© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2013 DOI 10.1179/1477570012Z.00000000030

comparative american studies, Vol. 11 No. 1, March 2013, 52–73

Professors on the Run: How Marcos’s Narratives of Zapatismo Refashion North American Cold War AnxietyJohn A. OchoaPenn State University

This article examines the communiqués issued by Subcomandante Marcos during the early years of the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico (1992–1998). It addresses a double voice, and a double mission, of these internet pronouncements: first, as a tool for a local Indigenous uprising in the state of Chiapas; second, as a part of a much broader anti-neoliberal and anti-neo-imperialist struggle. The article argues that the unusual interlacing of a local, almost intimate struggle with a much broader ideological struggle has its sources, models and origins, paradoxically, in U.S. Cold War anti-communist discourse of the 1950s. Both discourses featured almost priestl y, technocratic, master-explainers of an unseen enemy; both resorted to normative narratives of domesticity and infantilization; both relied on masked anti-heroes.

keywords Subcomandante Marcos; Zapatista rebellion; Cold War rhetoric; superhero imagery; Mexico-US relations

The national sovereignty resides essentially and originally in the people. All public

power originates in the people and is instituted for their benefit. The people at all times

have the inalienable right to alter or modify their form of government.

— Article 39 of the Mexican Constitution (1917 Constitution of Mexico

[As Amended] 2010)

I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

— Antonio Gramsci, ‘Letter from Prison’ (19 December 1929)

1992 was a symbolic year for North America and was meant to reaffirm its place in

the world. It was, after all, the sesquicentennial of the Columbian arrival in the New

World. It was also the year that the major North American economies — the United

States and Canada and Mexico — signed the North American Free Trade Agreement

(NAFTA) widely considered by the Left a tool of US imperialism. The treaty repre-

sented one of the most significant moves away from local interests and towards a

53PROFESSORS ON THE RUN

globalized economy since the formation of the European Union. As Hardt and Negri

have argued, virtualization of the location of production in this way meant another

way of postponing the reclamation of the means of production. A counterpoint to

this orchestrated and grand gesture away from the local and towards the global was

not surprising. What was surprising, at least in Mexico, was that the form this coun-

termovement took was the Zapatista insurgency, officially the ‘Ejército Zapatista de

Liberación Nacional’ or EZLN.

This ragtag movement, with its recycled uniforms barely functional weapons, on

several levels was a classic and familiar peasant uprising, almost a throwback. The

name itself, ‘Zapatistas’ came from the Indigenous revolutionary leader Emiliano

Zapata, a land-rights fighter during the chaotic Mexican Revolution (1910–1925). It

could easily be located in a long line of Cuban Revolution-inspired Central- and

South- American movements of the 70s and 80s, like the Nicaraguan Sandinistas (also

named for a previous revolutionary icon) or the Peruvian Shining Path.

Yet during these initial stages, the rebellion also announced the much larger project,

to become an international pressure organization against the forces of globalizing

neo-imperialism. The choice of date for the military uprising clearly illustrated this

double agenda for what could be a simple, local peasant uprising: January 1, 2004

was the day the continental-wide NAFTA went into effect. The uprising’s push

towards wider relevancy, with its unprecedented anti-globalization angle, brought

with it an unprecedented new battleground: the day the Zapatistas launched both

their bullets-and-bombs attack on local military garrisons and on free-market

domineering Trade Agreements, they also announced their presence on the Web.

This double mission was clearly embodied by the EZLN’s chosen spokesman, the

equally unprecedented figure, the anonymous and masked ‘sub-comandante’ with

nom-de-guerre Marcos. Clearly not a member of the indigenous population with

which he was fighting, but rather an educated and urbane ‘mestizo’, Marcos

unleashed an eclectic torrent of communiqués, postings, emails and creative output.

These show familiarity not only with classic Marxism and Latin American revolu-

tionary discourse, but also knowing references to both high and popular culture, a

keen and ironic voice, and a mastery of the short form. He was, according to the

startled analyses in the world media, the first post-modern revolutionary.

Of course, the fact that an educated, mestizo Marcos becomes a vocero, the public

voice of the oppressed Indigenous rebels, whose role is to educate outsiders, or

‘intérprete’, as he has often called himself, raises a lot of complicated issues about

identity, authority, legitimacy, and ventriloquy, not to mention rhetorical strategy.1

In order to concentrate on his double role within the revolutionary project, I begin

by examining this teacherly role. Teachers are everywhere in Subcomandante

Marcos’s voluminous output, especially in the writings from these initial years of the

rebellion (1994–96): the wise, ‘Don Juan’-like Indigenous character who imparts his

wisdom upon Marcos, ‘Old Man Antonio’; the political expert, the arrogant beetle

Durito; and Marcos himself, (aka ex-Professor of the Universidad Autónoma Metro-

politana Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente). But this is because another vital function

Marcos’s professors fill is as teachers to the rebels themselves: he often represents

himself, or his alter egos, explaining the enemy to the troops. Marcos (and his many

teacherly alter-egos like Durito) use this professorial stance to bridge the global and

the local aims of the rebellion.

54 JOHN A. OCHOA

My argument is that Marcos’s double-voiced version of Zapatismo both taps, and

co-opts, an unusual source: the culture and poetics of the 1950’s Cold War in the US.

Both discourses feature teacherly figures who voice a conviction about an outcome in

the face of an overwhelming new enemy — a reassurance of being on the right side:

the professor proclaims moral certainty in the struggle, despite a sense of being

embattled and even surrounded, whether that encirclement is real or contrived. The

circumstantial elements of these two discourses, on the surface quite distant (perhaps

even diametrically opposite) share more than appears at first blush. It is useful to

remember that during the Cold War, they led to what Alan Nadel, in his ground-

breaking book of the same name, terms ‘Containment Culture’, whereby the task

of policy of containing the enemy — in that case communist expansionism — was

echoed in the prosperous, consumerist, and ultimately stifling cultural containment

in the US of the period. I do not mean to suggest by any means that this is the

response the Zapatistas take by any means; rather, I explore how the complex

dynamics of encirclement by an overwhelming enemy invokes such similar tactics and

reactions in two such widely different contexts: a tense peace; a resort to normative

domesticity and even placidness to the point of infantilization; and, most impor-

tantly, the importance of the hieratic figure of the professor as a source of strength

and interpretation in desperate times.

The teacherly presence in Marcos’s output makes sense enough, given the exigen-

cies of the rebellion. However, its double role can sometimes come across as

rhetorically jarring. The task of the spokesperson, the intérprete, when educating the

public, needs to present a convincing and consistent front. This can stand at odds, as

those of us who have taught in a classroom can attest, with the place of the thought-

ful teacher who must convey knowledge in a more democratic fashion, through

engagement, using argument, lengthy evidence, discussion, and ultimately example.

Marcos’s double-tasked Academic/Professor is a new voice from the wilderness,

attempting at once to explain this Resistance against the government to those, mostl y

educated, witnesses watching from the outside, but also a source of strength to his

fellow fighters. Marcos’s teachers teach the public at large about the reasons behind

the fight, but they also provide a deeply necessary function to the combatants them-

selves. The function of the wartime Professor is to decipher the essence of an appar-

ently inscrutable enemy (Figure 1). To his fellow travellers, he is a hieratic figure, the

confident possessor of privileged knowledge about the enemy. And this knowledge,

he often implies but sometimes says outright, holds the key to victory.

