AgriCulture | Autonomía Zapatista and Agroecology
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| Maíz resistente. School for Chiapas. |
Moderator’s
Note: As part
of a series on the 20th anniversary of the Zapatista movement for Indigenous
autonomy, we offer this first and original unauthorized translation of a report
by Gallo Téenek. The report originally appeared in Spanish on Regeneración
Radio in October 2013 and offers a “social perspective” on the meaning
of direct democracy as constituted by Zapatista communities in the form of caracoles – which literally translates
as “Snails” and figuratively alludes to the spiral shape of the snail shell.
Don Durito and other Others might explain this as a symbol for the organizational
form of Indigenous nurturing of deep place-based knowledge and also a nest or nido offering protective harbor for the
social, biological, and cultural life of the organism and community.
Téenek desribes Zapatista grassroots institutions of
collective action through a lengthy depiction of the Oventic Junta de Buen Gobierno or Good
Government Council [a.k.a. Junta] and throughout emphasizes women’s agency –
somewhat reductively as “women’s roles”. Nonetheless, the Zapatistas model
transforming agriculture and food systems is also transforming gender,
sexuality, and especially how these intersect with the gender, age, and class
divisions of labor for both productive and reproductive work.
Some rather short sections of the report address the
Zapatista vision of agroecology. Téenek wishes to reveal how Indigenous farmers
rightfully consider such fields of tacit and apprenticed skills and knowledge as
the heart of their own heritage and the basis of conscious resurgence in Zapatista
traditions of place-based sustainable, resilient, and equitable AgriCultures.
In principal this means that agroecosystems directly link to caracoles and good
government councils.
This poses the question of territory and Téenek
states that homeland is always the basis for the “creation of identities” in place-based
Indigenous communities. This is clearly an allusion to the concept of
place-based identities, which, ever since Manuel Castells in the trilogy of
books on The Rise of the Network Society,
has been widely described by social scientists as one of the last great subversive
spaces of resistance to neoliberal capitalist globalization.
Téenek suggests that the Zapatista concept of territory is at the center of Indigenous
pathways to autonomy. Territory is not just space. It is place. Indigenous
concepts of territory often invoke above all else the Indigenous right to fulfill
obligations to place. Globalism must step back and respect the sovereignty
of the land organism itself through local adoption of “Original Instructions”.
Earth instructs humans and other-than-human organisms on the rules for
nurturingly inhabiting place and becoming good home makers.
The concept of agroecology, then, actually becomes
very important in this context althought Téenek, (mis)characterizes the
Zapatista campaign as a struggle for “food sovereignty”. My critique is that the concept of
sovereignty is first of all not Indigenous.
It is largely an invention unleashed by the French Revolution and therefore remains
problematic in many ways especially as a framework for describing the concepts
of self, polity, and authority in pre-contact Indigenous civilizations. There is also this: The irreducible Indigenous
perceptions of the damage caused by 500+ years of sovereignty by empires over
the Mexican Earth from afar and close up in the colonialist ‘lording’ over the
dead, diseased, and exhausted bodies of enslaved Indigenous masses that
nonetheless kept fighting back every step of the way until today. This was
brutal murderous dispossession but Indigenous peoples are not mere ghosts of
some all-encompassing
The Zapatista struggle for autonomy involves a
recovery of Indigenous agroecological knowledge, belief, and practice and this
is where Téenek enriches the conversation about Zapatismo and affiliated social
movements by introducing us to autonomous alternatives that simply starve the
neoliberal capitalist beast and its global commodity chains filled with the
violence of biotechnology and agro-industrial cartels, hopefully soon past the
banal blink-out intodissipation – a la
Enron, for Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer CropScience, and the rest of this Seed
Mafia surely deserve such a fate.
There is no one substantial description for this Indigenous
Agroecology. Each is always place-specific. To suppose that is possible would
amount to an absurdity given the multiplicity of each ejido, sembrado, huerto
familiar, milpa en arbol, acahual, bajada, rejollada, and all the other shifting
mosaics of land races and their wild relatives and companions. There is so much
more evolving and sacred complexity in such autonomous spaces and we can learn
from the networks of the polyculture landscapes that tie people to place and their
institutions of self-governance – the juntas and caracoles.
