CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

[Cheerful theme music begins]

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land.

The Zapatista movement emerging from Chiapas, Mexico over the past three decades has impacted people all over the world who struggle to liberate themselves from colonial capitalism and Cis-Heteropatiarchy. Between 2012 and 2019, several delegations of CIIS students, staff, and faculty traveled to Chiapas. There they attended various educational encounters that compose part of what CIIS faculty Charlotte María Sáenz calls “Zapatista Seed Pedagogics,” a way to describe the mutual education between Zapatistas and those outside their autonomous territory.

In this episode Charlotte is joined by fellow CIIS faculty member Zara Zimbardo for a conversation exploring the ways the Zapatista movement bridges different worldviews, politics, and geographies to collectively revision and remake “a world in which many worlds fit,” an oft-repeated Zapatista slogan.

This episode was recorded during a live online event on November 11th, 2023. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

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Zara: I'm so delighted and grateful to be here with you to get to have this interview conversation about the Zapatista movement and about your research. And it's very special to have this in this setting with public programs who are such fans of. And I want to start by just acknowledging that there is a long-time connection of over a decade between the Zapatista movement and the California Institute of Integral Studies. In significant part through student and faculty delegations to the Zapatista autonomous territories that you have facilitated, delegations of listening, learning, witnessing, and encounter. And I want to honor the connection between the CIIS and between CIDESI, the Indigenous Center of Integral Capacitation or Capacity Building, which has been a host institution to many Zapatista events and encounters that CIIS delegations have attended. So of both of these integral institutions and all of the many meanings of integral between liberatory theory and courageous action, between body minds, human more than human, north-south, different ways of being, knowing, thinking, and doing. I just want to honor this connection that's here that we get to really lift up tonight. And we had talked about opening with a piece of a story.

Charlotte: Thank you for that recognition. And I wanted to begin tonight's conversation with a quote. It's just a fragment from a communiqué that was published in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada on February 24, 1998. And it's a fragment of a story that's told by a spokesperson for the Zapatistas. It's called An Inverted Periscope or Memory Buried Key. And it speaks to the importance of learning from history and of unearthing what has been subjugated, what's been buried underground. And so it goes like this. It says, “the greatest gods, the first ones, learned that memory is the key to the future, and that one should care for it like one cares for one's land, one's home, and one's history. So that as an antidote for their amnesia, the very first gods, those who gave birth to the world, made a copy of everything they had created and of everything they knew. That copy they hid underground, so that there would be no confusion with what was above ground. So that under the world's ground, there is another identical world to the one here above ground, with a parallel history to that of the surface. The first world is underground.” So that's just a little tantalizing fragment of a much larger communique. But to set the stage for understanding what the Zapatista movement is and some of its poetics and complexity and history.

Zara: Thank you. And could you share some context within which to understand this fragment? I mean, there's so much context, so many layers of context to share. But who are the Zapatistas? What is Zapatismo? And what is your connection to it? How did you come to be connected to this movement?