Marcos’s double discourse is a natural echo of the double nature of the Zapatista

uprising itself, at least in its initial years.

Some scholars, like Herman Herlinghaus and Kristine Vanden Berghe, argue that

the one struggle gradually transformed into the other out of necessity. After the initial

defeat, the untenability of the armed struggle was replaced, in vastly different terms,

by a larger and more indefinite struggle of world-wide significance. These scholars

observe a progression from traditional dead-earnest language derived from sundry,

anti-imperial revolutions of the past — Cuba, Central America, the Peruvian Com-

munist Party, better known as Shining Path — to a more playful, ironic, and literary

language, and to a larger more indefinite arena of cyberspace: into the unquantifiable

space of post-national global politics.

55PROFESSORS ON THE RUN

figure 1 A teaching moment (Oscar Leon/AFP/Getty Images).

As Carlos Fuentes touted, this was the ‘first post-communist’ rebellion.2 But ini-

tially, the two registers coexisted. If we consider Marcos’s Zapatista output from this

period, we can see an almost schizophrenic alternation between the straightforward

language of writings such as the ‘Primera declaración desde la selva Lacandona’,

which, quoting Article 39 of the 1917 Constitution, unironically calls for a war against

an illegitimate government, to the fanciful and provocative stories featuring charac-

ters like Durito, Old Man Antonio, and Marcos himself as an ironic observer, all in

an oddly eclectic mix. Mariana Mora, who traces the development of Zapatista dis-

course from this early stage to the later ‘Otra Campaña’, and characterizes this ‘first

moment’ as one where ‘the decision to construct the autonomous municipalities gen-

erated’ the first ‘reinterpretation of the movement, originally conceived as primarily

agrarian, as one that linked resource distribution to self-determination’ (2007:70).

According to Mora, these two disparate aims — local resource distribution and rights

on the one hand, self-determination in the face of a large system on the other —

would not come into clearer linkage until the later stages of the movement, in 2006,

after almost ‘a decade of local practice’. Despite the technical and stylistic novelty

of Zapatista discourse from these early years, with its use of the mass media and

high irony, it still relied on familiar Marxist discourse and is informed by a Marxist

critique of power at the local level.3

I concentrate on the Marcos of these initial years, but especially on an aspect of

Marcos’s discourse that reflects the contradiction within a single teacherly voice:

Marcos who is both local and global, speaking both to the gathered fighters and

to a much larger listening audience. A much-anthologized jungle communiqué by

Marcos dated March 11, 1995 was composed in the midst of a hasty retreat from a

military crackdown. The circumstances were these: after the initial Zapatista uprising

of January 1, 1994, there had been nearly a year of tense peace. The much superior

force of the Mexican Government, poised to annihilate the rebels, had decided to pull

out its troops and allow the rebels a semi-autonomous existence; this was mostly

because of the public outcry resulting from Marcos’s widely circulated communiqués.

Now, in 1995, all of this changed. In the middle of a prolonged negotiation between

the Zapatistas and the Government, the Mexican Army was brought in to suppress

56 JOHN A. OCHOA

the rebel areas. In this lengthy communiqué, written in the style that would become

his hallmark, Marcos weaves revolutionary slogans and demands, straightforward

information, and quite fanciful narratives. It was, as had become standard for

Marcos’s output, published in various print and web venues. In one communiqué,

Marcos tells how he and two other colleagues are engaged in a ‘strategic withdrawal’,

which, he grudgingly admits, really means that they are being ruthlessly chased

through the jungle and they are fleeing for their lives.

He and his colleagues travel at night in order to avoid detection. And one morning,

while Marcos is setting up camp to sleep through the day, he insets a fanciful story

about how he almost steps on a character who soon becomes a frequent interlocutor,

the cartoon-like beetle Durito, or ‘little hard one’, who is emphatically not a cock-

roach. It takes a while for the insect to recognize his masked friend, whom he had

met before he was promoted to ‘Subcomandante’ or ‘Sup’. Durito, a prickly fellow,

gives Marcos some friendly grief, sponges some tobacco from him, and asks about

his current plight. Marcos explains that on his way to the negotiating table, the

government had surreptitiously extracted strategic information from the delegates,

and then used that information to attack their positions, forcing them to run:

Durito went on smoking, and waited for me to finish telling him everything that

had happened in the last ten days. Durito said: ‘Wait for me’. And he went under a little

leaf. After a while he came out pushing his little desk. After that he went for a chair, sat

down, took out some papers, and began to look through them with a worried air. ‘Mmmh,

mmh’ he said with every few pages that he read. After a time he exclaimed:

‘Here it is!’

‘Here’s what?’ I asked, intrigued.

‘Don’t interrupt me!’ Durito said seriously and solemnly. And added, ‘Pay atten-

tion. Your problem is the same one as many others. It refers to the economic and social

doctrine known as “Neoliberalism”. . .’ (Marcos, 2005: 53)4

The leap from three lonely guerillas fleeing through the jungle to a detailed explana-

tion of a global threat known as ‘Neoliberalism’, embodies the well-documented

paradox at the heart of Zapatismo, or at least of the first incarnation of Zapatismo

of the mid-1990s: the fact that Zapatista discourse is double-voiced. This discourse,

especially as expressed by Subcomandante Marcos, is simultaneously global and

profoundly local.

We see a clear manifestation of how Marcos approaches his doubleness of mission

in the encounter with Durito: what do you do when you are in the heat of battle,

worried that you are about to be overrun by the enemy? You teach. About big things.

In the episode, Durito pulls out his desk and his papers, and begins to explain the

situation in terms of an abstract concept: ‘Neoliberalism’. One can imagine him

cleaning his blackboard, or setting up a Powerpoint presentation. Marcos reacts

understandably to this enforced lesson (as perhaps many of his own readers do as

well): ‘“Just what I needed. . . now classes in political economy,” I thought. It seems

like Durito heard what I was thinking because he chided me: “Ssshh! This isn’t just

any class! It is a treatise [cátedra] of the highest order!”’ Cátedra is a significant term

here; it is both a lecture and the physical place of the lecture, the ‘chair’ of the profes-

sor, a point to which I return later. In any case, an unusual pattern emerges: the very

local and pressing battle sublimates into a vast, abstract war of ideas. This scene of

57PROFESSORS ON THE RUN

teaching in the heat of a very local struggle is meant to be seen, and disseminated, on

a much larger scale.

We can look to the culture of the Cold War for insight into the relationship

between the small-scale front with a much larger, global standoff. At the heart of

both Marcos’s discourse and Cold War culture, we see a turn, at a time of crisis

against an inscrutable and enormous enemy, towards the hieratic, teacherly figure

who must fulfil multiple roles. Before the Second World War, American administra-

tions, including FDR’s, had tended to draw heavily for their leadership from

professional politicians, the party faithful, and business and industrial leaders. US

Governments had in the past called upon academics as experts, but this was usually

in advisory roles, or when in actual leadership roles it was usually based on a proven

political or administrative track record, as in the case of Woodrow Wilson.

But in post-war administrations, beginning with Harry Truman’s, there was a clear

move towards technocracy. A new breed of leader was recruited directly from the

academic ranks, based primarily on knowledge more than leadership experience,

in order to fill important economic, scientific, intelligence, diplomatic and policy

positions, often as decision-makers. These men had not typically risen through the

traditional political ranks but rather belonged to the most elite universities and think

tanks. This trend ultimately led to a heavy representation by academics in Kennedy’s

idealistic but misguided ‘Best and the Brightest’ generation of policymakers, men like

Arthur Schlesinger and McGeorge Bundy, who eventually helped determine the

disastrous Vietnam War strategy.