The Zapatista polyculture mosaic is a finely tuned
and carefully timed sacred cultural and ecological rotation through cycles such
as the huertos familiares è
milpas è acahuales as part of living ancestral heritage
landscapes slowly being resurrected through the resurgence of the deep roots of
place-based knowledge+belief+practice in Indigenous agroecology and
permaculture.
The regenerative life cycle of the Zapatista
place-based AgriCulture – which now becomes the focus of grassroots caracol
research, teaching, and mentoring – is in this form connected to the
articulation of the direct participatory democracy of the Good Government
Councils with full accountability to the democratically elected general
assemblies.
Finally, this leaves me thinking: Are we in the Chicana/o
and broader food justice movements competently applying these lessons on organizational
processes to our own regenerative AgriCulture work? Are we going beyond the seemingly
obligatory critical self-reflections about our ‘roles’ in the autonomous forms
of governance, some of which we have inherited since late antiquity in the acequia and merced institutions found today across the American Southwest? Do we and our
own communities embrace mandar obedecer
as leadership reproduced through mutual reliance interests in the form
of communal bread labor alongside social movement activism as
scientists and environmental justice advocates? These are important questions I
am led to consider after reading this insightful report on Zapatismo and
agroecology by Gallo Téenek.
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| Promotoras Zapatistas teach agroecology. School for Chiapas |
Autonomy more than direct
democracy
INDIGENOUS FARMING, FOODS, & FOODWAYS ARE
CORE VALUES
Gallo Téenek | March 14, 2014
Translation by Devon G. Peña
NOTE: Throughout this translation, I
have added the material in brackets.
After ten years of Zapatista autonomy it is worth pondering, albeit briefly, the
organizational form of self-government with particular emphasis on projects in education, health, and agroecology and to
highlight the role [sic] that women play
in these processes.
To
understand the concept of autonomy we have to start from two premises: 1) subjects
have self-determination, i.e. the ability to make decisions in regard to the
forms of organization, and 2) territory, is an area where they carry out decision-making,
implement actions, manage resources, and create identities.
So,
with the inspiration of autonomy in Zapatista territory, Indigenous peoples
have in practice been reinventing the
meaning of democracy, working through their own contradictions. According
to Ramirez Zaragoza (2008:82):
…Not only from the 1994 uprising, but above all, since
the shaping of the San Andres Accords that were breached by the government in 1996
and after the adoption of the law on Indigenous rights and culture of 2001, Indigenous
communities were in real terms legally denied the possibility of self-determination
based on their customs.
It
is also important to point out that the shift to the demand for autonomy has to
do with territorial considerations, which carry an implicit idea of
sustainability linked to the style of pre-Hispanic [sic] social-territorial
organization, which also corresponds to a modern anti-capitalist vision of the world.
“The territory has to do with where the culture is based, as cultural territory,
as the product of a constant change in social process, and this is not only
geographical-political.” (Ceceña 2004:602)
It
is the territory controlled by the Zapatistas where we find the construction of
the five Aguascalientes[i] as results
of identity networks that link across the territory in rebellion in Chiapas,
where the Zapatista Indigenous people construct the possibility of improving
their living conditions.
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| Image courtesy of Dorset Chiapas Solidarity |
At
first people called “civil society” promoted and supported productive education
and health projects in various Autonomous Municipalities of Chiapas. For
example, in Oventic Caracol II, the
education and health needs of more than 38 surrounding communities are served
through the clinic – Hospital “La Guadalupe” and High School – and these were
the first projects to be generated in Zapatista territory. (Sub Comandante
Marcos, 2001: 249)
The
Zapatista support bases within the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities
[MAREZ] are clear instances of rebel government and play the most important role
in the Zapatista struggle through this [spatial agency that Indigenous people
use] to hold their autonomy, always
without recognition the Mexican government.
