Introduction to FIRST WORLD HA, HA, HA! The Zapatista Challenge
1995
Intro by Elaine Katzenberger

...it is not only by shooting bullets in the battlefields that tyranny is overthrown, but also by hurling ideas of redemption, words of freedom and terrible anathemas against the hangmen that people bring down dictators and empires..."

—Emiliano Zapata

In early January of 1994, the story from Chiapas and the photos of Zapatistas were accompanied by the following headline in the San Francisco Examiner: "Roots of Rebellion: Poverty and Oppression." What could have provoked this sudden outburst of political truth on the front page? Somehow, it seemed, a popular uprising in Mexico was commanding center stage in a sympathetic light. From here, it seemed like a glimmer of hope.
     When the Zapatista Army emerged from the jungle, "the ones without faces, the ones with voices" stepped directly into the media spotlight, making front page news around the world. During the occupation of San Cristóbal, spokesperson and militarys strategist Subcomandante Marcos declared their subversive intention: "We want to know what this event will provoke, what will move the national consciousness." Having won access to the international press and communications media, the Zapatistas used them to wage a parallel war of words and symbols, an effective decolonization of public language. Their Declaration of War was an emotional appeal to the conscience and frustrated electoral desires of the nation; and it was broadcast on the radio, read on national television, and faxed to the Mexican and international press.

We want to know what this event will provoke, what will move the national consciousness."

—Subcomandante Marcos

     The Mexican government's initial response was predictable: an attempt to discredit the movement as the work of outsiders who were manipulating the (admittedly) poverty-stricken native populations and using them to destabilize the country. The army was sent out to crush the uprising.
     Public sympathy for the Zapatistas was immediate and overwhelming. Demonstrators filled plazas throughout the country—and, in many foreign cities, as well—holding banners that read, "We are all Chiapanecos." It soon became apparent that the government would be forced to acquiesce to the growing international demand for a cease-fire. A sense of shared triumph began to spread. On the day that the offical cease-fire was declared, there was a large demonstration in Mexico City. OVer 100,000 people marched together, shouting, "First World, Ha Ha Ha!" in open defiance of the ruling class and its economic allies in "developed" countries to the North, who were opening Mexico to foreign investment. It was an expression of solidarity with the Zapatistas, who had repudiated the official façade of policital stability and economic well-being in Mexico. And it was the catharsis of exposing and acknowledging the actual conditions of worsening poverty and repression, and publicly naming the cause for them.

Demonstrators filled plazas throughout the country—and, in many foreign cities, as well—holding banners that read, "We are all Chiapanecos." It soon became apparent that the government would be forced to acquiesce to the growing international demand for a cease-fire.

     The ability to provoke an understanding of common struggle among diverse peoples was the most striking aspect of the Zapatista insurrection. Commandeering technology and language that had been formatted to occlude them, the Zapatistas positioned themselves as the heirs of the Mexican people's historic struggle for democracy and justice. They linked the national and native hearts of Mexico, and a public, collective soul-searching ensued. Questions of self-perception and self-representation—as a people, as a society, and as a nation—filled the pages of the Mexican press. It was, as Juan Bañuelos writes, "...the confrontation between two designs for living: the indigenous way of being and fulfillment and the neoliberal way of possession and power." It created a brief, unsettled, hopeful period, one that Guillermo Gómez Peña describes as, "...a time in which we all experimented with the realm of unlimited utopian possibilities." And this collective response to the Zapatista challenge has changed Mexico, despite the government's attempts to preserve appearances.

The ability to provoke an understanding of common struggle among diverse peoples was the most striking aspect of the Zapatista insurrection.

     This book was conceived as a way to translate, broadcast, and amplify the sense of possibility that was created by the uprising. [...]
     First World, HA HA HA! also examines the resonance of the Zapatista uprising outside of Mexico, where the insurrection was widely hailed as a direct attack on the New World Order. In the post-Cold War era, with global economic restructuring—codified in treaties such as NAFTA and GATT—the Zapatista rebellion made it clear that the battle lines are now more clearly drawn. Writers from the United States explore the nature of the new development, and its potential for social movemtns here in our country. Noam Chomsky demonstrates that "nationality" is meaningless to an economic alliance which has no boundaries and Iain Boal observes, "The resistance will be as transnational as capital."
     Native people in all of the Americas understood the rebellion as a continuation of the historic indigenous resistance of the hemisphere. Native writers and activists from both Mexico and the United States link the Zapatista movement to a continental—and worldwide—struggle for indigenous rights. Ward Churchill states, "...the Zapatistas—and the indigenismo they incarnate—represent the revitalization of revolutionary potential...in ways which finally and truly do lead toward self-determination for all peoples, no matter how small or 'primitive'..."

The resistance will be as transnational as capital.

