This thesis demonstrates how, through diverse daily life practices, a Zapatista community, referred to here as La Humanidad, creates a model of autonomy in the Mexican State of Chiapas. Based on ethnographic information, this study explores the meanings that this community attributes to practices and notions such as Autonomy, Resistance, Memory, good government and bad government. I contend that these practices represent an attempt to confront and resist the neoliberal model of Good Governance and consequently reconstruct the social fabric, revive communitarian practices, and develop models of self-sufficiency in regard to economics, health and education. Although La Humanidad constitutes just one case study, it highlights little known aspects of what is meant by grassroots participation in regard to this particular Zapatista community, allowing us to gain deeper insight into how indigenous campesino autonomy has been constructed following the Zapatista Uprising. Furthermore, through multi-sited fieldwork, I demonstrate the variety of organisational experiences of The Good Government Council among the five different Zapatista Caracoles: Oventic, La Garrucha, Morelia, Roberto Barrios, and La Realidad. In order to contrast these Caracoles with official forms of government organization, this study also addresses aspects of the constitutional government in the Municipality of San Andres Larrainzar.

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This dissertation is an ethnographic analysis of the ways in which disenfranchised Black communities mobilize cultural legacies of maroonage to empower themselves through the establishment of independent educational institutions. Using Kamali Academy, an African-centered, systematic home school in New Orleans, Louisiana, as a case study and ethnographic site, I examine two primary questions: What does the relationship between maroonage, as a political-cultural praxis, and independent Black educational institutions tell us about the construction of autonomous Black communities in the United States? Specifically, what does Kamali Academy teach us about these communities’ viability as interventions into a failing educational system that marginalizes Black students and families in New Orleans? Building on existing scholarship, I highlight maroonage as a method of community construction within a dominant socio-political structure. I depart from the literature, however, by rearticulating maroonage as a translocal and transhistorical cultural tradition, a process by which individuals and communities disengage from the dominant structure and re-engage in affirming and positive institutions. When considered within the context of both the charter school movement that has taken over New Orleans public schools since Hurricane Katrina as well as the extensive legacy of the struggle for independent Black education in the United States, Kamali Academy provides insight into what I have termed institutional maroonage, or the formation and maintenance of independent Black institutions that serve as spaces for community building and benefit the interests of Black freedom. / text