The Zapatista movement of southern Mexico has received little analytical
attention focused on the myriad of writings issued by the movement. To help fill this
gap, this study uses David Snow and Robert Benford’s concept of framing as a
theoretical basis, and performs a systematic and discursive analysis of the communiqués
issued by the Zapatista movement in order to understand how the movement framed itself
over its thirteen-year existence. Communiqués were coded by noting evocations of the
diagnostic frames of corrupt government, violent government, and neoliberal government
and in terms of prognostic framing, general democracy, small-scale democracy, and
revolutionary frames.
This research concludes that the prognostic frame of general democracy was very
high in the initial years of the movement, and shifted towards the small-scale democracy
frame after the election of Vicente Fox in 2000. The diagnostic frames dealt with in this
research showed a slight downward trend as Mexico democratized, but there is
significant inter-year variation in the prevalence diagnostic frames that seems to be
related to specific acts of government repression, or other government actions. This
research also concludes that a portion of the EZLN’s success and long existence can be attributed to the movement’s ability to modify its diagnostic and prognostic frames to
match the changing political and societal context that the movement existed in.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2602 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Pinnick, Aaron Corbett |
| Contributors | Almeida, Paul D. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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