Through
their own means of incorporating productive
projects, the Zapatista communities build their bases of support through other
forms of politics where leading-by-obeying [mandar
obedeciendo] practice emerges out of a process in which the [new political
subjects] radically distance themselves from institutional organizations:
The JBG (
... ) of these 5 snails held for other revocation of mandate, for those who do
not meet either their names are removed by the communities, and the charge is rotating
and has no compensation, as it is conceived as a job and collective benefit (
... ) This body (JBG ) are ( ... ) a class instance where its member are
rotated weekly ( ... ) remain from Sunday to Sunday and then return to their
communities in origin municipalities and authorities, and again ( ... ) after
three or four weeks. This representation mechanism originates from the
different communities of the municipality named the Autonomous Council of the
municipality and its various representatives in municipal commissions. In turn,
members of the Council of each municipality are organized in shifts so as to
ensure their continued involvement.
(Cerda Garcia, 2011: 147)
Renewal
of town council terms every three years by [consensus of] general assembly. During
the six months following the end of a term, the former autonomous authorities
have the responsibility to advise and assist the new authorities. Thus, the JBG
is comprised of about 12 people – both women and men – and belonging to
different municipalities of Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabales, and mestiza/o
[communities]. The daily work is organized through projects [under supervision]
of autonomous commissions for finance, complaints [accountability and
transparency], issues [dispute resolution], responses to requests, among
others. (Op. cit , 2011: 148)
Councils
act as autonomous bodies representing the municipalities [and] … Good
Government are bodies representing various Autonomous Municipalities and become
the representative voice of all members of the communities belonging to an ethnic
group, in the same way that JBG representatives were representatives of all
municipalities falling within their jurisdiction regardless of which particular
municipality the representative belongs to (Ramirez Zaragoza, 2009: 37-39).
Regarding
the Zapatista organization, members of the Board of Good Government at Oventic Caracol,
who were active during the brigade that participated in Mana Radio in
solidarity with Zapatista communities in 2011, talked about the meaning of work
as part of an autonomous body:
…We are
giving service to our people, we know what we have said from the 94, ( ... ) we
do have to change a situation that is of the people ( ... ) we see what needs
there are here ( ... ) is our obligation to receive national and international
visitors and it is our obligation to see the fulfillment of the needs of every
people of every village. (Good
Government Oventic, 2011, interview)
The
difference between public schools and Zapatista charter schools [sic] is the [method of] imparting of
knowledge and the content. On the one hand, in the public schools classes are
taught only in Spanish and Indigenous culture is left aside, while Zapatista schools
the identity of Indigenous peoples is encouraged and classes are given in
Spanish, Zoque, Tzeltal and Chol and [the curriculum] speaks of the Zapatista
struggle and history. The stories of the autonomous learning of children are
about their own people and struggles. The challenge in education is now to correlate
all projects. Classes in health and agroecology are wanted by and offered in
the communities. (Muñoz Ramírez, 2004: Internet) The autonomous educational
projects are very important in the Indigenous movement in Chiapas because it is
the means by which they reproduce their social practices, i.e. raising
awareness among Zapatista children and generating the means of reproduction and
continuity of their struggle [for autonomy].
Regarding
autonomous healthcare, the Zapatista project [in Oventic] has built their own
clinics and organized themselves as health workers campaigning for hygiene and disease
prevention. Likewise, they have conducted “rescue projects” for traditional
medicine and participated in the construction of dental clinics.
We have a
central clinic ( ... ) the same in each Autonomous Municipalities ( ... ) Why ?
Because municipalities are very withdrawn ( ... ) but not only , we also have
nursing homes in each community ( ... ) us as Zapatistas, the people themselves
began to organize ( ... ) are not getting money, pay ( ... ) we are in resistance.
(Good Government Oventic, 2011,
interview)
Autonomous
regions are [working to extend a network] of nursing homes and clinics, dental
offices, clinical and herbology [ethnobotany] laboratories, and centers for
practiced ophthalmology and gynecology as well as pharmacies. In the community
health system of the Zapatistas, the queries have a nominal fee and are
sometimes free and serve anyone who requests [medical attention] whether or not
the [person is part of the] EZLN support base. Traditional medicine is free while
[provision of] pharmaceutical medicine [is provided at] cost. (Zibechi , 2008:
43 )
Despite
the lack of recognition by the Mexican government, the strategies in the field
of health the Zapatista Support Bases are implementing illustrate efficiency
[as measured by] (reduction of infant and maternal mortality) but also because
it makes possible the formation of a local
health strategy controlled by the Indigenous population.
