Un Encuentro Para Libertad: Chicana Artivistas making art with the Zapatistas
Music: Quetzal – jaracho elegua
Narration:
The scene was a bit chaotic. Different languages, different cultures, rolled-up sleeves and ski masks. But the groups were creating something together. Something new.
In 1997, a group of artists from East LA met with a group of freedom fighters from Chiapas. And what came next redefined art, culture, and entire social movements.
How did a creative workshop across borders and across languages further a revolution? How did music, one-act plays, poems, murals and more connect humans more thoroughly than anything else? And what can we learn from the Chicana art scene in East LA in the 90s and their alliance with the indigenous Zapatistas in Mexico about how to make art as resistance today and tomorrow?
From Rebel Yell Creative, this is The Art of Resistance, a podcast about channeling our rage into creation, and using writing, music, and all kinds of art to resist the status quo.
I’m your host and producer Amy Lee Lillard, and I’m an author, podcaster, and autistic person who’s been obsessing over artists who resisted since I was a kid. And today, I’m looking to make all the weird art, and help others do the same.
(2:08) PART 1: EASTLOS
The scene moved. In the early 90s, the Troy Café in East LA was a small place where artists could gather and musicians play. It was a place for people to talk about how art and music was relevant. And what it could do for Chicano culture.
The Chicana term came from the artists and activists before them. This is southern California painter Berenice Badillo.
Clip: Chicana identity, from Cultura Chicana: Historia
By 1996 the Chicano artistic scene had shifted from Troy Café to the new Centro Regeneracion. This was a big warehouse space open to all artists and genres. It was co-founded by Zack de la Rocha of the band Rage Against the Machine.
Clip: Down Rodeo
They were a band known for fusing protest and resistance into music. And Zack was one of several artists with ties to East LA working to build the art community.
At the Centro, artists put on shows featuring music, performance art, poetry, visual art, and more. The artists who spent time in and created in the Centro formed a community, one based on a lot of sharing. Music groups would swap off on performing for fundraisers, demonstrations, and events. Poets and graffiti artists, painters and muralists, filmmakers and theatre groups – they all wanted to create a new kind of artistic scene rooted in activism.
The band Quetzal, formed by Quetzal Flores and led by artist and musician Martha Gonzalez, was a key fixture at el Centro.
Music: Quetzal Live - Para Sanar
Here’s Martha in 2022 on what it means to be an artivista:
Clip: Martha Gonzalez, MacArthur Fellow interview
And Flores, like many in the scene, was very inspired by the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico.
Flores brought together other artists into study groups dedicated to exploring the Zapatista movement, and how art and culture could be a tool to fight neoliberalism.
In 1996, a member of the Zapatista movement spoke in East LA and explored the art scene at el Centro. Impressed, he invited the artists down to Chiapas for un encuentro.
(6:16) PART 2: CHIAPAS
Clip: January 1 announcement
Music: Quetzal, Estoy Aqui
On January 1, 1994, a group of indigenous peoples from the far south region of Mexico called Chiapas announced they had occupied public buildings and landholdings in multiple cities. The movement was timed to coincide with the new economic agreement between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, called NAFTA. The agreement marked a new global economy, one which might benefit some, but would decimate the indigenous communities. NAFTA was going to open the door to seizing more land from indigenous Mexicans and other peoples.
The group, called the Zapatistas, announced: Hoy decimos basta. Today, we say: enough.
Power for this group was a collective, but several comandantes or leaders emerged as spokespeople. Here’s comandante Marcos, with a translater.
Clip: Role in society, Zapatista Uprising
Music: Se Acabo
The Zapatista movement had started in the late 1970s under a different name. For years, organizers worked in the indigenous communities in Chiapas to spread the simple truth – the unfairness they felt? The pain of overwork and underpayment? The frustration with their lack of voice in the government and the culture at large? It was all valid. And it stemmed from centuries of colonialism, and racism, and today’s new term for the same thing: neoliberalism.
The Zapatista movement gained a strong following in the rural villages. Some villagers even went to the mountains to train as insurgents. From the start, everyone had the same training and voice – even the women. Because as poorly as the indigenous men were treated, the indigenous women were treated much worse. They had no access to healthcare, no ability to control how many kids they had. They were passed from father to husband, and told to stay in the home and stay silent.
But the Zapatistas showed another way. Here’s an interview with a woman from Chiapas who withheld her identity.
