press to get a copy in hqx format for word 4.0 . Dont't forget to set the page numbers in your software before printing.

Fractal Borders

There are borders and there are borders: borders between countries, international borders established by history, geography, language, and law. The borders within borders that emerge through discord or war--internal borders, one could say, though sometimes domestic military checkpoints turn into new international borders--then again, sometimes the old borders melt away or change. East Germany/West Germany, North Vietnam/South Vietnam, Northern Ireland/Southern Ireland, The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Since Texas was once part of Mexico, my Mexican friends who forgive me for being a gringa say that my having been born in Texas means I'm really a Mexican. (On the other hand, when I visit the country of which I'm a citizen, I get complimented on my English and asked where I learned it; meaning, I suppose, that to firmly rooted estadounidenses I've become an articulate foreigner.) People move across borders; borders move across people.

Wars, rebellions, uprisings create complex, shifting borders. The most baroque case I've seen was during the Salvadoran peace talks of 1988, when the office of the papal nuncio in San Salvador was used as neutral territory for talks between Salvadoran government representatives and rebel leaders of the FMLN. The FMLN had armed dozens of guards with sticks, their faces covered with bandannas, in a cordon around the area that stretched into loops and peninsulas to accommodate the hilly terrain and various buildings and streets. The Salvadoran army had guards with machine guns forming a larger cordon around the FMLN guards; the double cordon snaked around a hotel, back and forth over intersections. Journalists who wanted to approach the nuncio had to run a gauntlet of up to seven military checkpoints of alternating allegiance in the space of a couple of blocks, and we would show our different sets of credentials, sizing up the next group of guards--bandannas and jeans or olive drab?--in order to present the appropriate set of press credentials to avoid getting turned back.

The Zapatista area in the Mexican state of Chiapas has been something like that for over a year, though more chaotic in some ways and less war-hardened in others. (There has, after all, been extremely little armed confrontation: one might ask if this is a war at all, or whether it is more of an extended ritual of bellicose gestures and exhortations.) To get to Zapatista territory you pass army checkpoints, leaving Tuxtla-Gutiérrez, entering San Cristóbal, leaving San Cristóbal, entering Ocosingo, and at various points beyond. Past Ocosingo you may encounter Zapatista checkpoints as well, depending on the state of the war (if it is a war). And the fractal demarcations of territory are just as complex at the local level; in the Zapatista villages not everyone is Zapatista, and everybody knows who is on which side: "The families at the southern end of town are all Zapatista, the people in the houses by the school are not."

But there are interior borders, too, which also shift: the borders within the individual heart and mind. The Zapatista uprising is only a little more than a year old; the Zapatistas have been organizing and raising support in Chiapas for just ten years. Those combatants were not born Zapatistas. At some point they decided to cross that line, to join a fledgling, ill-equipped guerrilla movement. Why?

Women With a Lot of Petticoat

I asked a group of Chiapanecan Indian women what had made them become "activists"--activistas, because in Mexico City, speaking in public, one avoids calling people Zapatistas--but we all understood what was meant. They answered, "Por los golpes" (because of the blows). At first, I thought they meant the blows of losing their land, their crops, their malnourished children: the blows of fate and economics. But no, they were being entirely literal. It was the blows received, they said, when their husbands beat them.

We were sitting in a circle in one of those old wooden-floored apartments of Mexico City's Centro Historico, just a couple of blocks from where thousands of Chiapanecan Indians had occupied the central plaza, the old Zócalo, the plaza in front of the National Palace. These women were part of that group and had walked all the way from Chiapas, a twenty-day march, protesting the Mexican government's treatment of the Indians. They were tired, amazed at the journey they had just made out of the remote highlands of their native villages all the way to the biggest city in the world, but they carried their astonishment with aplomb.

They were elegantly dressed in the traditional Indigenous clothing: midnight-blue enaguas, the long bolts of handwoven cotton skirting folded and wrapped around the hips, cinched at the waist with wide red wrapped refajas, red-on-white embroidered huipiles (the traditional blouses), and elaborately braided hair. The clothing is not just beautiful, it is layered with meaning. It identifies them with their ethnic group (these women were Tzotziles and Tzeltales) and the village they come from; the craft with which the clothing is made is a sign of their skills at needlework. In fact, they were all artists, sculptors in clay (in Mexico's subtly racist terminology they are called artesanas, or "craftswomen" to distinguish them from "real" artists, i.e., those working in the European tradition of the arts).