Zapatistacommunities are trying to ensure food sovereignty [sic] and practices that
respect “Mother Earth” through agroecology projects. These include advocates working
with communities and municipalities with Zapatista support bases.
One
project focuses on a soil improvement plan consisting, among other things, of
efforts to eliminate the practice of gradually burning acahuales [the native tree plantings that are designed to rotate
fallow fields back into wild forest species for a long duration recovery period
after intensive human uses]; the use organic fertilizers and the end of
insecticides for pests; all this in order to restore fertility to the lands.
(Muñoz Ramírez, 2004: Internet)
In
this respect the members of the Good Government
…realized that
the chemicals sold by the rich and poor governance are just killing Mother
Earth, polluting the soil, the river, the air ( ... ) the earth and us, for the
chemicals ( ... ) they bring a lot disease ( ... ) right now there are already many
communities, many municipalities everywhere, that know how organic fertilizers
are prepared ( ... ) and are not using chemicals and are learning to do naturally
pure production very well, right now they are learning about soil conservation
( ... ) people are already planting cornfields, beans, vegetables ( ... )
Nature ( ... ) already shows us a good way of how to survive (Good Government Junta, Oventic, 2011, interview)
The
Zapatista agroecology projects – given the form of understanding of nature as toward
a balanced use of natural resources and always with respect for the environment
of Indigenous peoples – makes preservation of the local ecology possible along
with the development of broad knowledge of the nutritional, therapeutic, and
life [biodiversity] facilitating properties [of agroecosystems and their local
contexts.]
[Changes in gender relations]
Another
key feature is that the Zapatista movement has generated a number of changes in
the forms of the daily relationship established between men and women. In this
sense, it has enabled the participation of women from the early days of public
activity during the EZLN uprising in 1994 and before women had rights to
participate in the work of the people. Thus, a great achievement of the
organization itself has to do with the dignity of women as has been done in the
fight against the practice of “selling” women, and in which women previously
could not freely choose their own marital or domestic partners. (Cerda Garcia,
2011:114)
In
the spaces of the Autonomous Municipalities or Snails people can exercise freely
the experiences of courtship, pair formation, and the exercise of sexuality.
There is also an intention and a series of measures to ensure that during
meetings and workshops the tasks traditionally reserved for women such as
grooming or food preparation are also shared by men. ( op. cit , 2011 . 114 )
Not only
men, women also are doing their job , are coordinators , coordinate together
men and women ( ... ) when it comes to marketing cooperatives as they are ,
these are the same women who carry out all the jobs done there . Currently in the
Chiapas Highlands are two cooperatives that are working and the collective
group of women, they are the policy tables ( ... ) there are the same
companions who make the decision , taking initiative , problem solve when
problems arise on their cooperative ( ... ) because all that is needed there. (Women of the Good Government Oventic, 2011,
interview)
These
cooperatives, shops, farms and collective ovens are also used for discussion
and collective deliberation, as spaces of self-management and discussion of
gender identities, and enable mixed participation and the participation of
women in political discussion.
An
important feature that emerges from Zapatismo and that I cannot pass-up without
noting is their concept of power because they do not recognize protagonists or embrace
the idea of a single revolution; rather [their revolutionary subjectivity]
arise[s] as a moral force that is diffused among the people. Against the
imposition (of hegemony), Zapatistas counter-pose the recognition of
difference. The slogan “to lead by obeying” means that public assemblies
directly elect officials and can revoke the mandates; accountability to the
community is as with the conduct of communitary work; all these qualities are
important to the construction of new political practices.
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| Postales Zapatistas. Courtesy of Javier Soria. |
The
exercise and construction of power in the Caracoles and the Good Government is not
done under the logic of the state, i.e., the centralization of power and
domination; instead of concentrating political power in one man [sic] or an
institution, Indigenous Zapatista communities realize a form of equitable
redistribution of power, where each community member has the ability to
influence the decisions of the community, accompanied by a direct democracy and
power generated from the community:
The
Zapatista Caracoles also represent a rupture with the vision of the revolutionary
movements of the 20th Century that sought to take power by force and
then change the world. Instead rebel Mayas build power from below (the micro)
and in this form seek to create resistance networks with other communities or
other movements. (Romero, 2010:
Internet)
The
autonomous organization of Indigenous communities is not new. In Mexico, three
quarters of the municipalities of Oaxaca – with 15 distinct coexisting ethnic
groups – elect their authorities according to customary law and approximately 70
percent of the state’s population is governed by Indigenous authorities. In
more than 400 municipalities “community self-determination” is conducted through
the management of local affairs and the administration and protection of
communal lands, natural resources, and culture (Le Bot, 1998, March 29:
Internet).
