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From: "Dana" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: NN,The Other Campaign in Oaxaca, Mexico: A Realist In A China Shop,Jan
16
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 06:28:17 +0100
The Other Campaign in Oaxaca, Mexico: A Realist In A China Shop
By Nancy Davies,
Posted on Mon Jan 16th, 2006 at 09:46:29 PM EST
Narco News
In the weeks leading up to the arrival of the Zapatista Otra Campa~a I am
ambling around the city as usual, looking for people to speak to about
Delegado Zero, Marcos. As you may imagine, a city is not a place to find
campesinos, unless you count the woman who sits on the sidewalk at the
corner of Porfirio Diaz with a small display of onions, zucchinis and chiles
laid out on the pavement in front of her. I asked if she knew of any such
person as Marcos. She had not. Nor the Zapatistas.
An elderly "orphan" comes into the city from the Mixteca, to beg. She
says the people in her town are mean; my guess is, she's mentally unwell.
She told me she has no mother, no father, no aunts nor uncles, no husband,
and nobody will giver her water. She's illiterate, to boot. She wept. That
did not encourage me to ask her about the Otra Camap~a.
Nor can you find many indigenes in the city, unless you mean any
brown-skinned person, or the women vendors in their huipiles of bright red
stripes. I spoke to an old aproned woman from whom I bought a supper of
memalotes at the Christmas Fair, and she seemed to have maybe heard of the
Zapatistas, but most definitely was familiar with the poor, of which she is
one. She yearns for some relief, but had no particular thoughts beyond the
daily misery of hot frying oil and her impoverished existence.
I finally met someone who had indeed heard of both Marcos and the
Zapatistas. He's a man who shines shoes in the zocalo, Sundays only - both
he and his wife work during the week. They have three young children, and
making a living is difficult. Yes, he heard the Otra Campa~a is coming. But
he also heard that the government of Oaxaca State is giving money to the
Zapatistas. Where did he hear that? Maybe on television. Why would the
government give them money? His reply hinted vaguely at an unknowable
corruption.
I also heard from another man that the Zapatistas are receiving money
from the government. My guess is that people confuse the receipt of money
from the PRI operatives, in towns both here and in Chiapas, by people who
are indeed poor; and my informants could not distinguish clearly (or at all)
between the Zapatistas, the indigenous, and the poor. Hey, how should they?
In addition to lack of information and misinformation, some people I
spoke to asked, what is their program? Do they have a program? Is Marcos
going to try to be president?
The idea that the Otra Camap~a is to gather information or build a civil
movement on the left, is simply not on their radar. The idea that a "leader"
would not have a ready-to-hand program is equally foreign, a "leader" is
definitely supposed to have a program. And what's the difference between a
spokesperson and a leader? There is none! They can't make heads or tails of
what is going on.
Clearly, the Zapatistas are aware of this problem - but how they will
approach solutions, I don't know. The idea that "civil society" will somehow
respond, seems to me to come up against the middle-class elitism of this
very civil society - i.e., people who work, salaried, for non-profits. They
are the educated, the ones with parents and aunts and uncles, the ones who
can read.
Therefore I conclude the campaign will find as its natural base those
who are campesinos in rural towns where they practice communalidad. Whether
one says Magonista, Zapatista, Communalista, or all three combined, much
hope rests on arousing people who already have the habit of communal
interaction.
The urban poor have no-one to educate them and nowhere to go for
reinforcement. The closest resource is the church, and one might suppose
that institution provides a community base. But I doubt it. For one thing,
many Catholics have disassociated by conversion, and focus more on sin than
on (social) redemption. The drink-free dance-free evangelist community
assures each member that they are worthless and damned - too bad. The
Catholic community, which I fondly recall as adhering to Liberation
Theology, has dwindled. A saint's calenda, which should be accompanied not
only by monos and a marching band but by a few hundred faithful, is now
passing through the streets with twenty people - the elders and the
grandchildren. I asked a bystander native Oaxaque~a, For which Virgin is
this calenda? She didn't know. In a few minutes came back to me to report,
and damn but I've forgotten which Virgin it was. So it goes.
I hope, as we wait for news of meetings, (probably through CIPO-RFM)
that the campaign will affect ordinary urban people. What percent of the
Oaxaca State population can be reached, given the distances - both physical
and psychological - between mountain pueblos and the concentration of anomic
poor in the city? Between those tied to the land and those tied to daily
urban wage labor? That is an unanswered question.
At the moment, it seems that large swaths of the nation's poor remain
outside the reach of the Other Campaign - and yet, they are a natural base
for any leftward movement. Taking a clue from how organizing took place in
Venezuela, for example, the urban poor live in specific neighborhoods, with
problems specific to their barrios, and were energized around their own
reality, in their own streets. That will have to be the case in Oaxaca, too,
and even more so in Mexico DF and other larger urban areas.
Surely the Zapatistas, rural in their history and methods, are wrestling
with the challenge.
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