Zapatista micropolitics and antifascist education

Abstract

A critique of both homogenizing and vertical power runs through the Zapatista social project in Chiapas, Mexico, lending a distinctive character to both Zapatismo’s political vision of self-governance and to the educational vision of its community schools. Zapatismo’s critical practices may thus offer valuable contributions to antifascist praxis and pedagogy. This paper considers anti/fascism through a micropolitical lens, focusing on two prevailing tendencies: binarization of power relations and homogenization of identities. It then suggests that Zapatista practices undermine microfascist tendencies in social-political life through subversion of command relationships, plural identification, critique of representation and safeguarding of alterity. The paper concludes by tracing the manner in which a critique of state schooling within Chiapas’s indigenous communities has led to the development of Zapatista autonomous schools, examining ways in which these schools refuse totalization and prefigure community autonomy.