This turn towards technocracy was in large part due to necessity: the highly tech-

nological nature of nuclear policy required unusual expertise; but most importantly,

the Soviets were deeply unfamiliar, abstract and thus inscrutable. The New Professors

were there to make them less so. Because they possessed rare insight into the, until

then, not-very-visible Russian mind, they achieved an almost hieratic role that went

far beyond that of mere depositors of knowledge; they were ideologues, for certain,

but they were also defenders of the faith. And like any priestly figure, they reached

this position by possessing knowledge, and a relationship with unseen forces beyond

the reach of the average coreligionist.

An apt image to invoke here is the figure of Winston Churchill, who delivered

the beginning salvo of the Cold War, the ‘Iron Curtain’ speech (March 5, 1946). He

presented it not to the British Parliament, the US Congress, or the United Nations;

rather, he chose to deliver it in a rather intimate academic setting, Westminster

College, a small liberal arts school in Missouri while wearing professorial garb

(Figure 2).

Churchill’s two main agendas that night were first, to argue for the solidification

of the ‘special relationship’ between the United States and Great Britain and

secondly, for the authorization of the UN as an effective intermediary, Churchill

addressed both agendas by pointing to the new common enemy looming:

The safety of the world, ladies and gentlemen, requires a unity in Europe, from which no

nation should be permanently outcast [. . . .] Twice the United States has had to send

several millions of its young men across the Atlantic to fight the wars. But now we all

can find any nation, wherever it may dwell, between dusk and dawn. Surely we should

work with conscious purpose for a grand pacification of Europe within the structure of

the United Nations. (Churchill, 1974: 7289)

58 JOHN A. OCHOA

This is new, poetic language of victorious post-nationalism. The new Soviet enemy

was very different in nature from the very recent Fascist enemy, and it now made a

new internationalist order inevitable. All legitimate democracies would need to unite

against this new, common enemy.

In his magisterial reading of Cold War discourse, Alan Nadel points to one of the

most influential of the early academic policy shapers, George F. Kennan. While he

was ambassador to the USSR, Kennan wrote another key document of the Cold War,

perhaps even more significant than Churchill’s speech, the scholarly ‘Long Telegram’

from Moscow, a classified document which would lead to an article, published

anonymously in Foreign Affairs; together they would shape the Truman Doctrine and

anti-Soviet policy for decades to come. Kennan describes the psychology of the new

adversary:

Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventuristic. It

does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of

reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force [sic]. For this reason it can easily with-

draw — and usually does when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the

adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do

so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns.

[. . . .] [The Soviets’] success will really depend on the degree of cohesion, firmness and

vigor which Western World can muster. And this is a factor which is within our power

to influence. (Kennan, 1946: 16–7)

For Kennan the enemy is amoral, opportunistic, wrong, and because of this ulti-

mately doomed. Notice the oddly idealistic cheerleading: ‘cohesion, firmness and

vigor’ in the face of this threat determines the outcome. This is not unlike what

Professor Durito, after pulling out his little desk and his papers, says in his cátedra

about the enemy, which instead of the Soviet menace is now Neoliberalism:

figure 2 Churchill delivering the ‘Iron Curtain’ speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946 (National Churchill Museum Photographic Collection).

59PROFESSORS ON THE RUN

‘It is a metatheoretical problem! [. . . .] Well, it turns out that “Neoliberalism” is not a

theory to confront or explain the crisis. It is the crisis itself made theory and economic

doctrine! That is, ‘Neoliberalism’ hasn’t the least coherence; it has no plans or historic

perspective. In the end, pure theoretical shit’.

‘How strange. . . I’ve never heard or read that interpretation’ I said with surprise.

‘Of course! How, if it just occurred to me in this moment!’ says Durito with

pride.

‘And what has that got to do with our running away, excuse me, with our with-

drawal?’ I asked, doubting such a novel theory.

‘Ah! Ah! Elementary, my dear Watson Sup! There are no plans, there are no

perspectives, only i-m-p-r-o-v-i-s-a-t-i-o-n. The government has no consistency: one day

we’re rich, another day we’re poor, one day they want peace, another day they want war,

one day fasting, another day stuffed, and so on. Do I make myself clear?’ Durito

inquires.

‘Almost. . .’ I hesitate and scratch my head.

‘And so?’ I ask, seeing that Durito isn’t continuing with his discourse.

‘It’s going to explode. Boom! Like a balloon blown up too much. It has no future.

We’re going to win’ says Durito as he puts his papers away. (Marcos, 2005: 53–54)

Because the neoliberal government is devoid of ‘plans’ and incapable of true insight,

Durito concludes, with the inevitability of the believer, that despite the incredibly

long odds the rebels will win. Both Kennan and Durito view their enormous enemy

as ‘not schematic’, ‘improvisational’, essentially an instinctual and reactive creature,

more like some sort of overgrown lower-order organism: it effectively manages its

expansive mission by thoughtlessly regulating its own survival functions, keeps all its

moving parts moving, and responds only to significant changes in the environment,

or to irritation.

A common convention about Cold War culture is that it led to a tense, enforced,

bourgeois normativity. The stereotype of the 1950s is as a perpetually in-between

space, full of suppressed anxiety. This is the space about which the poet Robert

Lowell, possibly institutionalized, pads about in his pyjamas and asks, in his 1959

poem ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’: ‘These are the tranquilized Fifties/ and I

am forty. / Ought I to regret my seedtime?’ (Lowell, 1965: 85). Lowell’s verses speak

to the numb, floating quality generally ascribed to the period, a kind of anesthetized,

middle-age complacency that could blow up at any time; there was always a strong

undertow of nervous instability, of enclosure, and of being propped up artificially in

W. H. Auden’s ‘Age of Anxiety’ — a defiant survival tactic against the strain of living

under the constant threat of The Bomb.

This sedate normativity produced what we could call an American Beidermeier

— that period after the Napoleonic wars when a hermetic, inward-looking and anti-

conflict spirit invaded Europe, which was then under intense publication restrictions,

outright censorship, and internalized self-censorship which led to a parlour aesthetic;

The middle class living room, good taste, elliptical and ‘apolitical’ forms, and close

friends became the focus points. Both the Germany of the 1830s and the US of the

1950s were ‘Containment Cultures’, times of salons and television, respectively,

created in response to encirclement by an invisible enemy. The space of the struggle

became internal, domestic, and in many ways more intimate.

60 JOHN A. OCHOA

We see this internalizing shift when we compare the rhetoric of Churchill’s famous

‘We Shall Never Surrender’ speech to Parliament (1940), where he outlines the

desperately specific spaces of the (very hot) war, ‘we shall fight on the beaches, we

shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we

shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender’ (‘Finest Hour’). The terms of the new

Cold War are at once abstract, played out in an oddly suspended, liminal space, and

the stakes are much higher, and deeply local. We must prevail in the new internal

battlefield, which is within us all: détente (‘now we all can find any nation [. . .]

between dusk and dawn’). As Warren Susman put it, ‘[f]ullfilling those utopian

dreams made the United States a success.’ Ironically, however, this moment of

triumph was accompanied by something disturbing: a new self-consciousness of

tragedy and sense of disappointment.

