CHAPTER 10 THE MAYAN ZAPATISTA MOVEMENT 391changed. The masked delegation of twenty-three Zapatista comandantes and Sub-
comandante Marcos departed by bus from San Cristóbal de las Casas on Saturday,
February 25, following a festive send-off. The itinerary included eleven stops at In-
dian communities in as many states, including a four-day stop (March 1–4) in Nurio,
State of Michoacán, to lend Zapatista support to and allow their participation in the
Third Indigenous Congress being held there. On that occasion, representatives from
dozens of Mexico’s diverse native-language communities voted to make the Zapatis-
tas the “official voice” of the nation’s ten to fifteen million indigenous people. At
the same congress, Indian representatives presented mestizo Subcomandante Mar-
cos with the symbolic staff of indigenous political authority to serve as their
spokesman. This constitutes a formal recognition of what Indians have long under-
stood, that he truly speaks on their behalf and that his charismatic leadership carries
their blessings and moral authority. These events make clear that neither the Za-
patistas nor their spokesman Subcomandante Marcos can be dismissed as a distant
rumble from a far corner of Mexico. They are speaking for more than 10 percent of
the population of Mexico.
This carefully charted pilgrimage ended in a symbolic gesture of spiritual re-
conquest, since the Zócalo in Mexico City, the site of the March 11 rally, is built over
the ruins of the main ceremonial precinct of the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochti-
tlán. Chiapas Mayan oral traditions remember clearly that their own conquest and
defeat came from the north. The Zapatour itinerary (south-north) amounted, in
their view, to nothing less than the “reconquest” of Mexico in the name of indigenous
issues and causes, moving generally from the poor, predominantly Indian south and
southeast, to the north and northwest, finally to the symbolic center of Mexico’s mes-
tizo state and its “neoliberal” prosperity. The rally in the Zócalo turned into a media
spectacle comparable in magnitude to the Pope’s recent visit, the 1968 Olympics, or
the closely related Massacre of Tlatelolco.
In a final turn of irony, which has not yet been picked up by the media—nor
publicly mentioned by the Zapatistas themselves—February 25, 2001, was not only the
festive departure date of the pilgrimage from Chiapas but also the first day of the four
days of Carnival. The solar calendar, as understood by Mayan Christian custom, was
thus centrally involved in the script of this Carnival season pilgrimage to renew Mex-
ico’s Indian voice and bring it to the attention of Mexican national consciousness.
This involvement means, broadly interpreted, that the Zapatistas are not secular
pragmatists and that they are engaging the state in their own terms (for more on
the Maya cultural logic that informs Zapatista action in history, see Gossen 1999).
Fiesta of the Word
Although the Zapatistas and their allies are accomplished and widely published in the
art of rhetoric, and their statements are often signed, the best summary of the new
posture of the Indian community in relation to the Mexican state appears in an ob-
scure and anonymous document that was circulated in xerox format as the “Pream-
ble to the Resolutions of Roundtable One” at the Zapatista-sponsored National
Indigenous Forum, which was held in San Cristóbal de las Casas, January 3 to 8, 1996.