Charlotte: So on January 1st, 1994, some of us might remember that that was the date that the North American Free Trade Agreement went to effect, which basically changed the lives of all peoples in these three countries, changing the way much of our livelihoods, the ways that we exchange goods and services. And this date was also the date of the Zapatista uprising. And this was a group of Mayan peasants rising in arms in the southeastern state of Chiapas, Mexico, which is on the border with Guatemala. And this was strategic because it was to make a point about this free trade agreement, because they knew well that it spelled the end of their sustenance way of living as peasants who had for millennia farmed what we call the milpa, which is a subsistence plot of corn, squash, beans, and many other crops that are grown in that territory. So this armed uprising lasted for 12 days only of battles with the government before a ceasefire was declared that was really called for by the Mexican people with massive protests against the government's bombing of folks in Chiapas and asking for a ceasefire, asking for peace. So the ceasefire came in, but then a lot of the government continued its army offensive and paramilitary offensives in years subsequent. So in some way, the government's aggressions continued with low intensity warfare that took many forms in the decades since. But this, so this is what the Zapatista uprising is about, but also their name, the name Zapatista references the Zapatistas of the 1910 revolution. So the Zapatistas of today are not the first ones. They take their name from the leader of the South in 1910 revolution whose name was Emiliano Zapata. So that is where the name comes from. And the more recent Zapatista uprising was notable to the world. It became a global phenomenon because it was the first internet revolution that we were able to follow in real time with communiques directly from the movement. And these are communiques that continue till today and that you can read, anybody can read, translated into various languages on the website. It's called Enlace Zapatista. So it's a very internationalist movement. And from the beginning that caught the world's attention in the way that the movement remained in conversation with other movements around the world, with artists, with scientists, with different parts of Mexican civil society and also international folks. And then invited the world and folks from civil society nationally and internationally to come to their territories to learn more about their movement. And so it's grown into a movement that I'll be referring to as Zapatismo that is focused on the construction of autonomy. And this word might not be so familiar to folks in the United States, but here in the US, the closest concept is that of Indigenous sovereignty. But autonomy is the word implies is a self-naming autonomy, naming of self. It's about self-determination, having the ability to live with dignity as is our birthright as beings on this planet. And so that is part of what the Zapatistas mean with this slogan that has been shown in many of their large signs and their territories or in different artworks, which is “Everything for Everyone.” The Zapatista autonomy is deeply intertwined with solidarity with others, others who are oppressed around the world. And this notion of autonomy is at the heart of their resistance. Now there are various components to this autonomy for the Zapatistas. As a colleague of mine, Omar Javadis-Salamanca says, resistance is an infrastructure, not an event. And so the structures of Zapatista autonomy are composed of various things such as, well, one, self-governance. And this is done by rotating councils that practice what they call mandar obedeciendo, which is a leading by obeying, by obeying the people, leaders who obey the people. And these are local regional structures that are open to restructuring when needed as they are right now. They have recently released a series of 10 communiques just in this past few weeks that are moving us into their process of three years of consultation of their base communities and a massive restructuring of how they organize themselves. And it's a change from how they have been organized in the past decade or more. And they have told us that this is the result of a long time, of a long time of trial and error and seeing what works and doesn't work. But also, autonomy is made up of solidarity economies, the creation of cooperatives, women's cooperatives in particular. It also has a component of community justice, of no jails, but finding ways to resolve conflicts and do a more transformative restorative justice type model. And then a very different kind of education, education that is determined not by the state, but by families, the communities themselves of what they want their children to learn, how they want their children to learn. And a different kind of health, which in this case is an