The postwar success story was also the ‘age of anxiety’ (Griffin and Susman,

1989: 19). To be sure, there was an actively paranoid strain of popular culture that

produced such Sci-Fi allegories as The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) and The

Thing from Another World (1951). But that decade’s façade of prosperous entrench-

ment, and the forced, painted-on smiles of the ‘peaceful’ Biedermeier gentility — with

its emphasis on suburbia and the household decorative arts. This is the environment

that produced the fantasy-laden musicals that poured out of Hollywood, the shiny,

powerful new cars, the big screen epics such as the Ten Commandments, and the

standard-model postwar housing, the Levittown model of detached single-family

homes on identical lawns. All of this signals self-contained enclosures in response to

the enormous Red menace, to the tense truce of peaceful-non peace, that also led to

neurosis.5

It is difficult to argue for a direct analogy between the anxieties of the Cold War

and Marcos’s brand Zapatismo — they are, after all, quite different in both scale and

function. But the correspondences are clearly there, in a complex and telling way. An

initial, and somewhat facile, parallel could be drawn between the tense peace of the

semi-autonomous Zapatista ‘five towns’ during the first three years of the uprising,

negotiated with the Mexican government, which created a anxious sense of siege. But

the link between the two discourses runs deeper and is more complicated.

The Cold War, although it was marked by occasional outbreaks of actual outward

aggression like the Korean War or McCarthyism, for the majority culture in the US

involved a edgy public trusting an informed few to gain a deep, schematic and theo-

retical knowledge about the enemy and its methods. The rank-and-file population’s

real fight was mental, as it consisted of keeping the anxiety at bay and staying

one step ahead, heartened by the inevitability of success; recall Kennan’s call for

‘cohesion, firmness and vigor’. This involved deliberately doing what one always did,

because the enemy was so large and so myopic that ultimately, it would trip itself

up: consistency in the face of the Other’s ‘improvisation’.6 And this mission for the

rank and file holds true whether the enemy is Stalinism or, in the case of Marcos,

Neoliberalism. However, we must recall the double dynamic within Marcos’s dis-

course: some of it is for internal consumption, whose intended audience is his fellow

camaradas; some of it is meant for the outside world. This is the complicating factor:

within this latter representation, the message meant for the world, we see the image

of Marcos, the teacher, the cheerleader, the prophet of certainties, telling and encour-

aging his fellow combatants to win this mental war. This is a deeply important part

61PROFESSORS ON THE RUN

of the image projected to the world at large. Marcos shows the rebels winning the

mental war over anxiety, if not the real war against the Government.7

This is shrewd re-appropriation of Cold War anxiety on the part of Marcos. He

channels its coping mechanisms and refashioning them in the terms of his immediate

struggle. This brings us to two of these very specific mechanisms, which Marcos’s

performative (and teacherly) discourse re-takes: the resort to simplistic ‘children’s’

narratives and the use of masked superheroes.

During a period in the late 1990s, a particularly difficult time for the Zapatistas,

Marcos had remained oddly silent, leading to intense speculation that he had been

killed or captured or that he had given up on the struggle for some reason. He

suddenly returned to the fray with a flashy communiqué titled ‘Subcomandante

Marcos Breaks Silence After 4 Months’ (July 15, 1998):

To: The Mexican Federal Army

The Guatemalan Army

Interpol, Paris

CISEN [The Center for Research and National Security], Polanco

Sirs:

Eepa, eepa, eepa!

Andale, andale!

Arriba, Arriba!

Eepa, eepa!

— From the mountains of southeast Mexico, Insurgent Subcomandante Marcos

(Alias ‘Sup Speedy Gonzalez’, or what amounts to ‘a thorn in the side’) (Ejército

Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Mexico), et al. 1994–2001: 4:195 [my translation])

This, of course, is a reference to the wildly popular Warner Brother cartoons of the

1950s. Besides obviously playing with the racial stereotype of a character like Speedy,

Marcos invokes these cartoons because of their central place in the Cold War imagi-

nary. The reference is so familiar that Marcos can rely on the disembodied interjec-

tion: he only needs to repeat Speedy’s nonsensical ‘Eepa, eepa, eepa!’ to summon the

allusion.

Once again, even the apparently lighthearted Warner Brothers cartoons were tied

to anxious gravity of the Cold War condition. During the fifties, an important project

was to spread the gospel of free-market economics as the only viable alternative to

Communism. A significant voice in this task, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a brain-

child of the long-time president of General Motors, disseminated its message through

the usual venues. It funded academic research, cultural outreach, and educational and

commercial exchange programs both domestically and abroad. It also paid Holly-

wood studios to produce wide-audience films promoting its goals. One such series

was a sequence of three animated films commissioned from the Warner Brothers

animation outfit. These films were issued within the Looney Tunes series, followed

their standard 6–7 minute formula and borrowed some of the stars from the lineup

like Sylvester the Cat and Elmer Fudd. ‘By Word of Mouse’, (1954), ‘Heir Condi-

tioned’ (1955), and ‘Yankee Dood It’ (1956), were all directed by the legendary Isidore

‘Friz’ Freleng.

The initial setting of ‘By Word of Mouse’ is the postwar German town of

‘Knockwurst-on-der-Rye’, where a large German mouse family begs Hans to talk

62 JOHN A. OCHOA

about his recent trip to America. Hans begins a typical country-mouse/city-mouse

tale, when he disembarks from an ocean liner and meets his American friend Willy,

who shows him the wonders of his country. Hans is astonished at the number of

cars and other consumer goods, and exclaims that all Americans must be rich. Willy

corrects him, saying ‘they’re not all rich. Most of ‘em are just working guys’. When

Hans is sceptical and asks for an explanation of how ‘working guys’ can afford such

luxuries, Willy struggles to offer an adequate explanation of mass consumption and

mass production. He gets nowhere. For help, he takes Hans to Putnell University to

see a mouse professor who hopefully can clarify the concept of free-market capital-

ism. The professor is glad to help and pulls out a series of flip charts. But in the

middle of the lesson on how mass production makes products more affordable

through reduced cost, and on how open competition enforces innovation, Sylvester

the Cat appears out of nowhere and tries to catch the mice. They flee. The bulk of

the film consists of the three mouse characters finding various places in order to hide

and continue their ersatz lesson about free markets; they go into a filing cabinet, a

desk drawer, and on a paper boat floating inside the water cooler bottle. Whenever

Sylvester finds them again, the professor always foils Sylvester; either by slamming

drawers on him, pummelling him with a hammer, or making him fall down a

manhole.

In the end, Hans finally understands the concept of free markets, but he also

decides that, given the pursuing cat, the situation is just too dangerous for him, so he

returns to the ocean liner in order to depart for his Marshall-plan homeland. After

making Sylvester fall down a hole one last time, ‘don’t forget!’ the professor shouts

behind the hurrying Hans, ‘all of this has raised our standard of living to the highest

level in the world!’

The symmetries between this cartoon and the episode of the fleeing Marcos finding

Professor Durito in the jungle extend beyond the superficial ones. Looking beyond

the diametrically opposing ideologies of the two examples (free market capitalism on

the one hand, anti-Neoliberalism on the other), in formal respects the two tales are

almost proportional mirror images as well. In the Warner Brothers cartoon, the learn-

ers consult a professor in order to untangle the meaning of an orthodoxy, and the act

of consultation puts them at risk from a predator, and turns them into fleeing refugees

staving off anxiety; in the Durito story, the refugee Marcos, who is already fleeing,

runs into the professor in the middle of his flight and the uninvited consultation turns

him into a (reluctant) learner of a revolutionary heterodoxy.

