Imagining the Zapatistas: Rebellion, Representation and Popular Culture
M. Clint
McCowan,
220 N. Sixth Street, Bayfield, WI 54814
The Mexican…seems to me to be a
person who shuts himself away to protect himself: his face is a
mask1
— Octavio Paz
…I will take off my ski mask
when Mexican society takes off its own mask, the one it uses to cover up
the real Mexico…. And once they [Mexicans] have seen the real Mexico—as
we have seen it—they will be more determined to change it.2
— Subcomandante Marcos
Few events over the last decade have
captured the international public imagination as the Zapatista uprising
in Chiapas, Mexico, on 1 January 1994. In the years leading up to the
rebellion the Mexican government had been largely successful in creating
an image of the country as socially and economically stable. Mexico, the
government argued, was not only ready to commit to NAFTA, but was on its
way to achieving First World status. The events in Chiapas went a long
way in shattering this glossy image in showing the world, what
Subcomandante Marcos has called the “basement” or “underside” of
Mexico.3
The contrary image that the Zapatistas portrayed was
closer to reality. The scantily armed Indian rebels that emerged from
the jungle to take several regional towns by force argued that
widespread poverty, landlessness, malnutrition, inadequate heath care,
illiteracy, and governmental corruption were better indicators of the
“real” Mexico. They demanded land, justice, democratic reforms, and the
end of Mexico’s oppressive one-party state. Mexico and much of the world
stood transfixed in the mid-nineties as the events in Chiapas played
out.
The first response of President Carlos Salinas
de Gortari was to accuse the rebel forces of not being indigenous. In
labeling the Zapatistas as foreign agitators and communists from
Guatemala, Salinas believed that there would be little political fallout
in calling upon the military to crush the rebellion.4 The
Mexican government and the Zapatista insurgents have not been the only
parties offering images of the country, of themselves, and of each
other. With its infatuation of the rebels (especially with Subcomandante
Marcos), the popular press has also offered up representations of whom
the Zapatistas are and what their struggle is about. Above all, the
Zapatistas and the media have portrayed the rebellion as an indigenous
endeavor with non-ideological political views.
In addition to the ways that the rebellion has been
represented by the international media industry, popular images of the
rebels have been commodified in merchandise ranging from t-shirts and
pens, to dolls and condoms. Indeed, the desperate but powerful Indian
rebel hiding behind a ski mask has been made a popular icon with
multiple meanings. The commodification of the Zapatistas raises
questions about authenticity and the ability of the rebels to have
agency outside of the widespread images and representations of the
movement available on the commercial market.
It will be the aim of this study to explore some of
the ways in which the Zapatistas have been represented in popular
culture and the mass media. The paper will also examine how such
representations square up with the realities of the rebellion by
articulating, when necessary, the history of the movement. In other
words, the study will attempt to identify where the popular
discourse—fueled in large part by the media-savvy Marcos—has embellished
or misconstrued certain aspects of, or told different stories altogether
about, the Zapatista movement. In the end, the paper will contend that
the Zapatista uprising has been as much a war of images, or a propaganda
war, as a military endeavor.
A Rebellion Without
Ideology?
In the weeks and months following the
rebellion in early 1994, the international press formed its own ideas
about the aims and ideological underpinnings of the Zapatista movement.
“The way millions of Americans got the story,” argues journalist Andres
Oppenheimer, was that “the Zapatistas were a new phenomenon—a
pro-democracy Indian uprising with no ideological overtones.”5 Even
60 Minutes, aired on CBS, became caught up in the largely
uninformed media frenzy. On 21 August 1994, the show opened with the
following comment:
What Robin Hood was to the people
of Sherwood Forest, Subcomandante Marcos has become to the people of
Mexico—a fighter for the rights of peasants who are trapped in poverty
by large landowners.6
The program proceeded to insinuate
that the Zapatistas were struggling for U.S. style political rights.
What 60 Minutes and the rest of the popular press virtually
ignored was the possibility that the Zapatistas could be just another
well-trained Marxist guerrilla force. Was the rebel leader,
Subcomandante Marcos, also without ideology, or was he a media-savvy
spinster that possessed an uncanny ability not only to charm the press,
but also to play down the more radical aims of the movement by
moderating public statements? In portraying the Zapatista rebels as an
army of Indian peasants demanding land and democracy, and who were not
ideologues, the press omitted important clues that might have led to a
more critically informed understanding of the nature of the movement.
