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“To our way of thinking, and what we see in our heart, we have reached a point where we cannot go any further, and, in addition, it is possible that we could lose everything we have if we remain as we are and do nothing more in order to move forward. The hour has come to take a risk once again and to take a step which is dangerous but which is worthwhile. Because, perhaps united with other social sectors who suffer from the same wants as we do, it will be possible to achieve what we need and what we deserve. A new step forward in the indigenous struggle is only possible if the indigenous join together with workers, campesinos, students, teachers, employees…the workers of the city and the countryside.” From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast. Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee – General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Mexico, in the sixth month, or June, of the year 2005. Taken from the "Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona" XICAN@ NOTES ON LA TRAVESÍA POR LA VIDA: Sueños de l@s Ingobernables: La Xicanada Encountering España del Abajo [Part 4] I was reading a library copy of Civil Disobedience by the American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau outside, on the margins, of my high school quad area. The year was probably 2012 as I sat quietly against a wall on the cold concrete as I struggled to read a text written a century and some before I was born. I forget my reasons for engaging the text, as I was exploring it based on a reference made by the anarchist writer and revolutionary Emma Goldman who referred to the “great” American writer Thoreau. I was neither too impressed nor entertained as I could not understand the vocabulary and the general statements being made by this writer at the age of sixteen. Having barely understood Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays, I was a youth unable to make intelligible the theories, narratives, and descriptions by these writers that I yearned for as a Punk and someone desiring a politics outside of the dominant world. I eventually found myself reading about the Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores (CNT), a Spanish anarchist organization, as I also read about the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN)—unintentionally connecting those struggles separated by the Atlantic Ocean and by nuanced colonial histories. I had always felt their spirit as a youth, I think by that time a sixteen-year-old Mexican-American, who was dreaming another world. I read widely and was a curious student of rebel dreams. George Orwell exposed me to the Spanish anarchists that fought in the civil war in Spain (1936-39), between a fascist State and a communist vision—recapitulated and deferred to fascism in the face of betrayals on the popular Left and the popular surge of desiring fascism. While I don’t have much to say regarding Orwell’s fictional Animal Farm, as I read it in my youth and have not re-engaged it, the pivot to the experiments of the Spanish anarchists is my point of departure. For me, the CNT was a beautiful historical moment with powerful experiments, and it was a surprise to me that they still existed in Madrid, España. As a young Xicano at the university only five years ago, I saw and put Spain on the list of “never to travel to” as I wanted to avoid encountering a personal history that lived in my body—inscribed on my flesh and in familial stories. Yet, at the same time, I had always known a different kind of Spain, where love took place in the barricades against fascism, where another world—if not for a moment—existed in a small corner of the world. Despite my own convictions that Spain was irredeemable with its colonial history (i.e., Nueva España), legacies (coloniality of race), and ongoing influence in global cultural appropriation (i.e., I point here to the accumulation of wealth and artifacts), there is something about my encounter with the CNT and the EZLN that had always made me think and feel something deeper than conflating a contemporary nation-state with its people, who are a hodgepodge of bodies—this is not to say whiteness did not present itself, nor that Franco’s allies weren’t on the streets too. Let me start with my own truth. I come from a small geography demarcated by many different cities that share an incorporated existence within the larger Los Angeles County lines. The City of Los Angeles itself cedes without permission (i.e., historical, and contemporary violence) much territory to what constitutes the original territories of the Tongva and Tataviam peoples. The community and families that weave and intersect to mine are too many to narrate here, but a simple fact emerges: we, my people, are connected to a history in northern and central México that has little connection to El Movimiento of the 1960s-1970s in Los Angeles, California. We have minimal if no identification with Chicanidades or Chicanismo, let alone a consciousness that Chicanos exist, even when we consume Chicano popular film or music—they are somehow situated in the past as a vibrant culture. My own encounters and identifications with my Xicano identity weren’t because of my context, not purely. Rather, I came into a Xicanidad and a Xican@ consciousness, a unique composite that weaves differential modes of consciousness and it started with my own self-determined education and a commitment to indigeneity that was neither romantic nor a form of paternalism. It was a commitment to land and territory. It was a struggle for life from below and to the left. Traveling to Madrid, España has had its own challenges in me confronting my own historical web with colonial-capitalist history and the imaginaries or fantasies that a place like España invokes on me, or even México