In any case, what both chase narratives do share is an odd, superimposed scene of

improvised teaching. The learners are both students and refugees. And the content

of both scenes of teaching is even odder, given the immediate predicament, a very

dangerous flight from a very real enemy. Both cátedras are detailed explanation of

Big Ideas, with implications that extend well beyond these immediate, if pressing,

problems of —respectively — hungry cats and armies. But one gets the definite sense

that their very local problems and the Big Ideas are related.

So what do you do when you are about to be overrun by the enemy? From

diametrically opposed worldviews comes the same plan:You teach. About big things.

And in the case of the Warner Brothers cartoon (as indeed in just most studio

cartoons of the period) the outcome is inevitable. The ‘puddytat’ — or the coyote, or

63PROFESSORS ON THE RUN

the tongue-twisted hunter — is always foiled by the supposedly more vulnerable prey.

And in this situation, when the ‘vulnerable’ prey is the professor, the brave resource-

fulness he demonstrates in defeating his pursuer, extends to the context of his lessons.

The implication is that the doctrine of mass production and free markets ultimately

outwits any feline, foreign or domestic, trying to eat it.

Why cartoons? Why resort so often, and at times flippantly, to children’s allegories

or easy-to-understand folk tales (such as Marcos’s The Story of Colors, 1996) in order

to evangelize the Big Ideas as Marcos has consistently done? The easy answer is that,

in a time of siege the sense of encirclement, of containment, necessitates a resort

to forms and means that call attention away from that very containment, as Ariel

Dorfman argued two generations ago in How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist

Ideology in the Disney Comic (1971). Recall as well the euphoric graphic arts and

posters printed during the siege of cities like Barcelona and Stalingrad. Scenes like this

argue that it is only natural to see a resort to forms and means that speak to a fan-

tasy world that is contrary to the desperate realities, to offer a source of a necessary,

centripetal energy away from the centre of the crisis.

There is one significant difference between Durito’s scene of instruction and the

mouse scene. The enemy in the Warner Brothers example is a predator who is easily

defeated by the teacher: however, the enemy during the Cold War was abstract, and

never so obvious. This manifestation speaks to overcoming the anxiety in ways that

can only exist in cartoons. In the scene with Durito, however, the enemy is quite real,

and the fleeing soldiers are too.

What we see here is the representation of scene of conviction: we are shown the

sight of believers reaffirming the certainty of their beliefs. For Marcos and his teach-

ers, it is not a question of ‘if’, but of ‘when; Marcos’s writings are even often cast in

a lyrical mode more appropriate to a generous victor considering mercy for a van-

quished foe than a desperate refugee. In a communiqué from 1995, featuring another

teacherly interlocutor, the Indigenous wise-man Old Man Antonio, Marcos recounts

how

At the committee meeting we discussed throughout the whole afternoon. We searched for

the word in [indigenous] language that would mean ‘surrender’ and we could not find

one. There is no translation for it, either in Tsotsil or in Tseltal, and no one remembers

such a word existing in Tojolabal or Chol[. . . .]Silently, Antonio comes close to me,

coughing with tuberculosis, and whispers in my ear: ‘That word does not exist in

true language, because our people never give up and rather die’ (Marcos, 1998: 27 [my

translation])

It is worth noting that the ambitious and totally unrealistic goal of the Zapatista

offensive of January 1, 1994, announced on Zapatista radio broadcasts, was to

‘advance to the Capital of the Republic, conquering the Federal Army’ — a goal

Marcos still insisted upon for several months after the defeat (Bartolomé, 1995: 18;

Henck, 2007: 186–8). Of course an ambitiously defiant posture, characterized by the

unimaginability of defeat and an almost irrational faith in a vast victory despite over-

whelming odds, is not unique to Marcos or to the Zapatistas. This kind of posturing

is as old as revolutions and resistance movements themselves. The Spanish Republi-

can no pasarán and countless High Romantic martyrs ranging from Byron, Martí and

64 JOHN A. OCHOA

el Che come to mind. But for Marcos, and his teacherly alter-egos like Durito and

Old Man Antonio, this response is never jingoistic or shrill, or grandly meant to

rally the troops, but instead sounds rather personal and ruminative.

More than the public sloganeering of the Sandinstas or the Shining Path, it recalls

Che Guevara’s personal Bolivian Journal, where just before his death in October 1967

he confesses to a discouraging list of desertions, casualties, material losses, and

failures to recruit locals: ‘it was, without a doubt, the worst month we have had so

far’ (Guevara, 1968: 202); but almost bafflingly, he concludes on an optimistic note

to himself (‘I should mention that Inti and Coco [two of the Cubans fighting with

him] are becoming ever more steadfast revolutionary and military cadres’ [Guevara,

1968: 202]), and reports that the ‘morale of the rest of the men remains fairly high’

(Guevara, 1968: 220). When Marcos is recounting his own retreat from the Mexican

Army, ‘Durito asks with pity, as if afraid to hurt me. ‘And what do you intend to

do?’ I keep smoking, I look at the silver curls of the moon hung from the branches.

I let out a spiral of smoke and I answer him and answer myself: “Win.”’ (Marcos,

2005: 56).

But the difference is that this moment of conviction is represented: it is an act of

mimesis, meant for external consumption, to be read by a web-browsing public. This

explains the line of descent between two such dissimilar projects, in politics and in

scale, on the one hand the mainstream anti-communist discourse of the Cold-War,

and the decolonizing discourse of Marcos on the other: both procedures speak to

address the looming Other counterintuitively. While the Cold War drove the sublima-

tion internally, and to the comfort of comforting hieratic figures like the mouse pro-

fessor and to embody the enemy in a ridiculous (and vanquishable) cat, Marcos’ scene

turns the logic on its head: just like during the Cold War, when near annihilation,

teach about big things. Except that the hieratic teacher is an insufferable and hardly

believable bug. The enemy, conversely, is quite real and quite dangerous. Equally

believable is the conviction of the soldier Marcos, pupil of the ridiculous teacher: ‘[I]

answer myself: “Win.”’

One way to read the recourse to Children’s narrative is to view it as a purposeful

regression, a sort of ‘strategic infantilization’, in the same spirit as Spivak’s notion of

‘strategic essentialism’:8 A reduction to the ‘essentials’ as a very pragmatic approach

to identity politics, rendered necessary by the circumstances. This is a simplification

of moral problems, and concomitant aesthetic forms and values. Children’s allegories

are meant to be easily comprehensible. They also become potentially comforting,

especially when the intended audience is really adults; and, at least in the Disney ver-

sion so common in the 1950s, they provided the certainty of a previously promised,

happy ending. This is because it is easier for an obviously distorted or disguised —

cartoonish — subject, to create a narrative where they always come out on top. The

master narrative of children’s cartoons of the period is of being chased by a larger,

but ultimately unsuccessful, predator: consider the plots of most Disney, MGM and

Warner Brothers cartoons of the 40s and 50s. In these versions, the mouse invariably

prevails, despite the long odds.

Again, these escapist, streamlined narratives meant to give comfort to both children

and adults, when they are built as responses to very real preoccupations such as

threatening ideological agendas, fear of the Other, and the very actual threat of

65PROFESSORS ON THE RUN

annihilation. Such preoccupations cast their indelible shadows even in the anodyne

Disney versions. The very ‘simplicity’ of juvenile literature — cartoons especially —

reveals a complicated relationship with the deadly serious topics that generated them,

and which cannot be repressed. But the faith in the positive outcome remains strong.