integrative health, integrates traditional herbalist practices of healing that are millennial traditions, as well as integrating modern medicine and science. And alongside all of this has been a very revolutionary recognition of women's rights and values, not just women, but other genders as well. The Zapatista movement in 1994, and in fact, it was drafted earlier in 1993, came out, their very first revolutionary law was that of women. And that was the first of its kind in revolutionary movements of Latin America and maybe even the world where this kind of attention was given to women in the middle of doing the revolution itself. It wasn't something that could wait until afterwards. It was something that had to be done right there. So that's a snapshot of who the Zapatistas are and what Zapatismo is. I mean, this is a movement, a political philosophy that has its roots in Marxism, in Latin American traditions of liberation theology, as it's manifested locally in the diocese of Bishop Samuel Ruiz, who's very beloved by local peoples and called Tatic, as well as by very influenced also by regional ancestral cosmologies and practices. So it's part of a long history of indigenous resistance to an ongoing process of global colonization, which just more recently in the late 20th century, we've come to call globalization, but which is really the continuation of an unfinished conquest in this intensified period, especially now of late capitalist extraction. So that's what we're facing now. That's what they're facing now. That's what we're all facing now is this global transnational capital coming to scrape the bottom of the barrel in our territories, not just in Chiapas or Mexico, but all over the world. And the Zapatistas use this image of what they call the capitalist Hydra, which is a monster of many heads to represent this phenomenon that we are living in right now. They also call this time that we're in the global storm. And I think we're all feeling it all around the world. We're living this global storm in different ways, depending where we are and who we are. But I think everyone's feeling it in one way or another. In Zapatista territory, and in Mexico in general, it's being experienced as an onslaught of mega projects. These large government sponsored and supported projects that include, industrial quarters of various kinds, such as the inter oceanic corridor in the Isthmus, which is the narrowest part of Mexico. It's manifesting in massive deforestation of which we see right now on the Yucatan Peninsula, where the badly called Maya train is being built, which of course has caused a severe ecological impact, also not been fully consulted with local communities. And it's largely a train destined for tourism, for massive tourism in the region, which will of course reconfigure, which would just bring in all sorts of other issues. But also for transporting other goods and services. It's not the only train or the only corridor or the only roads that are being built. Hundreds of mining consignments have been handed out over the past decades that are in different points of the process of mining. And these are very damaging extractive types of mining to the land. Anyway, there is massive dispossession and displacement happening and in process of worsening, such as we're seeing in other parts of the world, in its most extreme form, what we're seeing right now in Gaza. So it's this kind of mega projects happening all over the world. But in Mexico, these are the forms it's taking. Another head of the capitalist Hydra, there are many heads, but is of course militarization and that accompanies the mining and all the projects I just mentioned. Also monopolized mainstream media that controls the narratives about what is happening. And so not everybody is quite is hearing directly from the communities. People are hearing from state sponsored media or a lot of monopolies. And there's a theater of governments that are composed of political parties that compete for power and attempt to placate or co-opt people, the people through social programs and handouts that amount to, you know, just crumbs for actual people, while the majority of tax monies go to, of course, economies of prisons and war. So all of this is part of a long history of colonial capitalist extraction and domination since 1492. It's not new, it's not just of the past decades, but over 500 years. Tomorrow November 17, we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the founding of the EZLN. So we're also in this whole 500 years, it hasn't, it has also been a long history of resistance. And that is also what we celebrate. The Zapatistas in their current configuration are celebrating that 40th anniversary, but it's a much longer history. And on January 1, 2024, that celebrates the 30th anniversary of the uprising, although as their latest communique reminds us, every day is a celebration because, as they say, we are alive and we are in struggle.