Artists and revolutionaries, using Spanish like the blunt instrument it is for them as a learned-late second language, they spoke at times in phrases peppered with mistakes; at times, their archaic style of speaking, mixing in vocabulary preserved from centuries past in those isolated highlands, dropping articles, is sheer poetry. They told me that when a woman is very activista, they call her mujer de mucha enagua: "woman with a lot of petticoat." (A revealing image, and key to understanding the women Zapatistas: unlike the European tradition of women who may assume political and military prowess, but whose doing so is assumed to involve a loss of femininity, these women consider a woman's activism to mean she has "a lot of petticoat": she is a real woman.)

Comandante Ramona on Horseback

I was particularly curious about the women Zapatistas, coming from their ancestral villages in the Chiapas highlands, from the most traditional Indian societies in which women stayed at home and did strictly defined women's work, caring for children, cooking, sewing, remaining even more isolated than Indian men because Indian women are usually limited to their Indigenous languages, rarely speaking the Spanish necessary for access to the outside world. Suddenly, when the Zapatista National Liberation Army came on the scene with their 1994 New Year's Day march into San Cristóbal, we began to hear that there were Indian women among the guerrilleros. The first time the Zapatista leaders appeared before the international press there was a woman among them: Comandante Ramona, a rifle slung across her shoulder, wearing a ski mask with her traditional Chiapanecan Indian dress. I had interviewed women guerrilleras from El Salvador, but they had mostly come from the city, with university educations that had included Marxist economics and readings from Lenin and Ché Guevara. The Zapatista women seemed, even more than the Zapatista men, to have sprung from nowhere. How had this happened? How had they come to surmount that barrier of the unknown, to go from their familiar village lives to the violent unknown of guerrilla rebellion?

If being beaten by one's husband were all it took for a woman to decide to join a revolution, imagine the world-scale insurrection men would have on their hands. However, for better or worse, wife-beating is immensely more common than revolutionary women: it seems that some combination of factors is required to push women across that line. And certainly not all Zapatista women could be victims of overbearing husbands, for many are single (though one of the women who told me about "the blows" said that she was single, it doesn't make much difference whether it is a woman's husband or her parents--the point is that she must break free of her traditional subservient role). Comandante Ramona, for example, is said to have decided many years ago, at the beginning of the Zapatista movement, that she would not get married or have children, choosing instead to fight.

I first began to get an inkling of what Comandante Ramona means to Chiapanecan women while I was walking through a sidewalk market on a little plaza in San Cristóbal. I passed blankets spread with hand-woven embroidered wool cloths, macrame wristbands, worked-leather bags, carved-wood slingshots, pink and yellow wooden boxes with leather hinges, when I heard a voice calling, "Bracelets! Marcos!" A Chamula Indian girl in her teens had displayed on her blanket some of the most intricate and graceful wristbands I had seen, and Marcos dolls (these are the cloth dolls dressed in Indigenous Chiapanecan clothing that have been sold to tourists for decades, with the simple addition of a ski mask to make them look like the famous Zapatista spokesman and strategist, Subcomandante Marcos) in all sizes. I knelt to get a closer look, and she began to show me her wares: the bracelets in soft colors, the Marcos dolls, and the Ramona dolls. When she saw that I was interested in the Ramonas, her enthusiasm bubbled into a stream of exclamations, reminding me of nothing so much as the way we used to talk about our Barbies in their different outfits: "Here's Ramona on horseback! Here's Ramona with a rifle! Here's Ramona with long hair, see how I did her hair? Here's Ramona with a loop in back to hang her up with. Here's Ramona dressed in her San Andrés huipil!" I picked up the dolls and complimented her on her fine work. Eyes sparkling, she told me she had seen Ramona herself: "She was here." The girl was breathless with admiration. The presence of Comandante Ramona in San Cristóbal had made far more of an impression on her than that of the international fantasy-figure of Subcomandante Marcos. Seeing Ramona had changed her perception of herself, charging her doll-making with thrillingly subversive significance.

