BY LEILA

November 20th is the 96th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. The three events that took place in San Cristóbal de las Casas on this anniversary speak to the variety of ways that different Mexican social groups relate to history as well as the disparate ways that they place emphasis on the revolutionary context. For some Mexicans, the anniversary of the revolution is a simple day of celebration. These people dedicate a slew of parades and fiestas to the commemoration of a glorious history and foster a deep sense of national pride. For other Mexicans, the day of commemoration is a site of ongoing struggle. The multiple and deep social inequalities, the poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy and lack of access to basic health and education services that many Mexicans still live, as well as the illegitimate prosperity of Mexico's small upper class, and the fraudulency of the nation's so called "democracy," all become important sites of struggle on this day. From this perspective, the revolution is not over in Mexico. History is but a site of inspiration and strength for the revolution that is still being lived.

(One)
The day begins with poms poms and school girls dressed in traditional colonial Mexican garb. The centre of San Cristobal is impassable, the dense parade in celebration of the Mexican Revolution winding around the city's central blocks. School children are followed by men on horseback who are followed by dancing troops, all assembled to commemorate the rich and multiple histories of this country - indigenous, campesino, colonial and revolutionary.

A mass of children and men dressed as Emiliano Zapata pass by San Cristóbal's historic centre in a haze of firecracker explosions, their identical paste on mustaches curved up at the ends, sombreros titled forward into the sun and plastic rifles lifted into the air with childish hands. The urban mestizo crowd smiles delightedly. "Zapata Vive!" the children, an exclamation which is both a surprising and non-sequeter cry from what appear to be affluent urban children in the midst of a community parade.

Emiliano Zapata, who was the commander of the Liberating Army of the South and a key personality in the 1910 Mexican Revolution, is also the man from whom the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN in its spanish initials) take its naming inspiration and the man whom all of the radical social struggles of Mexican invoke.

Historically, Emiliano Zapata was a peasant who fought with direct action for equitable distribution and community control of land. He led peasant armies (the members of which were also known as zapatistas) against the federal army and he redistributed countryside land to communities. Zapata is most well known for the 1911 Plan de Ayala which demanded that all stolen land be returned to the communities, that 1/3 of hacienda land be redistributed to landless peasants and that the land and property of those who resisted the plan be nationalized. Zapata was the radical social dimension of the Mexican Revolution.
In his own time, Zapata failed to win favour with city dwellers and he launched his struggle directly against the affluent elites of the country. Eventually, Zapata was assassinated by the founders of the modern Mexican state. (La Botz 43-50) That is why, today, it is strange to hear his name chanted and celebrated in a parade that does not define itself as political, much less revolutionary and controversial, especially when his name is spoken from the mouths of those with whom he never won favour in his own time.

A historical wall has been erected. The Zapata who appears in the celebratory parade is an icon of a man who is depicted as part of the distant and glorious past of Mexico; a past that is distinctly separate from the reality of the present. As Batalla says in his infamous "Mexico Profundo" of the contemporary perspective in Mexico, "We do not recognize a historical connection or a continuity with the past." (Batalla 3) While history in Mexico is exalted in celebrations and representations, there is a distinct rupture between that past and the present. This rupture denies the potency of the historical image and its relationship to the living world.
Across this rupture, the Zapata of the Mexican Revolution has lost all of his fire in today's celebration. In the parade he is not controversial and combative but iconized and tamed. His invocation is stripped of the social commentary that his historical life proclaimed.

(Two)
By the afternoon the spectacle of the light hearted parade has dissipated and the popcorn munching crowd has begun to drift home for the lunch hour. It is time for a different type of assembly to fill the streets. With green and white banners reading "No to the Free Trade Agreement," a few hundred campesinos (farmers) spread through the avenues around the central plaza. Like those in the morning's parade, they also shout "Zapata vive" but this time the exclamation is laced with passion and anger, not frivolity. “Zapata lives! The struggle continues!” they thunder.

No longer is history a dead thing, politely veiled and reinterpreted across a hundred long years. Now history is called to life, the vibrancy of a long ago social movement called upon to illuminate the continuing injustices that are lived in today's Mexico.

