Participating in delegations is often the way people who don't have time for a longer experience in Chiapas choose to begin to develop an understanding of the political situation.  Delegations are designed to be educational experiences.  A group of people from other countries and social and economic realities spend one to two weeks meeting with local organizations and visiting communities, listening to stories and presentations in the hopes of deepening their understanding of different political and social realities.

But because most delegations happen over the span of just one week, they're not the ideal way to comprehend social processes that have developed over more than five hundred years.  There are many workshops and presentations packed into one delegation, with limited time for reflection about what one is living and learning.  However, in order to learn as much as possible in a short delegation, making it less touristy and more politically productive, there are a set of practical guidelines all of us can follow.

Leave you tourist behavior behind:

Tourism is often said to help communities economically.  We hear things like: "We are bringing money to poor people."  "Before tourism, these people were miserable."  "Tourism developed this region."  These are all excuses people use to justify their behavior as tourists.  And, not coincidentally, that's also the same speech the government uses to justify investments in tourism.  But it's important to think critically about who tourism is actually helping.  Who are we making richer?  Most tourism makes the rich richer.  Money flows into the pockets of the owners of coffee shops, souvenir stores, bars and other places frequented by tourists.  In the same way, tourism generally reproduces the same alienating working conditions and low wages present in the dominant capitalist economy.  Tourism is also justified in that it purportedly promotes "development."  To the extent that the idea of development has taken on the meaning that the so-called "developed" countries have assigned it, development connotes a consumerist, anti-ecological world with no roots in local culture, based upon the exploitation of other people.  Isn't this idea exactly the opposite of what the Zapatistas are trying to construct?

The way in which tourists come to "consume" local culture is also offensive.  Culture is not static and people are not animals in a zoo.  But tourists easily forget that when they take photographs of whatever they consider "exotic".