and very much the United States—Europe distorts the reality of colonial domination and its legacies. By thinking of the CNT and the EZLN together I confronted other kinds of radical topographies, another kind of critical mapping that my own Xicano becoming entangled. I am direct about this because many who have an affinity with Chicanx/Xican@ politics, consciousness, and struggles tend to ward off connections to anarchism, especially from España, and seldom engages the resurgences of Zapatismo at the turn of the twenty-first century. Chicanx/Xican@ oppositional movement cultivates a distinct form of opposition against relations of domination, and in its own way many times closes itself off—reflecting a nuanced nationalism or an anxiety. Coming to Madrid has not only helped me with these thoughts, but it has also affirmed to me that we have no room to invoke España as the primary colonial oppressor as México itself inflicts violence on its pueblos originarios and pueblos negros/afro-mexicanos. The same is said of the United States and its inscription of Mexicans in the Southwest as barbarians at the gate. With this I assert that I am more likely to raise that black and red flag of the CNT as I also raise the EZLN flag of autonomous territories, waving in the wind two banners without a nationalism, flags that represent a struggle. The flags of México, España, and Aztlán (the Chicano version rendered by La Raza Unida Party) are unable to articulate the decolonial projects I desire, if not a commitment to weaving struggles that are otherwise grounded in difference. I don’t want to reduce the dreams or desires of freedom that constitutes specific national liberation struggles, but in my own anarchist heart, I don’t know if the State will make us free. To see Zapatismo in the flesh, and in Madrid, was to see a reflection of the struggles for life that I dreamt of, if not already saw in México and the United States—and it was here in Madrid that I witnessed a form of Zapatismo in a place I never thought I’d step my own two feet on as a Xicano. Why a Xicano in Madrid? Why not México City? Quito? My pueblo(s) of origin? I asked myself this question, as I am sure many will, as Las Américas were narrated so differently here—a place where Spanish ancestry originates for me as a reality in my own human condition as a descendent of the casta and different Indigenous peoples. Our [Xicana Tiahui] surreal experience pushed all of us to re-think how we were to encounter La Otra Europa. In other words, we came to Madrid to feel a different Europe that was narrated from below, not from those from above, such is the case with the history of nationalisms, fascism, and domination that Europe constructs to defend its modern project, one entangled with the globalization of capital and United States imperial rule. What is España del abajo for us then? We had an initial idea, and I had some imagined thoughts of what los españoles del abajo would look like, talk like, smell like, and how they would be building their other world. The truth was that both us and them had false ideas of each other— perhaps stereotypes and misconceptions misrepresented our own expectations. In truth, we had encountered more Europeans from below that weren’t Spanish nationals. We dialogued more with German, French, Mexican, and other Europeans that narrated their own migrant or “BIPoC” experiences in Europe. Madrid became a place of convergence where these stories of struggle and resistance were able to reach us. A Xicano in Madrid? Why not? We shared our zines of our own stories of resistance, our feelings of being in the United States, and the dreams we carried in our hearts. We became part of medios libres to help document and tell a different story of August 13, 2021, in Madrid. We shared space with different people from all over the world, and it wasn’t so different from the United States except that everyone spoke castellano or a European language unintelligible to us. A Xicano in Madrid because Xican@s can be anywhere—we take part of the struggles in our geography, in the contextual calendars, and in the oppositional modes we can. In world-traveling to Madrid’s below and to the left, a Xicano was able to witness a Zapatismo in a geography that carries so much pain, scars, and trauma—as much as it carries the pride of fascist States and nationalisms that invoke violence. The Zapatismo we carried and encountered was a planetary weaving of struggle, networks, and dialogue. The anarchist, feminist, communist, and radical environmentalist spirit of España del abajo will forever be rebellious—it is our responsibility to connect or understand this. I was a Xicano in Madrid with dreams of the CNT and EZLN—happy to know that the Zapatistas brought together the Marxists-Leninists and anarchists on the streets. Yet, our work remains unfinished. We [Xicana Tiahui] spent nine days in Tierra Insumisa and we were able to not only witness our own connection to five-hundred years of Indigenous resistance but were able to witness it in the heart of España. For all our troubles and our dialogues, not always agreeing with each other, we were able to stand together with the people from España del abajo and march together. Where else would a Xican@ be if not sticking the finger to the legacies of Columbus in the place that funded the incomplete conquest? Where else would a Xican@ be if not yelling “¡no nos conquistaron!” on the streets of Madrid as we stood with the Esquadrón 421 and the people? We encountered Madrid as an ungovernable force, and we yelled it from the streets: “¡Alerta! ¡Alerta! ¡Alerta que caminan! ¡La lucha por la vida es la lucha Zapatista!” Written from Tierra Insumisa. Revised from Anisq’oyo. August 23, 2021
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November 2022
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