Despite the popular claims to the contrary, the
Zapatista struggle clearly emerged out of the political left. In his
book, The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy,
Chiapas historian Neil Harvey traces the long and complicated history of
indigenous leftist struggles for land and representation in southern
Mexico. It was from these movements, especially the leftist urban
guerilla organization—the National Liberation Forces (NLF)—that the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) emerged in 1983.
As an organizing force, the EZLN promoted armed
struggle over the legal strategies that had been employed by previous
organizations such as the Union de Uniones. The legal approach tended to
divide and weaken such organizations as members felt that negotiations
compromised too much. It is important to note, as Harvey does, that the
new activists in the EZLN “avoided imposing yet another political line
or ideology on the indigenous communities.”7
This is not to say, however, that many of the mestizo and Indian
Zapatista leaders were not thoroughly engrained in socialist ideology.
In the end, the ideological underpinnings of the EZLN
emerged as a complex hybrid of traditional Marxism with distinctive
indigenous political overtones.8 Harvey
argues that the EZLN had successfully found “new words for old
struggles.”9 As
Marcos recalls, he and the other mestizo activists in the EZLN had
started out as Marxists but went through a transformation of sorts as
they interacted with the collective Indian societies.
We had a very fixed notion of reality, but when we
ran up against it, our ideas were turned over. It was like that wheel
over there, which rolls over the ground and becomes smoother as it goes,
as it comes into contact with the people in the villages. It no longer
has any connection to its origins. So, when they ask me: ‘What are you
people? Marxists, Leninists, Castroites, Maoists, or what?’ I answer
that I don’t know. I really do not know. We are the product of a hybrid,
of a confrontation, of a collision in which, luckily I believe, we
lost.10
As late as 1993, however, Marcos and other leftist
leaders had reaffirmed and clearly stated their Marxist views in the
NLF’s “Declaration of Principles.” Among other things, the document
stated the goal of the NLF was to “establish the dictatorship of the
proletariat, understood as a government of the workers that will stave
off counter-revolution and begin the construction of socialism in
Mexico.”11 Oppenheimer
concludes that the Zapatista army, as the rural wing of the NLF, was
designed to begin the revolution in the countryside.
According to the NLF’s documents, Zapatista
defectors, and sources close to the movement, the group had adopted a
Maoist strategy of “prolonged popular war,” which would continue
throughout the country with massive protests by the civilian population
to wear down the government and ultimately topple it. Following that
plan, a group of young Marxist philosophy and sociology graduates from
the Autonomous Metropolitan University of Mexico had moved to Chiapas in
the early 1980s to set in motion the NLF’s rural guerrilla
front.12
Such
leftist goals and political leanings clearly do not square up with the
representations put forward by the popular press’ labeling of the
Zapatistas as “non-ideological” rebels.
An Indian Rebellion?
In addition to portraying the
Zapatista revolt as ideologically vague, the popular press has also
contended that the rebellion is a fully indigenous endeavor. Again, it
appears that the press has ignored investigating the origins of the EZLN.
Perhaps the omission of important information regarding the nature of
the movement was merely to create a popular and sellable media story
about poverty stricken Indians in southern Mexico struggling for land
and democracy. In any case, the press largely neglected to inform the
public that the origins and leaders of the rebellion came just as much
from mestizo leftist organizers in Mexico City as from the exploited
Mayan communities in Chiapas. In short, the media did not tell the
entire story.
In pitting the outnumbered landless rebels with aged
rifles, toy guns, and makeshift bayonets against the well-armed Mexican
army, the television images and press releases were effective in drawing
international sympathy to the Zapatista movement. Placing the
ill-equipped Indian rebels at the center of action on January 1 was a
masterful media ploy. An interview with Marcos reveals how the uprising
was choreographed to garner the support of the press. Writes
Oppenheimer:
As Zapatista military leader
Subcommander Marcos himself would concede to me later, his military
strategy consisted of surrounding San Cristobal with the elite troops
armed with AK-47 rifles, Uzi submachine guns, grenade launchers, and
night vision devices, which he placed in the four major access roads
to the city, while allowing lesser-armed rebel foot soldiers—some of
them only armed with sticks, machetes, and hand-carved wooden toy
guns—to march toward the center of town and take the municipal
palace…. The television cameras would focus on the…ragtag army of
landless Mayans mostly armed with toy guns…it worked exactly as
planned.13
To be sure, much of the strength of
the Zapatista movement has been their ability to turn the struggle
into a propaganda war. As artist/writer Guillermo Gomez Pena notes,
What made the Zapatista
insurrection different from any other recent guerilla movement was its
self-conscious and sophisticated use of the media. From the onset, the
EZLN was fully aware of the symbolic power of the military actions.