—Iain Boal

     In the United States, we are conditioned to believe that popular struggle cannot succeed. The press is widely employed to maintain a state of political hopelessness; we have become used to what Paul Goodman describes as "format": "Format is not like censorship that tries to obliterate speech, and so sometimes empowers it by making it important. And it is not like propaganda that simply tells lies.... Format is speech colonized, broken-spirited.... The government of a complicated modern society cannot lie much. But by format, even without trying, it can kill feeling, memory, learning, observation, imagination, [and] logic..." This is the formula that enables us to accept the increasing number of people with signs reading, "Hungry. Please Help."
     As the economic situation worsens, laws are created to criminalize such behavior as sitting or sleeping on sidewalks, and prisons and law-enforcemnt are given priority in the national budget. We are being led into complicity in our own repression. Noam Chomsky writes, "A few days after the NAFTA vote, the U.S. Senate passed...legislation call[ing] for 100,000 new police, high-security regional prisons, boot camps for young offenders, extension of the death penalty and harsher sentencing, as well as other onerous measures.... The concept of 'efficiency,' as defined by those of wealth and privilege, offers nothing to the growing sectors of the population that are useless for profit-making, and thus have been driven to poverty and despair. If they cannot be confined to urban slums, they will have to be controlled in some other way."

In the United States, we are conditioned to believe that popular struggle cannot succeed. The press is widely employed to maintain a state of political hopelessness"

—Paul Goodman

     The rebellion in Los Angeles was the most recent popular large-scale uprising in our country. It was given the familiar context of interracial antagonism in the media, although in the scenes of massive looting pointed to other frustrations. The implied story was the shared anger of Los Angeles' poor, who were turning not against each other but against the symbols of their economic oppression. The coalitions that were formed in the wake of the violence have endured a concerted campaign of repression by the police, but most people are unaware of their existence and struggle. The collective memory of what happened in Los Angeles remains one of races at war, senseless violence, and people wreaking havoc until order was restored by the federal government. The underlying causes for the poverty which fueled the uprising were never widely perceived or discussed in the media, and American society has yet to find a way to unmask our own concealed truths.
     In California's elections of 1994, a proposition that would deny social services to illegal immigrants was passed after heated debate. Alternative solutions to the "immigration problem" were discussed in the media, by politicians, and on the street. Most liberals seemed to favor the more "humane" approach, namely, reinforcing the border to make it impenetrable. (Immigrants from Mexico constitute the majority of "illegal aliens" in the state.) Of course, there was no public mention—except by the Latinos—that California and the entire Southwest had been stolen from Mexico by force (and from Native Americans before that), and that the definition of "illegal immigrant" is an insult to the original inhabitants of this land. Low wages, unemployment, poverty, and immigration were not perceived as the effects of an intentional, international policy—NAFTA and GATT did not figure in the discussion.
     Pete Wilson, the governor who had based his reelection campaign on this piece of legislation celebrated his victory saying that he figured, "all those people will just have to go back to where they came from." A few days later, the New York Times reported the following election-day protest:

     "About 40 masked men ransacked a McDonald's restaurant in Mexico City today to protest a ballot proposal in California that would cut social benefits of illegal immigrants and their families.
     'The assailants broke windows, threw cash registers to the floor, overturned wastebaskets and painted graffiti denouncing the United States in the restaurant in the fashionable Zona Rosa area of the capital,' said a McDonald's marketing manager, Manuel Juárez. He said no one was injured.
     'Yankee Go Home!' 'Solidarity With the Immigrants!' and 'No to 187!' were among the messages scrawled on the restaurant's windows.... McDonald's is viewed by many Mexican leftists as a symbol of American imperialism." The prport goes on to say that the Mexican federal police were called in to defend the Golden Aches against the angry demonstrators.
     In his address to the Democratic National Convenation which was convened by the Zapatistas in the jungle of Chiapas and attended by 6,000 activists and intellectuals, Subcomandante Marcos said, "We direct ourselves to this Convention, to ask in the name of all men and women...that you save a moment, a few days, a few hours, enough minutes to find the common enemy." Until quite recently, people in the so-called First World—the United States in particular—have been comfortably unaware of the "common enemy," and resistance struggles have been waged on the margins of society. As the situation worsens for the majority of people, there is the hope that societies will look for actual alternatives, and that search will transcend national borders.

The collective memory of what happened in Los Angeles remains one of races at war, senseless violence, and people wreaking havoc until order was restored by the federal government. The underlying causes for the poverty which fueled the uprising were never widely perceived or discussed in the media, and American society has yet to find a way to unmask our own concealed truths.

     This book [and blog!] is a chronicle of societal [and personal] transformation, a look at what happens when the hope for change is ignited. The Zapatista rebellion has not ended, and Mexico continues to be shaken by it. As Octavio Paz wrote in 1972, "Zapata is beyond the controversy between liberals and conservatives, Marxists and neocapitalists; Zapata is before—and perhaps, if Mexico is not extinguished, he will be after." The Zapatistas' successful entry into the national—and international—consciousness holds promise for the struggle for social justice everywhere. As Ronnie Burk writes, "At the end of this mad century of revolutions, Mexico might very well show the world how it's done."

—E.K.

...the Zapatistas—and the indigenismo they incarnate—represent the revitalization of revolutionary potential...in ways which finally and truly do lead toward self-determination for all peoples, no matter how small or 'primitive'..."

—Ward Churchill