This thesis deals with issues of indigeneity, warfare and representation as they relate to the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas, Mexico between the years of 1994-2003 –a period widely known as a period of low intensity warfare. During this period, militants of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) engaged fiercely in the creation and defence of de facto “indigenous” municipalities and territories, posing a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Mexican “state” and its faculty to govern. The environment of war, accompanied by a prevalent Indianist discourse, highly structured the ways in which Zapatista lives came to be represented by activist and academic writings alike. Generic images of Zapatista militants came to dominate the literature. Within this context, my thesis argues for the importance of moving away from images of Zapatistas as public figures and investigating, instead, everyday Zapatista lives. I argue that a refocus on specific-situated-local-everyday politics necessarily entails engaging with “internal” conflict, division, hierarchies, and power differentials. Framed by an ethnographic approach, the analysis presented here is based on 17 months of fieldwork. My discussion on indigenous autonomy and self-determination, therefore, goes well beyond claims to indigenous rights and engages, instead, historical as well as on-the-ground expressions of what self-determination looked like on an everyday basis. My discussion on warfare, moves beyond condemnations of militarization in the area and pays attention to some of the ways in which warfare worked to structure peoples’ lives and daily perceptions as well as outsiders’ understanding of the conflict. While generally my analysis is confined by the particularities of time and space, a generous examination of an ample literature gives it theoretical depth and political relevance beyond the Zapatista case.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/26307 |
| Date | 22 February 2011 |
| Creators | Molina-Alfaro, Irma |
| Contributors | Napolitano, Valentina |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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