Clip: Women gaining consciousness
In the clip, the woman said when we learned about the Zapatista struggle, the women slowly gained understanding and consciousness about our reality. We saw the necessity to organize. We are women with dignity and pride.
Women took up arms along with the men. In fact, on January 1 the town San Cristobal de las Casas was occupied under the command of Major Ana Maria.
The Zapatistas wanted the world to hear them. They wanted the world to see them. One powerful tool from the start was the pasamontana, or balaclava. A ski mask. Every person wore a pasamontana covering all but their eyes. It was an image the media could not ignore, and an image that spread around the world as inspiration.
The Zapatistas knew that their declaration of war on January 1 was a desperate act, an almost suicidal one. Here’s comandante Marcos.
Clip: Death with dignity
Marcos said they all voted – war or no war. And they knew it wasn’t a choice against death. It was choice between death with dignity or without.
But no one saw the Zapatistas coming.
Music: La Bomba
No one expected anything of Mayan and indigenous peoples except to work and die and stay quiet. So they surprised everyone. They spoke to the media to give their story, and then they got to work.
They established a new way that survives to this day. There are 40 autonomous municipalities in Chiapas that contain multiple villages – like a county, in the US. There are five regions of municipalities, formerly named Aguascalientes, now caracoles. Within Zapatista territory, they govern themselves. They’ve set up independent healthcare and schools. They’ve taken over the land formerly owned by the patrons, who routinely worked the indigenous people to death. They’ve established an economy based on cooperation and equality.
The Zapatistas didn’t want to take over Mexico. They weren’t a typical revolutionary group in that way: Instead of seizing central power in revolution, or even winning an election, they have found a different way. Power is usually defined by money or the government. But the Zapatistas opened a space for democracy without taking central power. So redefining power.
Here's comandante Marcos again, with a translator.
Clip: Redefining power
(15:10) PART 3: EL ENCUENTRO
From the start, art and culture was a critical element of the Zapatista movement. Because for centuries of colonialism, in addition to taking the land from indigenous people, the colonizers worked to strip the people of their language, their cultural practices, their way of life.
It was a playbook that spread all over the world, including the U.S. It was something the Chicana artists knew intimately.
Music: Quetzal, This is My Home
The Chicano community was and is frequently attacked by the white capitalist mantra of more more more. The neighborhood had been torn apart by new construction and freeways; homes and small businesses razed by private developers and city planners. And that’s besides the constant racism and terror waged on immigrant Americans.
So when they were invited down to Chiapas for un encuentro, which technically means meeting, but was infused with so much more, the artists jumped at the chance.
In August of 1997, the Big Frente Zapatista, a group of over a hundred artists and community organizers, traveled to Chiapas. There they held the Encuentro Cultural Chicano / Indigena por la Humanidad y contra el Neoliberalismo (The Chicano and indigenous cultural meeting for humanity and against neoliberalism).
Over nearly two weeks in the Aguascalientes Oventic, the Zapatistas and the Chicana artists just… created. They held workshops in poetry, graffiti and mural painting, dance.
They held a music workshop where they developed a cumbia song together about the loss of ancestral lands, and the greed and enslavement by colonizers. But also the hope and joy of being together that day.
The theater workshop developed one-act plays about indigenous women and their struggles with healthcare. When women did have any access to healthcare, the government clinics would ignore their pain, and always give contraceptives on the way out.
Here’s audio of one of those plays:
Clip - Encuentro
The workshops took time and patience. English had to be translated to Spanish, and Spanish to Tzotil and multiple other Mayan languages, and then back again. Stories had to be told to explain to one another what they were creating.
But the somewhat chaotic process was the whole point. The creative works weren’t going to be produced and sold. They weren’t going to be measured and weighed and awarded prizes. The work that came out of the workshops were designed not for profit or competition, but to start conversations. To have a communal experience through creativity and art.
For everyone involved – the indigenous peoples who had been forced into colonial, capitalist ways, and the Chicanos raised in the U.S. culture of produce produce produce – this was an entire mental shift. And it spoke to cultural and art practices that, no matter how hard the colonizers tried, had never been destroyed.
(19:06) PART 4: THE MILLENNIUM
Music: Quetzal, El grito
After the trip was over, the Chicana artists went back to LA with a goal: engage more people in communal creations and experiences.
The band members of Quetzal came home and recorded the song the music workshop had developed – el grito de alegria.
They recorded several albums that shared the learnings from the Zapatistas, and still to this day run collective music-making and performance workshops. Martha Gonzalez in particular works with Entre Mujeres songwriting collective. Here’s Martha in 2016.