They chose to strategically begin the war the day that NAFTA went into
effect. And since the second day of the conflict, they placed as much
importance on staging press conferences and theatrical photos as on
their military strategy. The war was carried on as if it were a
performance.14
“Indian rights had never been a
central part of the NLF’s rhetoric,” says Oppenheimer.15 In
the “First Declaration of the Lancondon Jungle,” issued on New Years Day
1994, the rebels declared war on the “Salinas dictatorship” and demanded
land, jobs, housing, food, education, health care, freedom,
independence, justice, democracy, and peace. While these were all issues
confronting the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, the document makes no
references of Indian rights. The declaration instead announced the
Zapatistas intention to march on the nation’s capital, to defeat the
national army, and to topple the government.16 References
referring specifically to the rights of indigenous peoples would only
emerge in the subsequent declarations issued by the Zapatistas.17
The morning of the rebellion Comandante Felipe,
one of the Zapatista head Indian chiefs, held the movement’s first press
conference. “We have come to San Cristobal de las Casas to do a
revolution against capitalism,” said Felipe.18 It
was this kind of ideological zeal that Marcos and other rebels would
moderate, at least publicly, to make the rebellion more palatable to the
international press.
It was only after the Zapatistas had made the
worldwide headlines after the first week of fighting, argues
Oppenheimer, that Marcos would “start playing down their calls for class
struggle and begin to emphasize the Indian nature of the rebellion.”19 In
retaliation to Salinas’ comment that the Zapatistas were communists from
outside of the country and to gain the sympathy of the international
press, Marcos and the Zapatista leaders thought it would be better to
drop the socialist rhetoric and to cast the rebellion as a genuine
indigenous struggle. This was an extremely successful ploy in that it
legitimized the rebellion to the world.20
Furthermore, by playing up the Indian card, the
Zapatista leadership moderated the some of the more radical tenants of
the movement. It was these strategic ideological maneuvers that garnered
the Zapatistas widespread international support and spared them from
being crushed by the military forces of the Mexican government. In this
light, the rebellion appears to be just as much a performance act—a war
of images—as a military campaign.
Spokesman or Supreme
Commander?
Is Marcos a mere spokesman for the
committee of indigenous leaders or is he their supreme commander?
Despite his alleged submission to the Zapatista village leaders whom he
calls his “superiors” and “commanders,” Marcos’ relationship with the
Indians appears more complicated.21 Historian
Dan La Botz has commented that, “because of the EZLN’s clandestine
existence and state repression, we do not know how democratic the EZLN
really is.”22 When
pressed by one journalist, Marcos failed to give any substantial example
of a time when his indigenous leaders overturned any of his decisions or
advice. Because Marcos makes the military decisions for the Zapatistas
and is their link to the outside world, the reporter claims that Marcos
not only has the upper hand over the rebels, but also leaves little for
the indigenous leadership to decide upon.23
Perhaps such criticisms are overstated. Many others
report that the EZLN is a truly democratic organization and that the
Indian committee consults and votes on every minor and major issue. It
is somewhat revealing, however, that the Mayans guard Marcos with an
almost religious fervor. Reporters often speak of driving for days on
poor roads, being stopped at multiple checkpoints, having guns pointed
in their faces, hiking through the jungle, and having a complete body
search only to wait for days to meet or be ignored by the heavily
guarded and much revered Marcos. These same journalists report few
difficulties in making contacts with the other Zapatista leaders.
Could it be that the indigenous Zapatistas view
Marcos as a millennial messiah of sorts? After all, he trained the
rebels and articulated their case to the world. Furthermore, Marcos
continues to help guide them in their cause for justice, land, and
democracy. One wonders if the Mayans see something more than just a
sympathetic middle class mestizo in Marcos. Does he fill a special role
in the cosmology and religion of the indigenous peoples? Whether the
Indians revere him as sort of savior or as a pragmatic tool to further
their cause, his special position within the movement makes him
indispensable to the Mayan rebels.
