Zapatista, I generally envision a brown-skinned woman with dark hair, her face mainly concealed by a red paisley-patterned bandanna or a black balaclava. The fact that Zapatista women both recognize and denounce patriarchy has been key to building the solidarity the movement relies on. Similarly, women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the precursor to the BPP, began to move away from the conservative dresses and relaxed hair of Black women activists of the 1950s civil rights movements toward more practical denim, leather, and natural hair styles. These choices were a movement not only against the constraints of the wider American society and its standards of femininity but also against the respectability politics of the Black community, which viewed SNCC’s style, because it was influenced by the clothing of sharecroppers in the American South as as “lower class” and at odds with their middle-class aesthetic.
A movement that centers the experience and knowledge of women who live in a society that is built in opposition to their comfort, contributions, and care illuminates the power structures of capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism; similarly, seeing how my mother, sister, and my sister’s oldest child navigate the world has allowed me to have a deeper understanding of how our systems of oppression function.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that most of what I learned about the Zapatistas came from Mexican women in Chicago who embrace their Indigenous heritage and work to create solidarity with Black people and others who have been dispossessed by white supremacy and racial capitalism. Our exchanges have influenced not only my thinking but my aesthetic sensibilities: the clothing I wear, the photographs I take, even my tattoos. I wear T-shirts that advertise the People’s Free Food Program; I wear my hair in its natural state. The Black Panthers and the Zapatistas have taught me that self-expression can be a powerful tool to combat oppression worldwide.