So, who is Comandante Ramona, and what is it about her that so inspired that Chamula girl? Few facts are available: Ramona is a Tzotzil Indian from the town of San Andrés (as any Chiapanecan can tell from a glance at her huipil). Before she joined the Zapatistas she worked as an embroiderer. She is a comandante in the Zapatista National Liberation Army and a member of its governing Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee; she is thus of higher rank than Subcomandante Marcos, and is accorded great respect by the Zapatistas. During the peace talks of early 1994, she always appeared before the press standing next to the mediator, Samuel Ruiz, Bishop of San Cristóbal. Later, Ramona was said to be ill, perhaps of cancer; there were rumors around the end of 1994 that she had died. The Zapatistas released a video of Ramona in February 1995, showing a blurry figure in a ski mask sitting behind a table saying, "I am sick, perhaps I will die soon," adding that most Chiapanecan Indians suffer from malnutrition and illness. She urges Mexican women to organize, because "you can't build a free and just Mexico with your arms crossed." On the tape, there is a sort of intimate catch in her voice, as if she were speaking with great restrained emotion; distorted though it may be by the poor quality of the video, in Tzotzil-accented Spanish, her voice is unusually compelling.

But to the Chiapanecans, Ramona is much more than a Zapatista comandante; she has become a legend, endowed with almost mystical powers. Indian peasants, complaining about an abuse of power by local officials, will say: "Just wait till Ramona comes, then they'll see." When I asked the Chiapanecan women visiting Mexico City what they thought of Ramona, some of their answers surprised me. There was the expected, "She is brave and has dared to defend our rights," but when I asked for specifics, one said, "The light shone from her voice, she shows us the way" and they all nodded, as if they had now given me the facts of the matter. They didn't actually know her, they said (though one of them admitted to me later that she had only denied knowing Ramona because she couldn't admit she knew her in front of the others), but that was beside the point: "Ramona is a structure, like Mary. She is a symbol of our struggle. When we hear those words of Ramona's, it gives us a little feeling, we even cry."

It was a European woman, a university professor from Mexico City, who described Comandante Ramona in terms that gave me, with my admittedly occidental understanding, a sense of Ramona as a person: "She is a small woman: she comes only to my shoulder" (the professor is no taller than me--and I'm only 5' 2"--so Ramona must be very small indeed), "and she is very sweet, such a gentle person. But she's strong. It's all I can do to keep up with her, walking through the jungle. And she is a comandante; if she needs to give an order she's capable of saying, 'Do it!' to a squadron of men. And the men do it." The European professor was just as enthusiastic about Ramona as the Chiapanecan Indian women, and kept ending her sentences with "in fact--oh, I can't tell you that," giving the most tantalizing impression of the comandante's fascinating but undivulgable story. Even the exact nature of Ramona's illness has been kept secret by the Zapatistas, on the grounds, I believe, that if this were known to the Mexican army it might be more difficult to get her medicines to her without their being traced. This may explain why the professor looked so grim when I asked her opinion a couple of weeks later about a women's campaign to guarantee safe conduct for Ramona to come out of the jungle for medical treatment ("They're just creating more problems," she said). Or could the reason she was grim be that Ramona had already died? She said it wouldn't matter if Ramona did die: "Her importance is as a symbol."

So is it Comandante Ramona as a symbol that has inspired Indian women to join the Zapatistas? Perhaps, in part--though I don't think her image would be sufficient in itself to inspire women to cross that line, no matter how charismatic she may be, if there were not also concrete incentives for them to make that choice. Elena Poniatowska says that for Indian women Zapatismo represents "the best life option," and she describes the contrast between the lives of Indian women who are not Zapatistas (underpaid for work that is not respected, made to marry a man chosen by their parents), and the lives of the Zapatista women (protected against rapists, respected, their health a community concern, given access to birth control, able to choose their husbands).

