© 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: [email protected]
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