Zara: Thank you for that phenomenal context and situating. And I'm thinking of the, one of their many very resonant slogans that has reverberated and inspired around the world of one no and many yeses. And so in regards to what you shared, do we understand that slogan to be like this one unified clear no to the violences of colonial capitalist globalization and the many yeses being the different dimensions of autonomy that you were speaking of and creating and cultivating different ways of being different ways of living.

Charlotte: Yes, yes, definitely. The Zapatistas have always said that their way is not the way. They are just an example of what has worked for them. There are many ways of resisting and each place, each people has to do it according to their histories, to their resources, to their means, to their modes, the modes of being the way they do things. And also we are learning, we are all learning how to be different. And so this caminando preguntando, walking while asking questions is the methodology that they practice and promote. Again with that caveat that Zapatismo is not a recipe, it's a bridge. It's a bridge to get from here where we are to this better place, this better horizon of a world in which many worlds fit. That's another sort of saying of theirs.

Zara: Thank you. And I want to ask you to share a bit about your personal connection to the Zapatista movement and how you have created this connection with the CIIS community where you've led, I think about half a dozen delegations since 2012. If you could speak to this, how did you come to be into this relationship?

Charlotte: You know, I was in Chiapas on January 1st, 1994 with my family, New Year's Day. My mother's a teacher, so we were there with families of the school where she was working at the time. And I knew, listened to it on the radio, and I knew this was big. I understood that this was a very big earthquake. Without fully understanding what it all meant, it was something we all had to learn in the years and decades afterwards. So my path with learning about Zapatismo has been a slow learning by walking, by listening over decades, really. And it wasn't until the late 90s and then into the 2000s that I came back to Chiapas specifically to seek out the movement. And then when I came to work at CIIS in 2007, by then I was living and working in Chiapas, there was such a strong desire to connect the two communities. I was in this alternative school in San Francisco working at that time as an adjunct in this different way, this integral way, a way of connecting our different parts of ourselves, of trying to connect practice to theory, trying to connect all the parts of us that have been dismembered. And simultaneously, because I would travel back and forth between these localities, learning so much about how the Zapatistas were also trying to integrate so many things that have been disintegrated or dismembered historically for us. So what arose was a desire to connect my communities, my community there, my community here. And that led to my organizing five or six study trips between, I think it was 2012 and 2018 that were composed of students, faculty, staff. And we participated in different events, the little school, the little school of freedom according to the Zapatistas, which was a very radical project of immersion and daily life with Zapatista families. We attended two different conciencias para la humanidad, which translates into the with sciences, or sciences with a conscience for humanity, as well as compartes, which is a play on words between compañero, compa, and art. So these are places where we shared arts, and these are ongoing. There's some that happen in Oakland every year. And then of course, there were, when I was living there, there were the weekly seminars at the Indigenous Center of Integral Compacitation that you mentioned at the beginning that was our host institution for in many ways and facilitated many of these encounters and events, or other larger seminars like such as that as the critical thought against the capitalist hydra and many other festivals, seminars, conferences, talks that would happen continuously at this Indigenous Center of Integral Compacitation that is known as CIDESI by its acronym. And for many of the participants on these study trips, delegations to Chiapas, I mean, the experience really changed them profoundly and came to influence their own lives, their own work, and organizing. I've run into former students recently, actually in Albuquerque at a Zapatista encuentro there, and it was just, it brought me a lot of joy to see what they're doing, what students have, how they've taken these learnings into their own lives in different kinds of work, in different kinds of care work, organizing work, political work, NGO work, whatever kind of work that they do in the world, but carrying some of the principles and experiences from those trips.

Zara: I love the play on words with conciencias. So I would love to ask you about your research and what you, your focus on what you term zapatista seed pedagogics. And so move into some kind of key concepts and themes here. And so just first of all, what is the difference between pedagogy and pedagogics, which is not a term we hear as often, whereas pedagogy is method and practice of teaching? I'm curious to say, ask about that choice of that term. And what is the significance of the seed?

Charlotte: I started out with this notion of pedagogy of the seed and then realized in working through the research and the theorization that I was doing that this other word was more appropriate. And this word is pedagogics, which is a mouthful and it's not a common word that we use. And it's translated from the Spanish pedagogica. And it's borrowed from the Argentinian Mexican philosopher, Enrique Dussel, who used this word in his, what he calls a pedagogics of liberation. And what this word describes is a broader field of philosophy that includes politics, ethics, economics, and other realms of knowledge. It's a more holistic way of understanding education and what education does, that it's not just this banking method to use Paulo Freire's term of transmitting knowledge from one head to another, but a much more complex terrain of exchange, of learning, what I call a co-education. So, I'm indebted to Maestro Enrique Dussel, who just passed away last week, actually, for this word and for his tremendous amount of work. He was a big supporter of the movement and was the only time I've seen a philosopher on television, on the news in Mexico, on Carmen Aristegui's program. He was very beloved by the people. He was definitely a philosopher from below, a philosopher with people's movements. So that is where that word came. And I realized that this was a word that better described what I was trying to theorize from education, and from an education not just in Zapatista communities, but this broader education that Zapatismo was teaching us outside of the autonomous communities. And that was the impetus for my research, is I wanted to understand what was happening to us outside. And then I chose the seed, calling it a seed pedagogics, because of what it's doing. Well, first of all, in that it's a very compact technology, the way a seed is a very compact technology, and an ancient, maybe one of the oldest technologies of life, and how it contains such potency, right, in this very compact way. And so it seemed to me an apt metaphor, but also it's not just that. It also describes what the Zapatistas are doing by sharing their process, by sharing their learning, and by sharing of their autonomy. They're sharing their learning with others, you know, in their communities, creation, daily practice of autonomy, but also they're sharing it with us outside through these internationalist encounters, both in their autonomous territories, but also in traveling to other countries, like they did in the summer of 2021, with their journey for life, where they explicitly stated before departing from their communities that they were carrying seeds, that they were carrying the seeds of their autonomy, of their history, of their process, to share with the Europe from below. I'll just pause here to explain for a minute that it started out the journey for life. It started with a boat, a boat called La Montaña, the mountain, and this was a boat that carried a delegation of seven people to from a reverse colonization route from Mexico to Europe in a boat and to carry their seeds and share with the Europe from below, a Europe that was renamed by Mari Jose, one of the participants on this journey. She renamed Europe Sumilkashenkov, which means in her language, which is the Hoolaball, insubordinate Europe. And in order to convey that they were not here to conquer or subjugate the way had happened over 500 years ago, but they were there to connect with the Europe from below, which also suffers from the capitalist hydra and in this global storm.