I believe there are, in addition to these very important improvements in living conditions for Zapatista women, other factors that are equally or more important to Indian women's decision to become Zapatistas. These considerations have to do with what Mexicans call voz y voto, "voice and vote": having a say. Or, to put it another way: power. Perhaps the most important innovation I have heard of in Zapatista Indian communities (and one that began to be instituted years before the 1994 uprising) is women's having full rights to attend and speak in the village assemblies. Previously, women's participation had been very limited: they might enter the assembly hall only after the men had finished their discussion, making it difficult for the women to speak on issues that concerned them. But now women were not only on the agenda, they were setting the agenda. This was when things really began to change for them. I suspect that the fact that Zapatista women feel they themselves are the ones who instigated those subsequent changes makes the women that much more dedicated as Zapatistas; empowerment is more motivating than gratitude.

Marcos wrote in one of his letters (published regularly in Mexican newspapers, translated on the Internet and collected in volumes, Marcos's letters are considered by some to be one of the Zapatistas' principal weapons) that the first Zapatista revolution was not on January 1, 1994, but in March of 1993, when the Zapatista women "imposed" their "Revolutionary Law on Women." The law's ten articles include women's rights to participate in the revolution and earn military rank, to work and receive a fair salary, to decide how many children they want to have, to participate in community affairs and be elected to positions of responsibility, to have priority rights to health care and nutrition, to receive an education, to choose their husband, and to be safe from rape and domestic abuse.

By allowing women to set their own agenda, the Zapatistas created a major incentive for women to participate. Women who were beaten by their husbands and girls who were kept from going to school and fed only after their brothers had eaten perceived the Zapatista revolution as specifically addressing their most severe problems. This aspect of Zapatismo seems made-to-order to appeal to Indian women. At the same time, there is shared concern that the cultural changes in women's roles not be so radical as to lose those things they value of their Indigenous traditions. There was a recent statewide meeting in which Chiapanecan Indian women discussed which things they want to preserve in their traditions, as well as the things they want to change. A document from the meeting lists women's wearing of Indigenous clothing and raising sheep for their wool as traditions they want to keep. My conversations with Zapatista women lead me to include another incentive for their becoming Zapatista: excitement. Rural poverty is not only miserable, it's boring. Joining the Zapatistas means that women get to travel to other communities, meet new people, and learn Spanish, as well as receive training in weaponry and guerrilla tactics. And Comandante Ramona is a very exciting role model for a young Indigenous girl.

Fuzzy Borders Favor the Disenfranchised

The other side of the question of why Indian women become Zapatistas is the question of why the Zapatista organizers have made such concerted efforts to recruit women. Was it a miraculous freedom from machismo that made them want to have an equal opportunity uprising? Forgive me, Marcos, but I don't think so. It is more likely that they perceived the strategic advantages of including women in their ranks, and once they started there was no turning back.

In fact, women are proving to be particularly adept at this new kind of un-war, in which public relations are everything and having an international audience that is sensitive to human rights means that if either side resorts to military attacks or violence of any kind, it loses points. Violence against women draws a double penalty, while a group of unarmed women defying an all-male army convoy (as was reported to have happened in March 1995 in the Zapatista town of La Realidad) constitutes a no-casualties victory for the Zapatistas, while making the soldiers look pretty foolish: extra points. And does it really matter whether they are apolitical citizens, Zapatista supporters, or trained members of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation? In fact, though they might be Zapatistas, their not appearing to be so makes their victory that much more striking in press reports--and in this war, press coverage is the principal battlefield.