The campesino, in the streets of the city where the richness of the countryside arrives by the barrel and bus load, presents a loaded political contrast. Fruits and vegetables that have cost the campesino months of toiling labour are sold at five pesos a kilo in the central market. With such little revenue, the campesino lives humbly, working strenuously and earning just enough money to feed the family. Meanwhile, grandiose colonial houses, a collage of trendy clothing stores and coffee shops, and streets lined with cars of the latest model demonstrate the wealth that is concentrated in the city's centre. The inequalities of a system that grant such exorbitant privileges to some while failing to reimburse the toil and labour of others are redolent in every step the campesinos take on these city blocks.

As the demonstration passes down the street, a few of the youths lag behind, ski masks covering their faces, and spray paint a trail of political graffiti. Once they are done it reads, "No to the Free Trade Agreement," on every wall.

The Free Trade Agreement, known commonly as NAFTA, has devastated the campesino class of Mexico. It has further decreased the market price of crops and made it nearly impossible for small scale farmers to sustain themselves. While the processes of neoliberalism and globalization of trade have long been in motion ­ processes that intentionally drop the market value of crops so as to make nations more competitive for trade and that concentrate farming into large scale operations that are more suited for massive exportation ­ NAFTA was a final blow, passed in 1994, that has precipitated the intensification of poverty of the small-scale campesino class throughout Mexico. It is the individual family that has suffered, produce prices having dropped so low as to make basic survival a challenge.

Other trade agreements, recently passed or still on the table of international policy, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), threaten to further impoverish the individual men, women and children of the global south for the sake of increasing the volume of international trade and decreasing the price of produce in "developed" nations.

As the march passes out of town it chants, "Fuera Ulises Ruiz! Fuera Calderon! (Get out Ulises Ruiz! Get out Calderon!)," drawing the link between the struggle of the campesino in Chiapas, the struggle for the removal of the illegitimate governor of Oaxaca and the nationwide resistance to the fraudulently elected soon to be president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon.

In all three cases the people have been manipulated and exploited by a dominating and wealthy political class. The Chiapas campesino has been forsaken by a government more concerned with revenue from international trade than keeping its own citizens out of severe poverty. In Oaxaca more than 70% of the population lives in extreme poverty, meaning they don't have access to satisfy basic needs. The governor of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz has perpetuated this situation of extreme neglect, among other crimes, while continuing to pursue the wealth of the elite through pricey gentrification and tourist promotion plans. On a national level, Mexico's July 2nd presidential elections were tampered with. Felipe Calderon is the soon to be inaugurated* and fraudulent president of the country. He promises to continue down the path of trade liberalization, tourism promotion, and the garnering of capital for a wealthy elite while ignoring the needs and labour of the vast majority of Mexicans.

*As of publication, Felipe Calderon has already been inaugurated. He was sworn into office on December 1st, 2006. The ceremony was brief, tense and militarized. While congress clashed over the legitimacy of the action, thousands of PFP officers guarded the senate installations and a simultaneous protest in the central plaza denounced Calderon .

(Three)
On the outskirts of San Cristobal de las Casas, the morning of November 20th dawns with every highway that leads into and out of the city blocked by two thousand zapatistas.
November 20th, as well as being the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, is also the day of national strike, called by the EZLN, in solidarity with the people of Oaxaca. The blockades, as the huge banners that are stretched across the highways read, reiterate the demands of the Oaxacan social movement: that Ulises Ruiz leave office and be held responsible for his many human rights violations, that the Preventative Federal Police leave the city, that immediate and unconditional liberty be granted to all political prisoners, that all existing arrest warrants be withdrawn, and that the repression that is occurring in Oaxaca be stopped.

The social movement of Oaxaca, which began this past May with the demand of the teachers union for better working conditions, has grown since its conception both in number and in the profundity of its social vision. Now thousands strong, the movement is centralized around the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO, in its spanish initials), an entity that was formed in response to a violent police initiative that attempted to force protestors out of the city's center in June. The APPO is a fusion of some 360 social organizations, as well as teachers, citizens and indigenous communities, and it convenes the self governance of the movement. The APPO does not lead the movement, nor does it encompass all of the movement´s many constitutive parts – rather, it is an assembly through which people can come together to discuss tactical and ideological organization.

