At the age of 17 or 18 I went to visit my family in Mexico and encountered in the southern region of the country a world entirely unlike the one I remembered growing up in. The arrival (or rather, exponential expansion) of European & American tourism, Canadian zinc/gold/copper mining companies, and foreign investment post-NAFTA (which rendered 80% of the lands in the central valleys of Oaxaca Canadian and American property) had introduced a level of violence and subjugation which I had never in my life experienced before. Foreign investment had opened an economic Pandora’s box, decimating ejidal usufruct land holdings and plunging even more of the population into relative poverty, stripping communities of their lands and lowering the power of the local peso at the weekend food market. This, in turn, had the result of greater civil unrest and therefore greater militarization by the American-backed Mexican Armed Defense forces. Additionally, the threat to indigenous lifeways and food systems created an economic and social opening for narcotrafficking.
This is all to say that within an hour of my arrival, I had experienced the highest level of militarization in my life (think giant military trucks and men with machine guns every two blocks), my family expressing concerns over extortion by local narcos, and most horrifically an extremely traumatizing shooting that left a man dead on the ground at my feet while I called for an ambulance. The ensuing time that I spent with family in Mexico recovering from this PTSD-inducing tragedy was incredibly transformative, and although for several months after I experienced a level of hatred and rancor for the first world which I couldn’t have imagined before, this hatred eventually developed into a hopefully relationship with the history of Mexican land reform struggle.
My mom introduced me to readings about NeoZapatismo, an ideology from Southern Mexico which continues the revolutionary communist land reform work started by the ELS (the Southern Liberation Army) in 1911. My great great grandparents had fought in the ELS, and a century later I read about the post-NAFTA armed rebellion in Southern Mexico, which synthesized Maoist, anarchist, and uniquely Mayan thought into a new kind of “cosmovision.” I was grateful that my mom gifted me a book that applied Foucaldian thought to the Mexican Zapatista situation, and I learned about the concept of “a world where many worlds exist.” Through this many-worlds concept, the NeoZapatista educational project becomes not just about imparting upon those in learning a correct social and political doctrine, but rather about communicating what I can only describe as a charmed “cosmovision”, one where both children and adults learn, through dialectical discussion and artmaking, to reimagine their very perception of reality and the relationship between people. Thus education is both about proletarian conscientization and about establishing invisible and mystical ties that bind a community together into a complex but communal ethic. This abstract idea for education informs this point from the Zapatista educational plan: “The educational plan attempts to prioritize own/proper culture and all those elements which form part of an indigenous cosmovision. These areas of learning are elaborated through the demands of the communities, and give answer to the kind of education which is required by our communities.”
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