The Zapatistas have demonstrated their skills at making broad use of something that can be a real advantage in guerrilla warfare: amorphous identities and "fuzzy" borders. Marcos's mask allows people to project their fantasies: his amorphous image is a large part of his popularity. The Zapatistas' wide, inclusive platforms do not draw sharp lines; they seem to offer something for everybody (except for Chiapanecan landowners and the nation's rich and powerful). In marked contrast to the modernizing revolutions of Cuba, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, which pitted such concepts as "scientific socialism" against religion and tradition, thus inviting opposition from adherents of many traditional belief systems, Zapatismo incorporates a multitude of ideologies and political movements, and draws support from them in the name of radical democracy: Indigenous (and other minority) rights groups from all over the world, Chicanos, ecologists, feminists, liberation theologians, leftists of all stripes, students, human rights activists, anarchists, performance artists, musicians, and actors. The Zapatistas are like a country that offers tax-free investment opportunities to citizens of all nations. Their use of Internet communications has allowed them to tap into support from people who have never set foot in Mexico. Alma Guillermoprieto writes about Marcos's answer to her challenge of his claim that the Zapatistas would take Mexico City: "Weren't we there already by January 2nd?" asked Marcos. "We were everywhere, on the lips of everyone--in the subway, on the radio. And our flag was in the Zócalo."

Sharply defined borders favor the status quo and thus find proponents among the rich: it is the hacienda owners who set bottle shards into the orchard walls, not the hungry peasants outside. It is the United States that patrols its border with Mexico, not the Mexican government (which, as I write, is considering border-weakening legislation that would allow Mexicans to have dual citizenship). Conversely, fuzzy borders favor the disenfranchised. If the Zapatistas had tried to hold their lines and fight, they would have been defeated long ago. Their advantage lies in fluidity and lack of definition.

The Zapatista women I spoke with also demonstrated a lack of borders within their individual lives, which seems to be a trait common to many Indigenous cultures; for them, the personal is political, though it would never occur to them to say so. Their conversation reveals a perspective that does not divide and never has divided their lives into distinct spheres. Their personal lives, their political activism, their identities as artists, are integrated because they've never been separated: we are artists who joined the revolution because of the blows.

Women activists have the advantage of the particularly amorphous identities assigned them by a machista culture with a very limited conception of women's abilities; not being taken seriously by the authorities, women can be more radical and state their opinions more openly with less risk of being penalized. Women in Mexico City have staged public "acts" that are reminiscent of the public demonstrations of the Argentine "Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo" (who, by the way, support the Zapatista women), incorporating street theater to make a strong public criticism of the government: after the government's rather inept search-and-seizure of a supposed Zapatista "arsenal" consisting of little more than a few small handguns (the "arsenal" was presented to the press with great fanfare, as justification for the February 9th army incursions into Zapatista territory), a group of women went to the Ministry of the Interior and deposited a collection of water pistols, plastic machine-guns, and toy bows and arrows, saying they were afraid they might be accused of having arsenals in their homes. In marches and demonstrations, the first banners I saw expressing open support for the Zapatistas were being carried by women's groups, as if women in this society can afford to be more publicly radical than men, incurring a lesser risk of reprisal.

Comandante Ramona is another example of the advantages of an amorphous identity. Little as is known about her, hidden as she is from public awareness, she is an ambiguous symbol that seems to appeal to an even broader spectrum of people than Marcos. In a February 1995 march in Mexico City, when the men in the march chanted "Todos somos Marcos" ("We are all Marcos"), the women started to chant "Todos somos Ramona" ("We are all Ramona"--a chant that was taken up by the march in general, men and women, and the two chants became de rigueur in subsequent marches). A lesbian contingent of the march chanted "Todos somos Ramona" as well as "Lesbianas feministas también somos Zapatistas" ("Lesbian feminists are also Zapatistas"). A male filmmaker who has spent some time with the Zapatistas is critical of Marcos, but intrigued by Ramona. At a church-sponsored International Women's Day event where the video of Ramona was shown, a young nun sitting next to me wept. I confess that, for reasons I don't fully understand, my eyes filled, too.

But what does Ramona symbolize? She wears a mask: we are sure she must be beautiful. She speaks little Spanish: we can only imagine the eloquence behind that voice. She is a tiny woman, mortally ill, yet she is a comandante in a guerrilla uprising that has shaken the whole Mexican political system. She carries a rifle, but I've never heard of her using it. A woman and an Indian in a Third World country, she is one of the most oppressed of the oppressed--yet she has somehow turned that to advantage, refusing to be a victim. She symbolizes the power of authenticity: borders don't cross Ramona, Ramona crosses them. Con sus enaguas muy bien puestas, petticoats and all.