The Zapatistas, Radical Democratic Citizenship, and Women's Struggles

Abstract

The Zapatista uprising in Chiapas has presented a challenge for theories of democracy and citizenship. Although the demands of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation are framed in terms of democratization, we should not assume that these demands can be contained within the individualist parameters of liberal political philosophy. I use social movement theory and discourse analysis to discuss the novelty and political significance of the Zapatista rebellion, giving particular attention to indigenous women within the movement and their gender-based claims. In July 1996 the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) held a week-long conference at five sites in the Central Highlands and Lacandon forest regions of Chiapas in southeastern Mexico. Delegates from more than 40 countries attended the meeting, entitled the Encounter against Neoliberalism and for Humanity. For 6 days more than 3,000 thousand Zapatista sympathizers from as far away as Japan, France, Australia, and Argentina discussed the impact of capitalist restructuring and strategies of resistance in their countries. The goal was simply to engage in dialogue and build understanding Social Politics Summer 1998 © 1998 Oxford University Press Zapatistas and Women's Struggles • 159 between different perspectives. It was united by the theme of neoliberalism and the future of humanity, but it did not offer any single theory or political ideology under which all resistance could be subsumed. Indeed, most delegates insisted on the need to avoid creating another International. The collapse of communism was understood less as the end of history and more as the opportunity to create a new political imaginary that could articulate the plurality of popular struggles through a decentralized and democratic movement for global change. Rejecting the idea of predetermined processes of human emancipation, the encounter instead identified itself as the international of hope. Its practice would be governed by solidarity, communication and cooperation in furthering resistance to neoliberalism. Rather than proposing a common set of actions, each delegation was free to adopt the tactics and strategies that corresponded most to their historical and geopolitical circumstances. This encounter therefore raised several issues that help us link the particular experience of Chiapas to global problems of exclusion, theories of citizenship, and women's struggles. National borders have certainly been transcended by the Zapatistas, despite the fact that they are territorially restricted by more than 30,000 troops of the Mexican army. Only three Zapatistas have been able to set foot outside Chiapas since the 1 January 1994 uprising. The first was Comandanta Ramona, a young indigenous woman who attended a national congress of indigenous peoples in Mexico City in October 1996. A year later, two other Zapatistas traveled to Spain to participate in the Second Intercontinental Encounter For Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. The Zapatistas have revealed in a dramatic way that if traditional citizenship operates spatially, global citizenship operates temporally, escaping statist identities and embarking on a journey to a not yet existent global political community (Falk 1994). These citizen pilgrims inevitably face the backlash of those political and social forces that reassert territoriality as the basis for one's identity, as witnessed in the Mexican case by the government's attempt to delegitimize the Zapatistas by treating them as a purely local expression of civil disorder. However, the global appeal of the Zapatistas has now been firmly established, aided in part by cyberspace but more importantly by the novelty and inclusiveness of their political discourse. The fact that the intercontinental encounter was affectionately dubbed the intergaIdctica by organizers and participants only served to underline the temporal and global aspects of citizenship, rather than the territorial and statist traditions of modern social theory. Such an inclusive project raises once more the question of how women's struggles for equality are to be articulated with other social