However,
it is the Zapatistas that have bestowed emancipatory, rebellious, independent,
and self-managed forms of organization on Indigenous governance and exercise of
authority. Direct democracy practiced in Zapatista communities under the
principle of mandar obedecer and especially
with the creation of Good Government Juntas is what makes [Indigenous
authority] different in the Zapatista movement[s]. Ramírez (2008: 63) explains
how the social constructions holding the movement together are examples of the
real possibilities of creating spaces [territories] that work and nurture the
movement by building a political culture of participatory and direct democracy
that is itself a product of the political practice of obeying the basis of the
construction and strengthening of autonomy and will be the basis of the
maintenance of these political structures: Rebel Zapatista Autonomous
Municipalities and Good Government.
With
few economic resources men, women, children, and elderly of the Zapatista Indigenous
communities organize their schools, nursing homes, hospitals, cooperatives, pharmacies,
[and] commercial wineries; all those projects encompass what they define as
autonomy. What seems clear is the breaking of relations with the institutions
of government, with [constituted] power; without forcing the people, the civil
society to organize the Zapatista way; in this way, [Indigenous people] seek an
emancipatory relationship that respects culture and traditional knowledge of
the local territorial dimension [conocimiento
tradicional en una dimensión territorial local].
The
practices offered to the world by tens of thousands of men, women and children,
Tzotziles, Tzeltales, Tojolabales, Choles, Zoques, Mames and mestiza/os – all
of them Zapatistas – are the social laboratory of autonomy and self-government that
challenge the international community, the [so-called] “first world” to walk
together with the Zapatistas, [and embrace] practices that contradict the idea
of representative democracy that exists not only in Mexico but in the rest of
the world.
Bibliography
Ramírez
Zaragoza, Miguel Ángel. (2009). “El impacto
del movimiento zapatista en la participación política de los indígenas. Hacia
una cultura política democrática”. Tesis de maestría.
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Iztapalapa (UAM-I).México.
Ramírez
Zaragoza. (2008). “La autonomía y La Otra
Campaña van. El movimiento Zapatista y sus impactos en la transición
procedimental de la democracia y el cambio social”. Praxis y
Utopía. México.
Ceceña, Ana
Esther. (2004). Internet. “Autonomía y sustentabilidad: alternativa de los
pueblos”. Del Valle Rivera, María del Carmen (coords). El desarrollo agrícola y rural del tercer mundo en el
contexto de la mundialización. México: IIEc-UNAM-Plaza y Valdés.
Pág. 591-604. Documento disponible en: http://www.geopolitica.ws/media_files/download/geopolitica8.pdf.
Consultado el 22 de mayo de 2011
Subcomandante
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selva. Cartas y comunicados del EZLN durante el año 2000”.
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García, Alejandro. (2011). “Imaginando
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autónomo”. México. Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Miguel
Ángel Porrúa.
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Raúl. (2008). “Autonomías y emancipaciones.
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Romero,
Raúl. (2010). Internet. “Re-inventando el poder”. Documento disponible en: http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=101664&titular=ezln:-re-inventando-el-poder-.
Consultado el 18 de junio de 2011.
Le Bot,
Yvon. (1998). “La autonomía según los
zapatistas”. México. La matanza perpetrada en Acteal, municipio de
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autonomía indígena. En La Jornada, 29
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[i] Editor’s note: Aguascalientes is a reference to the Convention of
Aguascalientes held in October 1, 1914 as a democratic revolutionary meeting
for the development of a new Constitution by the four major fractions of the
1910 Revolution. The agrarianists, represented by Emiliano Zapata, insisted on
adoption of the Plan de Ayala, a peasant revolutionary declaration for a
land-to-the-tiller redistribution of the large estates, haciendas, and other despojos of Indigenous home territory.
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