An assembly of bosses, female, male and otherwise.
Imagine that you arrive at a Zapatista assembly. Allow me to accompany your gaze and your listening. We are in a meeting. SubMoy is presiding. At a broad glance (“as the crow flies,” as they used to say – now it is “with a drone”), you can detect obvious differences among those who participate.
In gender, for example. There are women, men and non-binary people.
In terms of timing. There are children, youngsters, adults and people already of age (“third age” or “senior citizens”). There is also the offspring still in the mother’s womb.
Of language. There are those whose mother tongue is Cho’ol, Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Mam or Ta Yol Mam, Zoque, Kakchikel, and Castilian.
Of geography. There are those from the different areas of the original peoples of the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas.
Of creeds and beliefs. There are Catholics, Evangelicals, Presbyterians, atheists, and those without defined or undefined beliefs.
There are also differences in what it is or means to be born, grow, live, and fight as natives in a geography where being “other” is a motive for contempt, exploitation, repression and dispossession. “Being” where “not being” is the rule and the stigma for the different.
For example, there are those who argue, argue, debate, yell, shout, wave their hands, get angry, joke, murmur: “if the Mayan kings, the Aztecs, the Spaniards, the priests, the French, the gringos, the bad governments of Mexico and the world, and all the and caxlan bastards (of all genders) that came just to see what they could steal, we would have already found the cure for cancer, the remedy for sadness and the consolation for heartbreak. For all other misfortunes, we are there, although slow… like a snail”.
And, on the other hand, there are those who argue against it and defend certain religions and caxlans; that for sadness the cumbia has already been discovered; and that, for heartbreak, any carpenter knows that “a nail pulls out another nail”.
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Now look for similarities, common identities.
Well, the first one that jumps out is that these people are Zapatistas. You assume this because the large gallery in which they are gathered is in a caracol. A “puy”. Those like work and meeting centers, where there are usually clinics, sometimes laboratories, athletic fields, collective and common stores, dining rooms, pavilions, and people walking from one side to the other.
It is possible that Veronica Palomitas, who has her own courier service, is also there. In exchange for a piece of candy, you can ask her to go get you something from the co-op store. Veronica Popcorn gets on her bike and pedals relentlessly to accomplish the mission. No matter the distance. Even if it’s up to 100… meters, the acting head of Comando Palomitas ensures that your order gets to her from you.
However, despite the evidence, not everyone may be a Zapatista. It is normal that, at times, non-Zapatistas brothers and sisters arrive for a health service -an ultrasound, for example-, to ask for orientation on some matter, to have a party or simply to go for a walk.
If you wait until pozol time (that kind of “lunch break” that is customary in rural areas at work or in their long meetings), you will hear them talking and smiling in languages that you assume are native because you don’t understand anything. Because yes, laughing in Tzeltal is not the same as laughing in Tzotzil or Cho’ol.
Neither is crying.
The late supGaleano used to drive Veronica Palomitas to despair when she started to scream: “I don’t understand you if you cry in Cho’ol”, he would tell her and Veronica would be disconcerted. “If I saw that you were you squealing in Castilian, maybe I could understand you”. The little girl tried to find out how to cry in Castilian, but she had already forgotten what the tantrum was about?
Oh, right. Some very nice flip-flops that Veronica Palomitas looked at in the cooperative store. Her father told her that “there was no money” and the old man rambled on because he argued that the boots were better. It was all for no use, and so the shrieking. Nothing serious, because the Captain, always prepared, took out of his hat… a chamoy candy! And then Veronica and the Captain would start planning terrible and marvelous things… like a play with footnotes. But those are all secrets that won’t be published…yet.
But don’t get distracted, concentrate. The similarities are not conclusive, because being native is shared with millions in Mexico and in the world; being Zapatistas with hundreds of thousands; being women or men or non-binary is also shared with millions.
Of course, you are right. It is clear that these people are not there to complain, either about their bad luck, or that they were born indigenous, or that they have been dispossessed, exploited, despised, repressed. In short, that history that they share with other native peoples of the world.
No complaints are heard other than that someone’s belly hurts because the tamales were raw, or because now they are sleepy, or because that other compa uses very harsh words that even he doesn’t understand, and no matter what, you have to respect his word.
