The world has had more than ten years to ponder the significance of the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. While the Zapatista rebellion helped reframe the debate around neoliberal globalization, it also challenged those inspired by it to explore the meanings of solidarity and the relevance of Zapatismo to their own struggles.
On January 9, 1998, a letter began circulating in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas announcing a new project in solidarity with the Zapatistas. The project was born, according to the letter, out of the need “to create an organization for people of color interested in working in solidarity with the Zapatista communities. ... We perceive an absence of people of color here in the solidarity movement.” The group’s goal was straightforward: strengthen connections between communities of color in the United States and the Zapatista movement. The letter concluded by quoting Aboriginal activist Lilla Watson: “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time ... But if you have come because your liberation is bound with mine, then let us work together.” “In solidarity,” the letter was signed, “Estación Libre.”
From the beginning, members of the Estación Libre collective have insisted that the Zapatista struggle is essentially the same as their own. “Racist national policies within the U.S. are directly related to racist policies abroad,” says the group’s literature. “U.S. money is being spent to wage war in Mexico while our communities are being deprived of vital services.” This deprivation is also a kind of war, according to the group—a low-intensity war. But this is only one of many reasons, they say, that the Zapatista struggle is of particular importance for people of color in the United States. “More importantly, the Zapatistas are an inspiring example of possibilities for moving forward at a time when we seem to be so desperately defending gains of the past.”
Estación Libre’s mission, according to its Web site, “is to assist both the indigenous struggles in Mexico and the struggle of communities of color in the United States by facilitating a fruitful interchange of experiences between these struggles.” To accomplish this, the organization employs several interrelated strategies. Foremost, it maintains a house—a living and working space for U.S. activists of color—in San Cristóbal. This house is the estación libre (free station) of the group’s name, considered by the collective to be a “liberated space” where arrivals from the United States are able to work and study. These individuals will then return to their communities and apply some of the lessons learned, through “observation and participation,” from the Zapatista experience.
With this house as a base, the collective also sponsors official delegations of people of color to meet and dialogue with Zapatista communities throughout Chiapas. To date, they have led five official delegations of students, teachers and community organizers, and have helped and hosted other groups organizing their own delegations.
A third channel of Estación Libre’s work emerged from those efforts. Last July, dozens of teachers, activists and others gathered in an intimate tenth floor space in New York City for a workshop entitled “Envisioning Revolution, Practicing Autonomy: Reflections on Zapatismo from Inside the Belly of the Beast.” Facilitating the workshop were four members of the collective’s local contingent. The facilitators had visited Chiapas through Estación Libre and had since returned to live and work in New York City. One of them, a soft-spoken young woman named Pandora, explained their role in the collective. Upon returning from Chiapas, she said, “our mission is to inspire organizing here in the U.S. based on the principles of Zapatismo.” Estación Libre takes these to include direct democracy, alliance-building, autonomy, inclusion, dialogue and accountability. Applying lessons learned in a foreign context is difficult, she acknowledged, “but it’s part of the struggle.”
That struggle is one that has been clear to Estación Libre since that first letter. “It is our belief that the only way to begin to destroy a system that has always been based on the exploitation and exclusion from power of peoples of Indigenous, African, Latino, and Asian descent is by developing links between peoples of color worldwide.” Six years after the letter’s first appearance, that struggle continues. In the workshop ten stories above Manhattan, Lisie, a young Mexican-American member of the collective, talks about common oppressive structures faced by people of color around the world. The scale and breadth of this oppression is such that it is often difficult to resist. “For us,” she gestures toward the other members of Estación Libre, “Zapatismo is a really active and practical way of producing and building alternatives to those structures.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Craig Zheng is NACLA’s administrative and special projects coordinator.
