2009
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press
The
Zapatista Army of National Liberation, or EZLN, emerged from the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico on New Year’s Day, 1994, and their anticapitalist movement for indigenous autonomy still inspires and perplexes us, sixteen years later. Anthropologists, historians and political scientists have already provided a small library’s worth of academic thought on this movement. To make sense of the EZLN, they return to the same questions: what do the Zapatistas tell us about Mexican history? What do they bode for the future of leftist revolutions? What do they represent in the Digital Age? But these questions do not consider the revolution on the ground: the Zapatista reality as perceived in daily practices and the place of politics in the lives of indigenous corn farmers. In
Developing Zapatista Autonomy: Conflict and NGO Involvement in Rebel Chiapas, anthropologist Niels Barmeyer takes up this other perspective on the Zapatistas. Barmeyer details the everyday dealings, strife and ambiguity in indigenous Zapatista communities, and he explores the messy politics of nongovernmental organizations linked to the Zapatista movement.
Documented in this book are community-led resistance unsanctioned by Zapatista authorities, power struggles and coercion behind apparent consensus, and indigenous communities’ strategic and ephemeral political affiliations in accordance with their own immediate needs. Through these and other episodes, Barmeyer cogently unravels narratives of indigenous harmony and rural idyll. Two communities in Eastern Chiapas where the author completed fieldwork serve as the setting. As a counterpoint to the politics within the EZLN and its base communities, Barmeyer boldly probes the idealizations and utopist visions that international activists superimpose on this indigenous movement, often in the name of solidarity. Though these two perspectives both merit exposure, the monograph does not progress smoothly between them. The strongest chapters offer fascinating examinations of international activist involvement and firsthand accounts drawn from the author’s experiences with base communities. Scholars of international development and historians of the EZLN will benefit most from adding this book to their shelves, but those interested in indigenous conceptions of their own identity must turn to other sources.
Barmeyer demonstrates familiarity with the extensive literature on the EZLN, but his treatment of these secondary sources could be more accessible. The minutiae and complex terminology associated with the Zapatistas could easily overwhelm a reader unfamiliar with rebel politics in Chiapas.
Developing Zapatista Autonomy is decidedly better suited to those already comfortable with the state’s geographic, ethnic groups, and the national context. Given the level of detail, his writing in this section could improve with more rigorous editing. Frequent awkward grammatical constructions proved difficult to decipher, only making more confusing the complicated political history of the EZLN. With this non-specialist reader in mind, the editors could have incorporated the useful guideposts provided by the author as footnotes; this information is currently relegated to an appendix of endnotes.
Having participated himself in constructing water systems in remote communities, Barmeyer analyzes his experiences as an activist with a critical and insightful perspective, shaped by a very personal saga of disenchantment that only sharpens his critique. Manipulations, both by EZLN members and NGOs, characterize the complex intercultural relationships between base communities, Zapatista leadership, non-indigenous activists and international donors. In one example, Barmeyer explains how a Zapatista base community modified a “well-meant bohemian imposition,” art classes in this case, to secure the more traditional academic instruction desired by the village, redefining the terms of this outside “help” (151). On the other hand, affiliated NGOs seeking grants or volunteers resort to “idealized notions of community and images of the indigenous Other as an endangered species” to attract the human and financial resources that they and the Zapatistas depend upon (153). Barmeyer narrates failed development projects and unsuccessful communication between volunteers and base communities, demonstrating that “just wanting to help” often entails thorny conflicts and power struggles. A compelling, problematic and discussion-worthy section on two indigenous employees of NGOs made me wish for more stories about individuals: this book deals mainly with collectives, or non-indigenous protagonists.
Thematically,
Developing Zapatista Autonomy lacks cohesion. Perhaps hoping to incorporate several disparate experiences in Chiapas into one book, Barmeyer’s rich information about his fieldwork in base communities might be better suited to several journal articles, or retooled into another monograph entirely. The superior writing, tighter narrative, and especially provocative arguments in his sections on NGO involvement could stand alone to consider the politics of international participants in an indigenous social movement. It is here that the author’s passion comes to the surface, to great narrative effect, pointing out how international NGOs craft “stylized messages catering to essentialist notions of Mayan culture and utopian pipe dreams of a base democracy untainted by individual power trips” (220). This and other such pithy statements surely spring from his own frustrations and disappointments as a solidarity activist and ethically committed academic. Barmeyer’s empirical data powerfully contradict that romantic vision which according to the book, he himself initially shared.
Barmeyer concludes that the EZLN finds itself caught between responding to the indigenous base communities it represents and the international donors that fund the movement’s projects. When foreign volunteers participate in these projects, their “romantic attraction” to rural poverty contrasts with communities who often desire the absent technology and conveniences (222). Given these conflicts, the author’s prediction for the movement’s future comes as no surprise: “Zapatista autonomy is going to last only if the communities also become economically independent” (192).
The book’s 2009 publication date surprised me since Barmeyer’s information does not consider in any detail events beyond 2005. Barmeyer notes that the Zapatista movement underwent a major ideological and practical reorganization in 2003, but he does not offer information about these changes as observed in the years since. More up-to-date research and analysis is sorely needed in the wake of this restructuring.
Despite this limitation, the material drawn from Barmeyer’s experiences “on the ground” sketches a detailed and discouraging scenario of Zapatista reality, a story that grows more interesting as the book progresses. Any activist or NGO worker venturing to Chiapas, and all scholars concerned with the everyday politics of the EZLN, would do well to consult
Developing Zapatista Autonomy. Far from closing the discussion about this indigenous social movement and its globalized supporters, Barmeyer’s book opens paths for future work geared toward documenting indigenous heterogeneity. Barmeyer asserts, rightly according to this reader, the need to demystify the nostalgic projections and generalizations that obscure the complicated human struggles taking place within the Zapatista movement, both in the rebel jungle and in the NGO office.
Reviewed by Rachel Grace Newman; El Colegio de Jalisco
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