But don’t be fooled, the silence you hear is not one of agreement, acceptance or resignation. It is one of thought.
Don’t think that everything is calm either, no. There are discussions, and loud ones. There is no shouting and hat-waving because few people wear hats. Let’s say there is “yelling and banging”. The female compañeras tend to be more lethal: they give each other dirty looks and gestures. And there are no fights with chairs as a weapon and shield, because… there are no chairs, but benches that discourage any arms race (they are heavy).
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Ah, that’s right. Among their differences is their history as Zapatistas. There are those who, clandestinely, prepared the blitz of January 1994. Those who marched, armed with truth and fire, in the streets of 7 municipal capitals that were taken by “the Indians”. Veteran combatants, old guerrillas, local, regional and zonal leaders, commanders of the so-called “Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Clandestine Committee”.
There are those who were just children in the uprising, and grew up in the midst of betrayals of all kinds, attacks and harassment by the armies, the police, the paramilitaries. There are those who built Zapatista autonomy.
There are those who have been born in the last 30 years and who have built schools, clinics and the entire organizational structure of Zapatista autonomy. Those who have organized meetings, festivals, workshops, tournaments, games, arts, and culture. Those who are Tercios Compas, Education Promoters, Health Promoters, Art and Culture Coordinators, painters, theater artists, singer-songwriters, dancers, musicians (no offense), bricklayers, poets, carpenters, novelists, mechanics, chauffeurs, militiamen, militiamen and militiapeople, poets, insurgents, autonomous authorities, filmmakers, sculptors, commissions of everything necessary (templete commission, cleaning, parking, latrines, bathrooms, puppies and kittens, kitchen, firewood, surveillance, shopkeepers, taqueria, tamale crudo, pyramid, musicals, motor, water, light, …, beetles? beetles? )
And, of course, there are the kids who do what every kid in the world should do: get into mischief.
Three generations. Four if we take into account childhood. Five, counting the one on the way.
In short, a more or less complex society. With their jobs and their quarrels. With the way these same communities have equipped themselves to organize the former and resolve the latter.
What is appreciated is the seriousness of the meeting. The same seriousness with which they decided and carried out an uprising; the same seriousness with which they decided autonomy and raised it; the same seriousness with which they defined their path with two words “Resistance and Rebellion” -and they fight it and live it day and night-; the same seriousness with which they called for the struggle for life; the same seriousness with which they now plan this next meeting.
The same seriousness with which they looked at themselves in the mirror of practice, critiqued not the reflection that the mirror gave back to them, but what they were and are, and thus reconstructed themselves.
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Many people. Many differences. And what they have in common doesn’t really make them different from others in the world.
But they found a common ground. A commonality. Something in which they coincide and does not require that they stop being who they are, nor deny their history, their roots, their way. Something to which they can contribute, support, with their knowledge, work, opinions, doubts.
Anyway. They are part of what is known as “Interzone”. But only a part, because there are authorities of Inter-ACGAZ, ACGAZ, CGAZ and GAL. There are coordinators. There are young people from the different areas. A lot of youth. A lot of noise.
Now they are united by a common purpose: to make other geographies, modes, genders, languages, generations understand how, against one pyramid, another one was built; how the latter was demolished; and how the common was and is the machete, axe, barretón, hammer, that first built it , and then destroyed it, in order to then destroy the biggest one: the system. Capitalism, the mother pyramid, which under its shadow and hierarchy has seen the birth and growth of other pyramids: patriarchy, homophobia, vanguardism, authoritarianism, psychopathy-turned- government, nationalism, criminal destruction of nature, and wars.
And why it is necessary to destroy the pyramid, any pyramid, and all pyramids.
It is an assembly by the way. But they did not meet to find out about something, but to reach an agreement on what, how, where, why.
A meeting to agree and organize. To prepare everything so that our compañeras, compañeros and compañeras from Mexico and the world, feel as they should, that is to say, accompanied.
And all this noise to prepare for a meeting. One with compañeros, compañeras and compañeroas who are similar in their differences. An international one. One for life.
From the Mountains of the Mexican Southeast.
The Captain
July 2025.
Original text published at Enlace Zapatista on July 27th, 2025.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.