And it is this memory that Marcos knowingly represents, by showing himself as the

subject of instruction.

The intrepid masked komrades

We turn briefly to the physical manifestation of Marcos’ double voice: his relation-

ship with the mask. Marcos’s mask is a heavy symbol and much has been made about

its complex epistemology. It easily invokes Octavio Paz’s arguments about the her-

metic nature of Mexican character (‘máscaras mexicanas’), Hollywood inventions

like El Zorro and ninja fighters, and lucha libre superheroes and their ironizing

folk-redeployers like the urban activist Superbarrio.9

To resort to the Cold War once more, as Edward Grifiin and Warren Susman

argue, the archetypal antihero of the period, the rebel without a cause, was not ‘nec-

essarily bad’, because he ‘revolted against a society deserving revolt. Popular writers

and professionals had thus arrived at the point where the disturbed personality should

be regarded not as a villain but as a hero. Indeed one of the extraordinary features

of the period was the celebration of the psychopathic as heroic’ (Griffin and Susman,

1989: 27). A significant variant of this antihero was the disguised comic book super-

hero who first arose during the Great Depression. The evil enemies of these superhe-

roes tended to be florid, highly individualistic evildoers, but in many cases they were

clear stand-ins for the succession of larger threats to North American society during

the period: the Depression, totalitarianism — first fascist, then communist. And,

correspondingly, their heroic adversaries represented the simple qualities, if not

always virtues, necessary in order to defeat these threats. Recall the main of these

superheroes, in rough order of appearance: Superman (1938), Batman (1939), Captain

America (1941), Spiderman (1962).

There is a progression to note in this list. First of all, the transformation of each

superhero is increasingly the result of science, technology, and knowledge, quite dif-

ferent from Superman’s birthright. In addition, the nature of the anonymity changes.

The civilian ‘cover’ persona of the superhero goes from merely incognito (Superman)

to a more complex dynamic. Notice the increase in the disconnect between the ‘real’,

street persona of the character, and his crime-fighting alter ego. When good reporter

and good citizen Clark Kent became Superman, he cast off his everyman street clothes

in order to became an exaggerated version of himself: a patriotic showman, garishly

heroic in his primary-colored, circus-strongman suit, with an equally exaggerated and

steely sense of civic duty that was already there. Good becomes good. His anonym-

ity is fairly easy to maintain, because Clark Kent isn’t that much different from Super-

man: a straight talker, honest, helpful, well brought up. The difference lies in a pair

of eyeglasses and a costume change. Spiderman, on the other hand, is quite different

from the virtuous and mostly unconflicted Superman; he is an anxious teenager whose

superhero persona, product of a science experiment gone wrong, is an outright

fugitive from the law and who often uses his superpowers for dubious ends.

66 JOHN A. OCHOA

This transformation from unquestioned hero into quasi-criminal was part in due

to the nature of the enemy. When the Depression and the Second World War gave

way to the Cold War, the threat became more ominous and diffuse, and in many

senses more inscrutable, and it was no longer one which could be vanquished with

either highly visible and determined government intervention (in the case of the

Depression), or superior force (in the case of the Second World War). It was now

perpetually imminent, as well as immanent: the enemy was nowhere and everywhere.

In these superheroes, the anonymity, and the conflict between the two aspects of this

crime-fighting character, between the ‘civilian’ and the ‘superhero’ personas, increased

proportionately. As Warren Susman and Edward Griffin have noted, ‘comics drama-

tized [. . .] the same kind of collective representation appearing in so many realms of

postwar culture: heroic figure who is a concerned, anxious sinner capable of the most

dreadful acts and incapable of operating rationally in terms of a scientific society’s

norms’ (Griffin and Susman, 1989: 28).

Batman, Captain America, and Spiderman were each progressively darker, often-

times quasi-criminal, in contrast to their upstanding-citizen covers. Batman began as

a grey-area, violent extension of hard-boiled fiction, and gradually got darker, and

more motivated by darker motives; Spiderman began operating as an outright vigi-

lante outside the rule of law. The masks, and the alter-ego existence, become more

and more a necessary requirement for doing ‘good’ precisely because they allowed the

superheroes to operate outside the rule of law; the anonymized persona is also the

public one.10

But the climaxing list of masked superheroes who are increasingly more marginal,

and more conflicted, reaches a kind of turning point — its ironic turnaround — in a

figure like Marcos. In a dispatch from January 20, 1994, Marcos taunts

Why so much ruckus about the ski-masks? Isn’t Mexican political culture of ‘culture of

hidden faces’? But in order to put a stop to the anguish of those who are afraid (or who

wish) that some ‘Komrade’ or cartoon villain might be the one who would appear behind

the ski mask, [. . .] of the ‘Sup’ [. . . .] I propose the following: I am willing to take off my

mask if Mexican Society takes off its foreign mask that it anxiously put on years ago.

(Marcos et al. 1995: 86)

Besides the somewhat predictable challenge to society that he will drop the pretence

if it will as well, there exists here a typical inversion; it is not the mask that marks

the dangerous villain, it is what lies underneath it: a cartoon character, a communist

‘Komrade’.

Marcos’s strategy rises to the surface here, again refashioning a Cold War pattern:

the enemy is large and unthinking. The masked professor, alternatively, knows

almost too much; he knows more about the enemy than it knows about itself.

Marcos’s masked condition supports his authority (recall that Kennan’s ‘Long

Telegram’ was first published anonymously, and Churchill’s first salvo was issued

academic costume not really his own). And his outlaw condition, fully expectable

from a superhero, is no longer a representation of his inability to fit in the world at

large. Rather, the criminality reflects the outside world itself: Mexican society is the

real criminal here.

67PROFESSORS ON THE RUN

In conclusion, we return briefly to the initial contradiction in Marcos’s discourse,

the simultaneous coexistence of two scales, on the one hand the pragmatic struggle

for Indigenous rights, and the much larger war against enormous (and slippery)

opponents such as ‘Neoliberalism’ and ‘globalization’ on the other. Kristine Vanden

Berghe argues for the presence of an intermediate, third scale in Marcos’s discourse:

a national one. She contends that Marcos’ Zapatismo was essentially an attempt

to reclaim a nationalist register, ‘discredit the government’, and ‘dissociate it from

Mexico, its geography, its history and the aspirations of its people’ (Vanden Berghe,

2005: 134 [my translation]; see also Vanden Berghe and Madden, 2004:125). This

reading places 90’s Zapatista discourse within a long continuum of patriotic national-

ism, more specifically the effort to claim the ‘authentic’ legacy of the Mexican

Revolution of 1910 — quite visible in the EZLN’s, and Marcos’s, transformation

from the FLN ‘Frente de Liberación Nacional’ [National Liberation Front] into the

‘Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional’ [Zapatista Army of National Liberation],

or as Henck details, from a ‘People’s Guerilla’ to a ‘Guerilla people’ (Henck, 2007:

64–190).

Some theorists have taken this line further, and convincingly argued that the EZLN

has created a neo-nationalist stance. In any case, Vanden Berghe’s assessment points

to an important feature of Zapatismo necessary to understand one of its central

paradoxes: we must carefully consider its place, its ‘geography’. The place of the Cold

War was internal: the glow of TV sets in the countless living rooms where it was

played out, was an appropriate manifestation of the mental struggle it required.

