Zapatista Creative Resistance Shines a Light on the Path to Freedom Television del Sur
go to original August 1, 2016

As dissident Mexican teachers struggle to combat neolibral education reforms, and political violence continues unabated across the country, the question most frequently raised last week by the storied Zapatistas movement in the southern state of Chiapas was this:

Care to dance?

Thousands converged on the Zapatista community of Oventic last week to share a wide selection of art representing the culture, history, and resistance of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, or EZLN. Dance, theater, music, painting, poetry, and more were put on display by the Indigenous people of the Tzotzil, Zoque, and Tzeltal communities of the Los Altos region of Chiapas for an audience of local, national, and international visitors.

Under the banner CompArte — a play on words emphasizing art within the Spanish word for sharing — the EZLN aimed to highlight the role that creativity, imagination and art has historically played in revolutionary movements, from the expressionist murals of Mexican painters to the traditional African dance of independence fighters in the former Portugese colonies of Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, Angola and Mozambique.

“If the machine imposes a perverse logic in which every tragedy numbs rather than enrages,” the EZLN wrote in a statement leading up to the event, “perhaps it could be the Arts that remind humanity that people not only kill and destroy, impose and dominate, humiliate and doom to oblivion, but can also create, liberate, and remember.”

According to a photo essay by journalists Carlos Ogaz and Andalucia Knoll on Regeneracion Radio, many performances and works of art recounted the long history of oppression and resistance of the Zapatista peoples from colonization to the conditions that paved the way for the formation of the EZLN in the early 1990’s to the movement’s more than 20 years fighting neoliberal capitalism and building local alternatives for economic, political, and cultural autonomy.

International guests at the artistic festival included Emory Douglas, U.S. artist and former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party. Douglas previously collaborated with the EZLN artists “Zapantera Negra,” a multimedia art project that explored artistic and political links between the Black Panther Party and the Zapatista movement. Zapantera Negra-inspired art also made an appearance at the festival.



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