A few weeks ago, during my visit to the Zapatista Caracol in Oventic, I and the delegation I was with met with some of the promotores of Oventic’s health clinic. (Promotor is the term the Zapatistas use to refer to the workers in their autonomous schools and clinics—it more or less means "promoter." All of the promotores are indigenous people.) I asked only one question, fully expecting to get an unpredictable answer.

I asked the promotores what their plans for the clinic were for the next few years. In the States, we would expect a clear answer to this question from a representative of any business or non-profit, an answer which would probably include a summary of the vision of the organization, the challenges it anticipates facing, its goals and objectives. The answer I received was: "To keep moving forward." That’s it. Their master plan is to keep advancing in their project, a step at a time, and not necessarily knowing where they are going. That answer summed up something very important about the nature of the Zapatista project. They are building and advancing on a foundation of uncertainty, of not being sure of the answers, not for themselves and certainly not for anyone else. They are uncertain, but they are doing the best they can in the place where they are, following the demands of their dignity, trying to build an alternative to the system in which they have no voice. Subcomandante Marcos has made this point explicit in some of his writings, but the Oventic promotor’s answer made it just as eloquently to me. And with luck and commitment, that perspective of uncertainty, of avoiding ideologies and the imposition of ideas on others, can continue to spread among the people and organizations around the world that are formulating critiques of the current system and building alternatives to it.

More than three years ago now, I came across the simple little philosophical formulation that made me decide to enter Teach for America. I found it in a text on the ethics of gifts, in a seminar during my first semester of my senior year. The author simply suggested that there are some moral obligations that don’t apply to everyone, but that require action from the people that they do apply to. Those obligations derive from ideals combined with opportunities to act. I already felt the strong ideal of a just society, then I found the opportunity to act of Teach for America, and I felt that taking that opportunity was an obligation that I couldn’t turn my back on. I have since finished that opportunity, but the obligation to act is even stronger for me than before. And part of why I came to Chiapas was to be around a community of activists and to think through where I belong in the river of currents, streams, and eddies that is the movement for global justice.

One thing that has come more and more clearly into focus for me during my time in Mexico has been that I want to fully embrace the "in-betweenness" of my identity and that I want the work I do to reflect that identity. I spent my childhood in and out of the US, setting up an identity that straddled places. Now, as my affinity and love for Mexico and Latin America has grown so much, shaped by my two years in Pilsen, by my time in Mexico, and by my very deep and special relationship with Claudia, my identity is planting another root here. Since I feel partly, but not completely, part of all of the places that have formed me, it’s making a lot of sense to me that my work should reflect my identity. I want to be involved with building connections, alliances and perhaps most of all, understanding between US and Latin American civil society, and between different levels of that society, perhaps between international, national, and local groups.

I’ve been thinking, talking, and reading a lot here about what "success" means to people involved in working for global justice. All of us here, and all of you that are reading this, have had plenty of conversations that go over in painstaking detail all of the powerful forces that are holding up the kind of system that we have now. Many of us are thoroughly pessimistic in our predictions about what’s to come. For me, the way to deal with this pessimism has been to hold on to the ethical lens that brought me to doing justice work in the first place: that I have to keep learning and working, taking and giving back, because there’s nothing else for me to do. It’s a responsibility to others and to myself, to dedicate my energies and actions toward the achievement of my ideals. That ethical framework that I saw written out as the equation "commitment to ideals + opportunity to work toward those ideals = obligation to act on the opportunity" in my philosophy book in Professor Smith’s class has sunk into and pervaded who I am. That’s given me a kind of security in dealing with the pessimism: things might go awfully, or they might not, but that’s out of my hands—all that I can control is what I do. And tempering that overarching pessimism is a sly little hopeful voice. It reminds me that we have an utterly dismal track record of predicting the future. That it’s impossible to know the consequences of the things that we do, in the world’s infinitely complex web of streams and forces and currents and pushing and pulling. Emerson’s essay "Civil Disobedience" from 1849 was ignored for the rest of that century and a big part of the 20th....until it became a vital document for the civil rights movement. Dylan: "Something’s happening and you don’t know what it is/do you, Mr. Jones..." Gandhi: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." And for most of us, who aren’t going to win in the way that Gandhi won, victories have to come in little, indirect, complicated ways that we may never even be aware of. So, I’m back to where I started—having to do what feels the most right for me to do, to add one more ripple into the river.