We return to Durito’s notion of a ‘cátedra’, which refers to both the content of a

lecture itself as well as the location where it occurs. One of the similarities between

the storylines of the Durito story and the Warner Brothers ‘Mouse’ cartoon is that

teaching happens where it needs to happen despite, or more likely because of, the

looming enemy. Durito in his cátedra explains how the neoliberal government hunt-

ing them down fails because it operates by ‘i-m-p-r-o-v-i-s-a-t-i-o-n. The government

has no consistency’ and has ‘no plans[. . .] no perspectives’ he states, from his oddly

improvised, yet almost complete, classroom. He accuses the government of a different

kind of improvisation than his, an unthinking, and (literally) reactionary one.

Durito’s own improvisation demonstrates resourcefulness, and an unusual perspective

lacking in the government, which allows him to see the connection between the rebels’

local predicament and a much larger one affecting everyone. Che Guevara’s famous

dictum about improvising the Revolution, ‘it is not necessary to wait until all

conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them’, seems to

involve a little one-desk classroom, in the jungle, while on the run (Guevara, 1998: 7).

Size is important. Especially if you’re a small, cartoonish creature, your risks

always seem oversized. In later stories Durito mounts an ‘anti-boot’ campaign. But

one’s smallness also confers a visionary privilege because the scale of the enterprise

is inverted. It is the local conflicts, the very specific threats that sublimate the larger

ideological message to a grander scale. As Jean and John Comaroff have observed

about the class struggle in the millennial age, the strategy of the globalizing neoliber-

alism is to outsource labor, and thus dissipate the place where it occurs: globalization

is ‘likely to fragment modernist forms of class consciousness, class alliance and class

antinomies [. . . .] [i]t is also likely to dissolve the ground on which proletarian culture

68 JOHN A. OCHOA

once took shape’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000: 302). In a fundamental way, small-

ness of scale stands in opposition to such deterritorialization. Smallness, in its very

lightness and ethereality, requires a deep awareness of the immediate surroundings.

Recall Levittown, and the parlour culture.

The virtualization of the cátedra, the migration of both the object lesson and the

medium to a more diffuse, but farther-reaching scale countermands and on some

level abandons the local struggle. But in important ways, it also reclaims that small,

local ground. The original Zapatista slogan — of the first Zapata, during the Revolu-

tion of 1910–20 — was one of place, ‘la tierra es de quien la trabaja’ [the land belongs

to those who work it]) and, while this cri becomes more complicated when the

‘tierra’ exists virtually, in cyberspace, we can easily understand neo-Zapatismo as a

case of fighting fire with fire.

But the fact that (neo)Zapatismo, in its unprecedented battle for virtual land and

place, resorts to the original Zapatismo of very specific goals and locations, brings us

once more Marcos’s double discourse, and his knowing reliance on the conventions

and strategies of the Cold War. In a communiqué from September 4, 1995, Durito

takes up the keyboard, and in his later persona as a Quixotic ‘Don Durito de la

Lacandona’, who has taken the Sup as his squire, issues the following slapstick

parable:

Había una vez un ratoncito que tenía mucha hambre y quería comer un quesito que

estaba en la cocinita de la casita. Y entonces el ratoncito se fue muy decidido a la coc-

inita para agarrar el quesito, pero resulta que se le atravesó un gatito [. . . .] Y entonces

el ratoncito dijo:

-‘¡Ya basta!’- y agarró una ametralladora y acribilló al gatito y fue a la cocinita y vio

que el pescadito, la lechita y el quesito ya se habían echado a perder y ya no se podían

comer y entonces regresó a donde estaba el gatito y lo destazó y luego hizo un gran

asado y luego invitó a todos sus amiguitos y amiguitas y entonces hicieron una fiesta y

se comieron al gatito asado y cantaron y bailaron y vivieron muy felices. (Ejército

Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Mexico) et al. 1994–2001: 2:438–9)

Once upon a time there was a little mouse who was very hungry. He wanted to eat a

little bit of cheese that was in the little kitchen of a little house. So the little mouse very

sure of himself headed for the little kitchen to take the little bit of cheese. But it so

happens that a little kitty came across his way, [. . . .] So then the little mouse said,

‘Enough already!’ and he grabbed a machine gun and riddled the little kitty and then

went into the kitchen and saw that the little bit of fish, the bit of milk and the bit of

cheese had gone bad and were inedible. So he went back to where the cat was, and he

dismembered him and then made a great roast and then he invited all his little friends

and they had a party and they ate the roasted kitty and they sang and danced and lived

happily ever after. [My translation]

I have given the citation in the original Spanish in order to highlight linguistic

particularity, the abuse of the diminutive endings (‘-ito, -ita’). This excess creates a

treacly, sickly-sweet tone, clearly tongue-in-cheek of the sort of story told to very

young children, and where diminutives usually carry an air of innocence. This tic,

combined with the simplistic and repetitive building blocks of the story make the

69PROFESSORS ON THE RUN

contrast with the ultraviolent ending even more jarring. Durito, the little hard one, is

not a soft touch.

Irony is related to scale. On one hand, the ‘smaller-scale’, local dimension of

Zapatismo — the struggle for indigenous rights — demands an un-ironic, ‘straight-

forward’ language, with a clear set of defined outcomes, and, as outlined above, it

harkens to other, previous — and perhaps more humourless — revolutions. It is,

basically, to the point. Marcos was clearly capable, especially in these first moments

of the war, of summoning such a language. The subcomandante of the various

declaraciones still argues for, and believes in, article 39 of the Mexican Constitution

where it states unequivocally that the government exists by the will of the people, and

that the people have the absolute right to change it if it no longer reflects that will.

A heartfelt communiqué, issued on August 30, only a few days before Durito’s wry

parable and in reaction to setbacks in the peace talks, accuses the government of bad

faith and proclaims to all readers that the ‘effort by Mexicans, citizens, and the

National Peace Conference reminds us that the motherland [patria] lives and is ours’

(Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Mexico) et al. 1994–2001: 2:437 [my

translation]). And the violence associated with this was very real. On the other hand,

the ‘larger-scale’ dimension of Zapatismo, the highly visible struggle against globali-

zation and Neoliberalism, although it is voiced ironically by the diminutive and

pompous Durito, is meant to go outward, to a watching audience.

Most commentators of Marcos are generally more concerned with the ‘post modern’

Marcos who speaks to the world at large, than the idealistic Marcos worried about

the daily caloric intake of the Tzotzil population. The Border performance artist

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, for one, sees the Subcomandante as a fellow performero

(Gomez-Peña, 1995: 90); ‘hacktivists’ such as Electronic Disturbance Theater founder

Ricardo Dominguez claim to carry out extensions of his work (Fusco and Domingue z,

2010). This sort of reading favours Marcos primarily as a commentator, a social

gadfly, more than an agent of immediate and local change which is often violent: he

is more valuable as a revolutionary critic than as an actual revolutionary.11

Indeed Marcos’s own progression might warrant such a reading. After the

Zapatista stalemate of 1994–6, the when the EZLN’s military impact waned, combat

segued into negotiation, the only viable Marcos really became the virtual Marcos of

indefinite time and space, and of long-term goals. It is worth noting that this playful,

ironic Marcos belongs to a long tradition of countercultural activity mixing art

and activism (‘culture jamming’, or more recently ‘artivism’,) with roots in Dada,

Surrealism, French Situationism, and other avant-garde movements. This tradition is

part aesthetic gesture, part grand political statement, part juvenile pranksterism.

