A decentralized community in Chiapas, Mexico, considered the most significant recent agrarian movement by Indigenous communities, they embrace territory as a network of relationships and prioritize a situated alternative to dominant patterns of living, decision-making, and place making
Context
“The voices of Indigenous people in Mexico have been either passively ignored or brutally silenced for most of the last five hundred years. Indigenous lands and resources have been repeatedly stolen and the people themselves exploited under some of the worst labour conditions in Mexico. The official policies of the Mexican state have been largely oriented toward assimilation, with only lip service given to the value of the country’s diverse ethnic, cultural, and linguistic heritage.”
Chiapas is one of the richest states in Mexico and yet it is also home to some of the poorest people in the country. Chiapas is abundant in natural resources and agricultural land and yet, in 1994, research showed that more than half of the population lacked access to drinking water and school education.
In 1994, Mexico signed up to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which enabled large-scale ownership and ranching by foreign companies. This devastated the livelihoods of small-scale farmers through land dispossession and polluting agricultural and industrial practices.
Practice
The Zapatista movement of Indigenous Mexicans emerged in response to this devastation. The movement officially began in eastern Chiapas, but followed decades of widespread political reorganisation occurring across Indigenous communities since the 1960s. The Zapatistas demanded official legal recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples and improvement of living conditions. They argued for autonomy as a collective right, and called for self-governance of their territories and resources.
From a Zapatista perspective, territory is not a defined physical space but is formed through relationships. Communities (pueblos) comprise flows of communication, negotiation, and confrontation between individual and communal needs, and a person’s sense of self is attuned to the larger scale of community. Communities gather at meeting places which also serve as seats of government. Called Caracoles, these meeting places are named after the word for snail, because their social structure spirals outward into the community and environment in a form that resembles a snail’s shell.
Central to the history and collective memory of Indigenous Mexicans is the struggle to return to land stolen by colonial conquest. Colonial land dispossession, and the imposition of property and ownership continued more recently in global trade agreements such as NAFTA, run counter to Indigenous understandings of land stewardship. The Zapatista movement points out the perversity and violence of owning nature by describing it as being akin to owning one’s own mother. Understanding nature as exceeding any possibility of objectification and ownership, and as being irreducible to human-centred ends, the Zapatista movement encourages ecologically careful systems of agriculture, and extends this understanding of respect to systems of governance, for example, by maintaining equitable gender relations within communities and leadership. Being aware and respectful of others, both human and more-than-human, the Zapatistas construct what they refer to as “A World Where Many Worlds Fit”.