The Zapatistas and
Popular Culture
Thus far this paper has tried
to wade through some of the popular conceptions and understandings of
the rebellion. In evaluating the impact that the Zapatistas have had on
popular culture, it appears necessary to also examine how popular
culture has affected the movement. In order to save the movement from
being annihilated by federal military forces, the Zapatistas had
to sell a certain type of self-image to garner the sympathy of the
international press. Indeed, the rebels choreographed a popular culture
revolution of sorts to promote their cause. As historian Arthur Schmidt
notes,
[t]he present-day Zapatista
uprising in Chiapas demonstrates both an unusual level of resistance
and an inventiveness indicative of the potential of popular cultural
creativity to link together matters of culture, economics, society,
state, and globe.24
The Zapatistas’ creative figuring of
Mexican popular culture straddles tradition and modernity. While their
preferred communicative tools—the international press and the
Internet—place them in the modern (perhaps postmodern) world, they also
play up images of the Mexican past and call for age-old demands.
Figuratively speaking, the Zapatistas have made Zapata comfortable with
the laptop. Among other things, this refashioning of Mexican popular
culture has made quite an impact on the Mexican state project. Historian
Anne Rubenstein argues that the Zapatista movement has gone a long way,
at least for a time, in wrenching Mexico’s collective memory and popular
culture from the grasp of the PRI.25
Since the mid-nineties, however, public
interest in the Zapatistas has waned considerably. Although the rebels
continue in their cause, Mexicans appear to be more concerned about
unemployment, social and economic problems, crime, and corruption than
the demands for democracy and land reform. A poll conducted in Mexico
just six months after the initial uprising revealed that Mexicans viewed
automobile traffic as a greater issue facing the country than the
Zapatista revolt. In fact, the Zapatista rebellion did not even make the
top ten answers.26
Journalist Joel Simon argues that the Zapatistas
failed in garnering public attention throughout the late-nineties
because they were not quite savvy enough to keep up with the rapid
changes that popular culture demands. He writes:
For the first year of the
Zapatista revolt Marcos did an amazing job of keeping the rebels in
the spotlight. Be he should have taken a lesson from Madonna. In
today’s MTV world, you need to change your image every fifteen minutes
to sustain interest. A year after the Zapatista uprising began, the
media and the public seemed to lose interest in the Zapatista
story.27
Could it be that the popular images
that the Zapatistas initially sold to the media now keep the rebels
pinned down, in the public’s view, under a certain stereotype or
representation? Has the commodification of such images held back the
movement from having real agency? What is an authentic Zapatista?
It seems that popular culture has had both an
accelerating and braking effect upon the rebellion’s popularity. In a
very real sense, the Zapatista movement has been co-opted by popular
culture. What initially was their friend is quite possibly now their
foe. Because the Zapatistas have been culturally appropriated and
commodified in a wide array of merchandise—including t-shirts, buttons,
refrigerator magnets, posters, ski-mask condoms, key chains, dolls,
pens, and billboard advertisements, to name a few—they have become
novelties or museum pieces for consumption. In the public imagination,
the Zapatista experience has its place in time and space—it is static.
Like the tourist destination that markets itself to the expectations and
preconceived understandings of the tourist, the popular culture industry
has created and designed the essential and authentic Zapatista for
consumption in the public mind.
It is ironic that the Zapatistas have feared and
fought against being co-opted by the state, never thinking that they
might be equally co-opted by popular culture. It is hard to say which is
possibly their worse enemy; that is, which is more debilitating to their
struggle. It seems fair to say that when the Zapatistas turned to the
media to play up popular images of their movement they entered into a
devil’s bargain. This bargain gave them international recognition and
momentarily spared their movement. In the end, however, the image making
spiraled out of their control in a frenzy of commodification. Of course,
the violent swings in the Mexican economy during the nineties also
exaggerated other national political and social issues and helped to
push the rebels to the sidelines.
Zapatista Images and
Commodification
The imagery of the Zapatistas,
especially that of the masked rebel, have come to have multiple meanings
and representations in Mexican popular culture. For journalist Elena
Poniatowska, the ski mask “is now an emblem of resistance of the most
novel and most bellicose Mexico.”
