A revolução teórica Zapatista ( suas consequências históricas, étnicas e políticas)

The Zapatistas's Theoretical Revolution (Its Historical, Ethical, and Political Consequences)

In a Chiapas market, shortly after the insurrection of 1994, a young Indian girl was heard to say: "Los Zapatistas nos devolvieron la dignidad" ("The Zapatistas have given us back our dignity"). Who took the dignity away from the Mayan peoples of Chiapas? It is easy to identify specific collective agents, like the Spaniards in the case of the colonization of Meso-America or the Creoles who built nations (Mexico and Guatemala in this case) after decolonization. The same loss of dignity occurred, however, elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in North America, Australasia, and other regions where there was no direct Spanish intervention. I propose, therefore, the more general formulation; that the dignity of indigenous people was taken away by the coloniality of power enacted in the making of the modern/colonial world, since about 1500 until today (Mignolo, 2000a). In the world-making process we identify today as modernity/coloniality, the term modernity does not stand by itself, since it cannot exist without its darker side: coloniality. As I conceive it here, the modern/colonial world goes together with the mercantile, industrial, and technological capitalism centered in the North Atlantic, both of which carry out the epistemic mechanism of coloniality of power: classifying people around the world by color and territory, and managing the distribution of labor and organization of society (Quijano,
1997; Mignolo, 2000b).

Accordingly, the statement of the young girl in the Chiapas market has significance far beyond the local history of indigenous people in Mexico. Nevertheless, her words draw meaning from an intense local history, as described in the Zapatistas's first declaration from the Lacandon Forest, in January of 1994:

We are the product of five hundred years of struggle: first against slavery; then in the insurgent-led war of Independence against Spain; later in the fight to avoid being absorbed by North American expansion; next to proclaim our Constitution; next to proclaim our Constitution and expel the French from our soil; and finally, after the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz refused to fairly apply the reform law, in the rebellion where the people created their own leaders. In that rebellion Villa and Zapata emerged-poor men, like us (First Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle, 1994).