Zara: Zapatista seed pedagogics is in large part a decolonizing educational process. And so I would like to ask if you could speak to decolonizing and decolonization as a term that gets used a lot in a lot of different ways. And so what in this context, what are we talking about in terms of different layers of what is being decolonized? What do they mean by that? What is their focus, as in education?

Charlotte: Yeah, it's a term, as you say, that needs to be impacted and needs different things to different people in different places. I think the Zapatista seed pedagogics is largely a decolonizing educational process because it includes so many components of what is needed when we speak of decolonizing ourselves. I mean, starting with the recuperation of land. So this notion of first and first and first most land back, right, that there's been this history of dispossession of people's territories, land and territories. And I say it twice in this way because in Mexico we speak of both land and the territory. The land is not just that place of earth. The land includes the territory and the territory is all of the things that make it possible to live, which of course includes all of the beings in that territory. But it also includes things like ways of life, rituals, the sacred, spirituality, and even our dead. So when I say the reclaiming of the land and the territory, it is bigger than just a parcel that is delineated in a certain way, which is the way in many times in English we think of land and territory. But that's not, that's not, so part of it is to decolonize what we mean by land and territory. And starting with giving land back, land reclamation. So for the Zapatistas that was 1994, this recuperation, and they refer to it in those terms, the recuperation of lands that are now under their autonomous control. But of course it is so much deeper and I mean it goes beyond, like all of this is, it's not so much beyond, but it's contained within these concepts are so many things that have been impacted by colonization. So you know, challenging the nature, human divide as if we were not nature, right? Like all these ways of thinking that came with colonialization that divided and separated and dismembered life itself from all our components. So challenging this notion of the individual, challenging, well, a reverence for life, you know, that life is integrated, that life is not divisible in these atomistic ways. And also for the Zapatistas, this really started with the eradication of shame. This notion that being who you are is shameful, you know, whether it's because you're indigenous, because you're a woman, because you have another gender. Unlearning colonial shame was the thing that the parents of the children asked for when they said, what should the children be learning in the new autonomous education? So unlearning all these internalized ideologies over time and the practices that encourage collectivity unlearning individualism, reclaiming ancestral ways of knowing, being, doing, which include ways of making food and medicine and being in relation with the sacred, other beings, our rituals, our language, all the things that make us who we are in, you know, anywhere in the world, but definitely in this context. So all of those are the forms of decolonization. And of course it goes on and we could talk about it a long time, but this is, I think, what the Zapatistas mean with their pedagogics and decolonizing process that it is.

Zara: Thank you. Could you say a little bit more about what challenging the human nature binary looks like in practice in terms of embodying, interbeing, and interdependence?