28 Rubenstein argues that the Zapatista mask,
like Superbarrio’s outfit,
referred to the beloved sport of lucha libre but also made an implicit
promise that they would not allow themselves to be co-opted or used by
the state.29
As Marcos notes in the epigraph, the Zapatista
ski mask represents the feigned state of Mexican affairs or Mexico’s
modern glossy image. When prodded about why the Zapatistas wear ski
masks, Marco responded with the following: “The main reason is that we
have to be careful that nobody tries to be the main leader. The masks
are meant to prevent this from happening.”
30 In the mid-nineties, the mask helped Marcos to find his way
into Mexico’s rich “activist” popular culture. Pena notes that Marcos
was undoubtedly the latest
popular hero in a noble tradition of activists which includes
Superbarrio, Fray Tormenta (the wrestler priest), and Super-Ecologista,
all self-proclaimed ‘social wrestlers’ who have utilized performance
and media strategies to enter in the political ‘wrestling arena’ of
contemporary Mexico.31
Marcos carefully constructed his image to draw on
the beloved heroes of Mexican history and draw international sympathy.
Pena writes:
His serious but nonchalant
demeanor, adorned with a pipe and a Zapata-style bandolera with
bullets that don’t match the model of his weapon, made him extremely
photogenic. His persona was a carefully crafted collage of
twentieth-century revolutionary symbols, costumes, and props borrowed
from Zapata, Sandino, Che, and Arafat as well as from celluloid heroes
such as Zorro and Mexico’s movie wrestler, ‘El Santo.’ Because of all
this, the New York Times christened him ‘the first postmodern
guerrilla leader,’ and newspapers and magazines throughout the world
made it a priority to obtain an interview with him. The cult of Marcos
was born.32
The Zapatista image has not escaped
several of the more base commercial aspects of Mexican popular culture.
A Marcondones, or Marcondoms, advertisement shows the rebel
leader Marcos with a condom on his head and reads, “Say no to terrorism.
Use Marcodoms against AIDS.”
33 A competing Zapatista condom brand, Alzados (those that
rise up), also carries the image of a masked rebel on the wrapper. The
commodification of the Zapatista knows few boundaries.
While Zapatista merchandise can be bought all over
the state of Chiapas, Mexico City, and other areas in southern Mexico,
one can now purchase a number of souvenirs over the Internet at the
Zapatista Cyber-Mercado and several other web-based vendors.34 Oppenheimer
notes that the Zapatista merchandise frenzy began because the presence
of the host of reporters that descended upon Chiapas following the
rebellion. He writes:
What few people outside Chiapas
knew is that the Zapatista paraphernalia craze wasn’t the truly
spontaneous phenomenon that most foreign correspondents found
ourselves reporting with wide-eyed amazement. Rather, it was a
textbook case of self-fulfilling media coverage…. [t]he hundreds of
war correspondents from throughout the world…were …looking for new
angles to keep the story in the front pages. What viewers didn’t
know—and many reporters found inconvenient to acknowledge—was that the
merchandising phenomenon had been created by ourselves.35
Summary
Image making has been an
essential component of the Zapatista movement. Indeed, the image
conscious and media savvy nature of the rebellion sets it apart in both
popularity and originality from the other rebel movements in Latin
America. Understanding that the Zapatista ideology stems as much from
leftist mestizo urban intellectuals as it does from the impoverished
rural Indians of Chiapas allows for a more fluid and revealing rendering
of the movement. For the Zapatistas, the image of the revolt— that of
the poverty-stricken ideologically vague Indian—has been just as
important as the goals of the revolt. With the aid of the international
press, the aims and images of the Zapatistas have often been blurred in
the public mind.
Like a fad that has seen its day and then gone out of
fashion, the Zapatistas brought their struggle to the world only to find
that in a relatively short amount of time their cause would begin to
fade into obscurity. While the rebels remain organized, active, and
continue to make grassroots progress for the Mayan peoples of Chiapas,
they no longer command the attention of the world press, let alone the
Mexican populace. The Zapatistas made a devil’s bargain with popular
culture: in selling an image of themselves they were able to bring a
short-lived international attention to their cause which also spared
them from being annihilated by the Mexican federal forces. The down side
of the bargain came when the Zapatistas were not able compete with other
major national issues or keep up with the rapidity and mutating nature
of popular culture. In a sense, the Zapatistas have become victims of
their own imaginings.
Endnotes
1. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude:
Life and Thought in Mexico (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 29.