Finally, we must recall an important fact about the ironic Marcos of this counter-

cultural tradition, master of a sophisticated, anti-globalizing wit, who decolonizes the

patterns of the Cold War discourse. This ironic, slippery Marcos coexisted in equal

measure with the ‘real’ Marcos, hiding in the sierra with an underequipped force and

issuing sincere demands and posing threats of real violence — the utopian Marcos

who still had an earthly solution in mind, whose declaraciones echoed Fidel Castro’s

dead-serious ‘Declaraciones de la Habana’. And this coexistence of two distinct

voices, one adamant and the other wistful, were both still, on a fundamental level,

hoping for a home, something the cosmopolitan Situationists essentially took for

70 JOHN A. OCHOA

granted, as observers from within Guy Debord’s ‘spectacle’. Assuming a home is

something that neither Marcos, nor Zapatismo, can do; although Marcos’s ironic

re-deployment of Cold War discourse shares much with the Situationists, it is differ-

ent because it does not happen at the heart of Empire, or in Paris, or in any hegem-

onic geography: it is, and always will be, located in the periphery. Nonetheless, its

reach has been enormous.

Notes

I would like to thank Araceli Tinajero of CUNY and

Josh Lund of the University of Pittsburgh for their

kind invitations to share early stages of this project at

public readings.1 Vanden Berghe gives a fine overview of the main

issues that arise when an educated, urban mestizo

like Marcos assumes roles as spokesperson and

leader in an Indigenous rebellion (Vanden Berghe,

2005: 54–87). Jan de Vos, in Una tierra para

sembrar sueños (2002) offers a good counterpoint to

this attention to Marcos, stating that the Indigenous

population had been reclaiming ‘the book’ for quite

a while before the appearance of the Zapatistas, and

of Marcos. For a broader approach to the deploy-

ment of ‘Indianness’ in the uprising at large and

its various discourses (not just Marcos’s), a useful

discussion is Higgins’s Understanding the Chiapas

Rebellion; Thomas Olesen lays out the discursive

networks created by the movement.2 Tangeman writes that the declaración is ‘devoid

of much of the leftist rhetorical baggage usually

accompanying leftist Latin American guerilla move-

ment’ (Tangeman, 1995: 89). Vanden Berghe, per-

haps the most thorough formal reader of Marcos’s

narratives, notes that classical anti-US rhetoric is

strangely muted in Marcos’s voice, replaced by a

wider-ranging, nuanced, and ironic stance (Vanden

Berghe, 2005: 143–153).3 Josefina Saldaña-Portillo argues for a different read-

ing of the development of Zapatista discourse. She

addresses the complex signification of ‘mestizaje’

within the discourse in tandem with parallel resist-

ance movements, such as US Chicanismo. Saldaña-

Portillo contends that the Zapatista’s shift away

from a local agenda and towards a larger one that

engaged with national and even international con-

cerns, such as political transparency and referendum

initiatives, recall votes, etc. (and, we can assume,

anti-neoliberalism in general) was the cause behind

the hard government backlash, because the Zapatis-

tas ‘exceeded the terms of their own subalterniza-

tion’, the ‘particularity of their ethnicity’ (2002:

402–3) the Indigenous rebels surpassed their own

self-marginalization which corresponded with the

hegemony’s conception of their proper place.

4 In the interest of space I have included quotations

only in English translation from various sources,

including my own, as noted. Most references to the

Spanish originals refer to the 6 volume collected

Documentos y comunicados (1994–2001), unless

otherwise noted.5 For a light-hearted overview of Cold War paranoia,

see Barson and Heller’s Red Scared. A limited subset

of anxious works allowed the source of anxiety

to surface head-on, films like The Manchurian

Candidate [1962]. And of course the mainstream

fifties culture in the US was punctuated by a vibrant

counterculture that sought to fight this enforced

normativity: misfits, rebels, and dropouts that

included the Beats, the bop jazz scene, and the

Civil Rights movement. Yet hese sub-cultures were

strictly oppositional and localized.6 This formula obviously became murkier during the

later Eisenhower and the Kennedy administrations,

where harder-line ideologues like John Foster Dulles

moved into more proactive, anti-communist efforts

like covert actions, support of pro-west govern-

ments, and economic gerrymandering, and ultimate-

ly to the debacles of Southeast Asia in the 1960s)

(Parmet, 1972: 233–245).7 Of course, the jungle communiqués were quite

successful in generating public outcry in Mexico and

abroad, and arguably tempered what could have

easily been the Mexican Government’s ultraviolent

response to the rebellion. See Khasnabish 113–143.8 Spivak’s position is a somewhat polemical position-

ing within the debate over whether marginalized

voices need to resort to the ‘risk of essence’ in order

to arrest a relativistic and ultimately debilitating

anti-essentialism; basically, she argues for the use-

fulness of essentialism ‘it’s the idea of strategy that

has been forgotten. The strategic has been taken as

a point of self-differentiation from the poor essen-

tialists. So long as the critique of essentialism is

understood not as an exposure of error, our own or

others’, but as an acknowledgement of the danger-

ousness of something one cannot not use’ (Spivak,

1993: 5 [my emphasis]).9 Approaches to this range from short, mostly impre-

sionistc journalistic pieces by notables Margo Glantz

71PROFESSORS ON THE RUN

(1998), Gabriel Zaid (1994), and Hugo Hiriart

(1995) to more theoretically inclined (for instance

Duhalde and Dratman, 1994 [231–4]). Most signifi-

cant is perhaps Marcos himself.10 According Herlinghaus, Marcos is not exactly an

anti-hero, but rather an ‘anti-Platonic’ half-hero

who, through intentional inconsistency and discon-

tinuity, seeks discursive emancipation from the very

mechanism of authorial voice, which is ultimately

hegemonic: like the unifying Foucauldian author-

function, the very notion of the ‘hero’ is suspect

(Herlinghaus, 2004: 225–8).

11 Herlinghaus couches Marcos’s dual existence in

Brechtian terms: ‘What we have is the the ‘Brech-

tian’ problem regarding the relationship between

those who ‘make’ history and those who ‘write’ it,

those who move history and those who dedicate

themselves to it symbolic ordering — between the

‘who’ and the “what”’ (Herlinghaus, 2004: 221 [my

translation]). He argues that ‘Marcos has invented’

his ironic persona ‘as a satirical postscript to a bour-

geois project whose cultural hegemony’ nonetheless

‘continues to echo’ throughout it (Herlinghaus,

2005: 57).

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73PROFESSORS ON THE RUN

Notes on contributor

John Ochoa teaches in the Spanish and Comparative Literature Departments at Penn

State University. His main areas of research are Mexican intellectual and cultural

history, and American hemispheric studies. He is author of The Uses of Failure in

Mexican Literature and Identity (U. of Texas 2005) and is currently at work on a

book project pairing works from North and Latin America organized around the

notion of travel — both of people and ideas. It engages issues of cultural migration

and aesthetic cross-pollination and the formation of official culture; the picaresque

genre in literature and film; the Mexican sources of Chicano nationalism, and the

figure of the pastoral outlaw.

Ochoa has also published articles and book chapters on Chicano performance art,

the legacy of Edward Said, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and culinary history.

He was a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellow in 2001-02 and held previous

faculty positions at Vassar College and the University of California, Riverside.

Contact information: John Ochoa, Department Comparative Literature, Penn State

University, University Park, PA 16802. Email: jao13@psu.edu