Pertenencia Mutua: Dignifying Death and Honoring Mother Earth in Zapatista Discourse

The literary quality of Zapatista discourse authored by mestizo spokesman Subcommander Marcos has attracted the support of literary elites, including Nobel Prize laureates José Saramago and Gabriel García Márquez. In studying the literary character rather than the political utility of Marcos' writings about environmental themes and indigenismo, I have two main concerns: a) to show how the Zapatistas perform a role shaped by the expectations amongst their international audience about the “ecological Indian”; b) to analyze the Mayan mythopoetics of corn culture, via an ethic of “pertenencia mutua” or mutual belonging. The first focal point is an Old Antonio stories in which the movement of waters rushing down a mountain is used as a parable in which death and sacrifice are given dignity, and memorialized. Secondly, I close with a discussion of how Zapatista expressions of belonging to “our mother earth” align them with a similar discursive history throughout the Americas. The mediated form of Mayan environmentalism which Marcos and others voice can be placed within a revisionist second wave of ecocriticism, or a “third current” of environmental justice movements which have undercut the perception or reality that environmentalism is a sort of exclusive club for privileged Westerners.