The central demand of the APPO is the removal of governor Ulises Ruis from office. Ulises Ruiz, says the Oaxaca Network for Human Rights, came to power "by means of a huge security force and in the midst of denouncements of electoral fraud , and he has carried out his administration in an authoritarian manner since its commencement." During his six years in power there have been 25 deaths at the hands of the government, 600 citizens have been violently detained, more than 40 have been injured and threats have been made against 13 other people. What's more, Ulises Ruiz has invested hundreds of millions of pesos in gentrification of Oaxaca's city center while abandoning social projects throughout the impoverished state. In Oaxaca, 80% of the state's municipalities lack drainage, electricity and access to drinkable water and it is estimated that 73% of the population lives in what's defined as "extreme poverty," earning less than 2000 pesos a month as a household. ("Necedad Caciquil")
Through various forms of resistance and organization, the social movement of Oaxaca has economically and politically shut down the state's capital over the course of the past six months. Under the APPO the people of Oaxaca have taken the organization of themselves into their own hands and effectively immobilized and invalidated the structure of supposed democracy that is administered by the state. These structures have lost all power and Ulises Ruiz continues to be governor in name only.

The impressive feat of invalidating the government structures of the state has been achieved by calling upon history for tactical support and ideological inspiration. The people of Oaxaca have a long and rich history of resistance to state injustices, having long mounted campaigns to challenge the theft of natural resources and corporate bio-piracy and to protect their own exercise of autonomy. The use of the assembly as the convening point of the current social movement is itself a bit of wisdom pulled from the traditional model of governance used by the state's indigenous communities. The indigenous of Oaxaca, rather than using a state apparatus for governance, use a community assembly, complete with a popular jury to settle conflicts.

Other tactics of the movement, such as the use of barricades, molotovs and cohetones as means of resistance, are also culled from traditional practices. The barricades which have been central to the movement are a tactic drawn from nearly as far back as the Mexican Revolution itself. As Ricardo Flores Magón, a revolutionary Oaxaqueño of 1915, wrote "the barricade is a way for the people to respond to the military's use of trenches (as a battle tactic)." Today, as Preventative Federal Police flow into the city by the thousand, the barricades are still a way for the people to respond to the state's use of force.

Similarly, the molotovs that the people in resistance lob back at the police forces as they are assaulted with tear gas and automatic riffles, are a historic form of self-defense that have long been used in Mexican insurgent struggles. The cohetones (small single explosion fire works) that are used as signals between the people of the resistance and that are also fired in response to police force aggressions are traditionally used in ceremonies and celebrations: their reinterpretation as a means of defense and communication is a reharnassing of the rich histories of the people.

The revolution, in Oaxaca, is not celebrated: it is lived . What's more, the movements and people of the revolutions of history are not remembered as static, historically compartmentalized characters and events, but rather as lived and living realities which proceed fluidly into today, intimately connected with the present. From the tales of the revolutions of the past, today's movement draws power, hope and lessons: tactical lessons, such as the use of molotovs and barricades as methods of resistance, as well as ideological lessons, such as the possibility for radical change in the struggle against inequalities and corrupt power.

In the context of Oaxaca, just as in the context of the campesinos who marched through San Cristobal, the day of the revolution is understood not as a moment for celebration of a past that is distinctly separate from the present, but as a site of continuing struggle and a source of reinvigorated resistance.

The EZLN announcement of the day of the Mexican revolution as the day of national and international solidarity with the peoples of Oaxaca further underscores the strong ties between a revolutionary history and the injustices and battles of the present. While some may sit happily down with their historical texts and marvel over the long lost glories of the past, the rest of us know that neither the glories nor the brutalities of history have come to an end. As Oaxaca is both lived and remembered on this November 20th, as the Preventative Federal Police occupy the streets and those who fight for social change are shot at with semi-automatic rifles, and as the people of Mexico come together to organize and resist the systems of corrupt power that are imposed upon them, it becomes clear that history is not dead and that the revolution of 1910 is still alive − very much so .

Sources
Batalla, Bonfil. México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization. University of Texas Press.
Austin, 2001.
La Botz, Dan. "From Mexican Revolution to One Party State."" Democracy in Mexico:
Peasant Rebellion and Political Reform.
Vergara, Rosalia, Olmos, Jose Gil, Matias, Pedro. "La APPO por dentro." Processo.
5 November 2006
Vergara, Rosalia, Olmos, Jose Gil, Matias, Pedro. "Necedad caciquil." Processo.
5 November 2006