398 UNIT 3 MODERN MESOAMERICA
Archembault Biazot, a white ex-nun known as “La Coronela” (The Colonel). Of
French birth and Canadian residency, she is said to have died heroically as she led
the Indian troops in the siege of the town of Las Margaritas on January 1, 1994 (Men-
divil 1994:10). To this day, the Zapatista Web site is staffed by a faithful staff of tech-
nicians and translators, many of them North Americans and European. The most
famous of the Zapatista translators goes by the name of La Irlandesa (The Irish
Woman), suggesting that Irish is her national identity.
As has often been the case in the history of indigenous movements in the Mayan
area, supernatural help has appeared in association with the Zapatista Movement. On
April 30, 1994, a Tojolabal Indian woman, a Zapatista named Dominga Hernández,
found herself bathed in miraculous spectral light (rayos lucentes), whereupon she
found an image of a white Baby Jesus propped up against an oak tree. The Child of
Lomantán (as the image is now called, named for the Tojolabal hamlet where the ap-
parition occurred) spoke and declared his solidarity with the poor and requested a
permanent home. Dominga built him a modest shrine in her patio, where visitors,
petitioners, and visionaries now come to revere and seek intercession from the Child
as a patron of the Zapatista cause. The Bishop of San Cristóbal, Samuel Ruiz, sent rep-
resentatives to look for fresh signs of this miracle shortly after the apparition oc-
curred (Ross 1995:7). The vitality of the new cult is such that both Zapatistas and
progovernment Indian communities are laying claim to the Child’s miraculous pow-
ers (Furbee 1996).
The non-Indian ethnic identity of the Child of Lomantán—the martyred Colonel
Janine, Subcomandante Marcos, and perhaps also the emblematic memory of Zapata
himself, all of them white or mestizo—reiterates the integrative, inclusive dimension
of Zapatista thinking. This aspect of Zapatismo is also captured succinctly in a well-
publicized poem that Marcos wrote, allegedly in response to a Chiapas PRI official’s
allegation in December 1997 that Marcos was gay in order to discredit his integrity.
Marcos’s response provides another glimpse of the global sweep of what and whom
the Zapatistas seek to empower via their goal of inclusion:Yes, Marcos is gay.
Marcos is gay in San Francisco,
Black in South Africa.
An Asian in Europe,
a Chicano in San Ysidro,
an anarchist in Spain,
a Palestinian in Israel,
a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristóbal,
a Jew in Germany,
a Gypsy in Poland,
a Mohawk in Quebec,
a pacifist in Bosnia,
a single woman on the Metro at 10 pm,