(Back
to Paragraph)
2. Medea Benjamin, “Interview with
Subcomandante Marcos,” in First World, Ha Ha Ha!: The Zapatista
Challenge, ed. Elaine Katzenberger (San Francisco: City Lights,
1995), p. 70. (Back
to Paragraph)
3. See Andres Oppenheimer, Bordering on
Chaos: Mexico’s Roller-Coaster Journey Toward Prosperity (Boston:
Little, Brown and Co., 1996), p. 52. (Back
to Paragraph)
4. John Warnock, The Other Mexico: The North
American Triangle Completed (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995), p.
258. (Back
to Paragraph)
5. Oppenheimer, p. 44. (Back
to Paragraph)
6. 60 Minutes, CBS News,
21 August 1994. (Back
to Paragraph)
7. Neil Harvey, The Chiapas Rebellion: The
Struggle for Land and Democracy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1998), p. 164. (Back
to Paragraph)
8. Oppenheimer, p. 49. (Back
to Paragraph)
9. Harvey, p. 164. (Back
to Paragraph)
10. Subcomadante Marcos, quoted in Harvey, p.
167.(Back
to Paragraph)
11. National Liberation Forces, “Declaration of
Principles,” 1993, quoted in Oppenheimer, p. 48. (Back
to Paragraph)
12. Oppenheimer, p. 45. (Back
to Paragraph)
13. Ibid., p. 25. (Back
to Paragraph)
14. Guillermo Gomez Pena, “The Subcomadante of
Performance,” in Katzenberger, p. 90. (Back
to Paragraph)
15. Oppenheimer, p. 45. (Back
to Paragraph)
16. “First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle”
at ejército
zapatista de liberación nacional.
17.
The Declarations of the Zapatistas are
posted for reading in several different languages at ejército
zapatista de liberación nacional.
(Back
to Paragraph)
18. Comandante Felipe, see Oppenheimer, pp.
19–20. (Back
to Paragraph)
19. Oppenheimer, p. 47. (Back
to Paragraph)
20. It is interesting to note that earlier
indigenous rebellions in Mexican history were not considered
“legitimate” because of their Indian nature. The Zapatista
rebellion only gained legitimacy when the leaders emphasized the
indigenous aspects of the movement. (Back
to Paragraph)
21. For the full quote stating that the
indigenous leaders are his “superiors” and “commanders,” see Subcomandante Marcos, letter to Proceso, La Jornada, El Financiero,
and Tiempo, as printed in El Financiero, 24 January 1994, p.
54. (Back
to Paragraph)
22. Dan La Botz, Democracy in Mexico:
Peasant Rebellion and Political Reform (Boston: South End Press,
1995), p. 39. (Back
to Paragraph)
23. Oppenheimer, p. 73. (Back
to Paragraph)
24. Arthur Schmidt, “Making It Real Compared to
What? Reconceptualizing Mexican History Since 1940,” in Fragments of
a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940,
ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2001), p. 50. (Back
to Paragraph)
25. Anne Rubestein, “Mass Media and Popular
Culture in the Postrevolutionary Era,” in The Oxford History of
Mexico, ed. Michael C. Meyer and William H. Beezley (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), p. 670. (Back
to Paragraph)
26. Jorge Matte Langlois’s polls, quoted in
Oppenheimer, pp. 152–53. (Back
to Paragraph)
27. Joel Simon, Endangered Mexico: An
Environment on the Edge (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997), p.
110. (Back
to Paragraph)
28. Elena Poniatowska, “Forward: Taking Mexican
Popular Culture by Storm,” in Fragments of a Golden Age, p. xiv.
(Back
to Paragraph)
29. Rubestein, “Mass Media and Popular Culture
in the Postrevolutionary Era,” in The Oxford History of Mexico,
p. 670. (Back
to Paragraph)
30. See Harvey, p. 6. (Back
to Paragraph)
31. Guillermo Gomez Pena, “The Subcomadante of
Performance,” in First World, Ha Ha Ha!, p. 90. (Back
to Paragraph)
32. Ibid., p. 91. (Back
to Paragraph)
33. Katzenberger, p. 97. (Back
to Paragraph)
34. Zapatista Cyber-Mercado.
(Back
to Paragraph)
35.
Oppenheimer, pp. 29–30. (Back
to Paragraph)
Volume XIV