Charlotte: A little bit, sure. I mean, the relationship with other beings, well, a lot of it's contained in the language. And this is true of indigenous languages, I think all over the world. But one of the things that I love about learning some of the native languages of the Maya territory is to learn how the language itself contains other ways of thinking of us. Us is in the language, it's in the termination of the words so that everything is always ending with a tic, which is communicating the us-ness. And also that almost all things that perhaps in English we would call objects are animate, that the world is animate even in things that we make or a bowl that we make from the earth, it's still animate. It still has a soul in a sense. It still has its being. And in some of the languages, if you say a bowl fell off the table, it's because the bowl ran off the table. Things are alive. The world is alive and not just stones are alive. So there's just a whole nother way of seeing the world. It's not a thing or composed of things for you to use for your personal benefit, but rather it's an interrelation of beings with which you interact and engage and are in relationship with. And so you have respect and responsibility towards all of these beings. You start to not see them so much as things in the world, but more as fellow beings. So this is part of what is contained in the stories and in the rituals of not just the Maya, but many, many indigenous peoples around the world.

Zara: Thank you. When you were sharing about the historic context of resistance, continuing to the present, how would you say that the Zapatista movement now is practicing forms of resistance to ongoing extraction, ongoing oppression at the hands of the state? What does this look like today?

Charlotte: In their daily construction of autonomy. I mean, it is a daily practice of figuring out how we're going to solve problems, how we're going to face the increasing militarization of the state, of what we're going to do about these rival drug cartels that have infiltrated the region in these last years in a very intensified way that we had not seen before. So how are we going to face these new challenges and the old challenges? How are we going to grow enough food? So how do we solve our collective problems? And this is a collective society. So we approach the problems with collectivity. That is a way the movement practices these forms of resistance. And of course, as they're always telling us, always in their communiques, they're saying, organize yourselves, organize yourselves, organize yourselves. There's nothing without organization, without the discipline of listening to each other, of gathering, of gathering and being together, forming trust, building trust, relationship with each other, listening to each other and speaking your word in assembly. Assemblea, assembly is an ancestral practice that is politicized in Zapatismo, practiced by many communities, but in Zapatismo, all of these practices that are not unique to Zapatismo, they exist in other indigenous communities, are politicized in a particular way. So the drawing from these ancestral cosmologies and practices and rituals and ways of being and doing in everyday life, making your tortillas from your corn, being with your children, things that are just basic things of life, seeing them as part of the resistance.

Zara: And in the spirit of collectivity, I want to lift up this beautiful term and concept of Corazon Nosotrico, which is the title of one of your essays. What is the significance of Corazon Nosotrico?

Charlotte: It means collective heart, Corazon Nosotrico. It's our collective beating heart, right? And the Zapatistas make reference to this. It's a term that recognizes that we are in fact not isolated, atomized individuals as capitalism would have us believe, but rather that we are a wide diversity of beings, including us humans, but all of us, human and beyond human, that we are all connected in a web of life, in this web of relationships and responsibilities to each other. So that this collectively beating heart, it speaks to the construction of an us, of a we that we need to do, or if we're not already doing it. And it's what we hold in common, that we are beings like any other being on this earth, whose birthright is a dignified life with the purpose of living in the ways that support our flourishing, our mutual flourishing, just like any flower in the garden is part of a stalk, is part of the leaves, is part of the roots, is part of the plant, is part of the soil. I mean, it's all interconnected. Just like that, we are too. It may not be obvious to some of us because we've been taught otherwise, but that we are not separate, that we are actually very entangled with the rest of creation.

Zara: I really appreciate this metaphor of the flowers in the garden that are each blossoming in their own fabulous way while having these deep roots and connection to this larger ecosystem in terms of thinking about relationship between individual expression and agency and growth and the collective and Corazon Nosotrico. And then curious, I mean, there's another binary there of the individual and the collective, the me and the we, and curious to ask what are some of the challenges that you see in translating some of these collectivist values and ways of being into our very hyper individualistic society and culture?

