Zelig in the Jungle: Neozapatismo and the Construction of the International Indigenous Subject

Abstract

This article argues that as an inclusive social movement, the National Liberation Zapatista Army (EZLN), opens diverse critical challenges to unilateral interpretations of globalization—via the construction of communicative action undertaken by international alternative social networks. There is a subversive potentiality in the very concept of globalization as possibility: on the one hand, globalization should be appropriated as rejecting absolute truths of what it is supposed to mean to be globalized; on the other hand, it should provide spaces for the communicative action of subaltern counterpublics in which different human groups interact, discuss diverse topics and create social networks. Likewise, the article argues that the subject is the main agent of liberation, wherein no identity determinant dominates another—class, race, sex, ethnic group, gender—but the subject is the quintessential vanguard—as a plural collectivity—of social struggles forging a potential solidarity against diverse forms of domination. Therefore, if the Neozapatista experience has a lesson, it is precisely its initiative to transform the international indigenous subject—as well as other oppressed identities—into a catalyst for claims of unity in difference.