Clip: Collective Songwriting
Music: Quetzal Cielito Lindo and Tragafuegos
Other participants of the encuentro went on to form art collectives showcasing women of color. Some formed social justice organizations. Some went into academia, or wrote plays, or organized unions, or created music therapy.
In Chiapas, they held additional Encuentros with other groups from around the world. Over the years, they have been constantly harassed by the Mexican military, fighting back incursions on their land, planting crops while helicopters flew dangerously close above. They have been killed by the government and its forces. And no matter how many speeches by comandantes, the media routinely reports the government line on the Zapatistas as a violent insurrection driven by outsiders from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba. They’d manipulated these passive, powerless people into this act.
But despite it all, the Zapatistas continue, building thriving systems for themselves. All the while keeping their language and culture and art alive and well.
(22:13) PART 5: IMPACT
So how do you measure the impact of all this?
As we’ve been talking about all season, measurement of art and its impact is… flawed.
From the start in Troy Café, and later in Centro Regeneracion, the Chicana artivistas talked constantly about the role of art and culture in society, while grappling with our capitalist system that says: art and music is just another commodity. Something to be sold, consumed, and regurgitated again and again to make cash.
Our modern life doesn’t view art and culture as communal experiences. Our system values product over process. Our system tells creators and artists that if they don’t make money doing their work, it’s pointless.
But the Chicano artists knew there had to be a different way. They were frustrated that arts and culture were often seen as less than political tactics like protests and political organizing.
And the Zapatistas presented that different way. Art and music and culture is relational, they said, based on our intersectional connections. It’s not a soundtrack to a movement – it’s a tactic. Its an essential element.
Culture and art can help communities connect when society and the economy would force them apart.
Resistance, then, isn’t defined by winners and losers, success or failure. Those concepts don’t matter, and don’t even make sense. The process is the thing. The art, the creation, is the thing. The alliances and relationships made along the way is the thing. By all of this, we can assert our freedom from the status quo.
As one of the Zapatista dichos or sayings says: No tenemos que pedir permiso para ser libres. We don’t have to ask permission to be free.
(24:38) CONCLUSION:
What can we learn from this story? What can we do as creative people in this fucked-up world?
Because we are all creative. We can all finds ways to resist.
Art is resistance. And more than that, art is a process. Resistance is a process. There’s no end, there’s no product, no gatekeeping.
So here’s what we do from here:
· We tell our stories, in our way.
· We get creative and get weird, and work beyond the parameters we think box us in.
· We create revolutionary art to reach the people who need to see it and hear it.
· And we don’t think of this as short term. Even if we get a new administration in 2028, even if we miraculously come out of this terrifying, tyrannical moment, there is so much to fight against and for. This is a long-term commitment to making art for a better world.
Music: Se Acabo
(25:55) OUTRO:
The Art of Resistance is a podcast from Rebel Yell Creative, which is creative consulting, courses and community for good work, good art, and good people. We help community groups, small businesses and creative individuals build, create, and resist.
If you’re a creative looking to make art as resistance, subscribe at rebelyellcreative.com.
And if you have a story about making art as resistance that we should feature on the show, one from the past, or one from today, send us a note! Find the link in the show notes.
This is Amy Lee Lillard, and I wrote, narrated, and produced this show. Check the show notes for all sources, and some great additional reading and watching.
I’ll see you next time.
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
Chican@ Artivistas: Music, Community and Transborder Tactics in East Los Angeles, Martha Gonzalez
The Zapatista Experience: Rebellion, Resistance, and Autonomy, Jerome Baschet
A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency, Jeff Conant
Companeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories, Hilary Klein
“Build Culture, Build Community, Break Fascism.” Garrett Gutierrez, Public Books. https://www.publicbooks.org/build-culture-build-community-break-fascism/
Video of the encuentro and a one-act play:
Martha Gonzalez, Musician, Scholar, and Artist/Activist | 2022 MacArthur Fellow:
Collective Songwriting in Boyle Heights:
Cultura Chicana: HIstoria de identidad y lucha:
Declaración de Guerra del EZLN 1 de enero de 1994:
Zapatista Uprising 20 Years Later: How Indigenous Mexicans Stood Up Against NAFTA "Death Sentence.”
MUJERES EN EL MOVIMIENTO ZAPATISTA:
Chiapas: la guerra y la paz 1994 - 2004 (DOCUMENTAL COMPLETO)
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