Charlotte: It's a great question. And I feel like I myself fell into this trap at some point along the way, where it was the collective, not the individual, and as if these were like two binary dichotomized things, but understanding that one's own personal self is not subsumed in this collectivity that we're talking about here in Zapatismo, that each person is precious, is a precious name and comes from a precious place. So it's not about being subsumed into some kind of faceless revolution, which is what so much of this fear around this notion of communism evokes in the general American public. It's not that. It's not to erase our individual personhood. So it warns us not to fall into this binary or false dichotomy trap that posits it as me or we, but rather me in the we.

Zara: Thank you. I want to read a brief passage from one of your essays of thinking about the central symbol of the caracoles, which is a very multidimensional, multilayered symbol. And you write that “Zapatista seed pedagogics teach and practice interbeing and interdependence with community, including the natural world and cosmos, stretching from microscopic to vast scales. This is often represented through the image and motion of a spiral conscious shell, a caracoles, such as those of snails and other mollusks. The spiral of this caracol is a paradigm of symbolic thought for Mayan peoples, where the caracol is a concept that transcends and encircles the words used to describe it.” So there's so much here contained within the symbol of the caracol. Could you speak to speak to its significance? Yeah, it's different contexts of significance.

Charlotte: Well, the snail or the spiral of the spiral of the snail has so many multiple meanings and Zapatismo. I mean, the conch shell is used to call the community to assembly. I mean, it is a gathering of the people to come together to do our collective work. It is also a glyph in a lot of Mesoamerican codexes. You see this snail conch like glyph coming out of people's mouths. So it's also a symbol for word, speaking. And then the spiral itself is also a way of describing time. That time is not linear. It spirals like we are here again, but we are in a slightly different place. If you imagine the spiral in a 3D space, you are in a similar location, but you are actually in another dimension of it. So it's very rich. The Zapatistas used this symbolism, notion, and word of the caracol to name their centers, their administrative localities in their autonomous territory, where they would gather for encuentros, but also receive and engage with outsiders. So caracoles also became these windows to the world and ways of welcoming and doorways into Zapatista territories. So these are just briefly stated some of the ways in which that symbol and figure of the snail or the conch shell signify in Zapatismo. And I guess the obvious one, but it needs to be said, is that the snail moves slowly. You'll see a lot of snails, and they also symbolize moving slowly and that real deep change takes time, that we should move at the pace of the slowest and just slow down, which is so, so relevant in our very fast paced world now. So very rich significance and wisdom that the snail and the spiral and all of these symbolisms around the caracol carry for the movement and for us as learners.

Zara: And the slow politics wisdom of the snail seems very much present in, we were mentioning earlier of the caminamos preguntando, of the like walking we ask questions, that this is not this quick recipe prescription figured out in the face of tremendous urgency, but that it's taking the time things take to doubt and to question and making that path through traveling it. And so I'd like to ask about how a bit more, I mean, you've already spoken to this in a number of ways, but how can Zapatista seed pedagogics inform ongoing struggles for freedom through our personal and collective practices and daily practices?

Charlotte: Yeah I like to think of this as seeding at home or how to bring this home into our context and our lives. We did touch upon unlearning. I think there's so much unlearning for us to do and just when we think we've learned it we've got to like unlearn it again or learn it in another way. And a lot of that has to do with listening and tending to those voices that have been subjugated and continue to be subjugated. So that's listening to elders, to children, to of course the non-human world, the plants, birds, trees, animals, the forest, the waterways, oceans, stones. It's revolutionary to do that in a world that doesn't think that has merit or is possible. So this unlearning and listening were some of the seeds that came out of my research when I asked people what did you learn and how are you applying this in your own worlds? And so this was part of what I learned through doing the research was that people were in this again spiral process of being there in the same place again but a little further along in the unlearning. And then practicing that it's not just theoretical, it's in our daily practices. How to build collectivity, how do we build commonality, how do we build this community in commonness. So practices of making decisions collectively as a family, as a block in your neighborhood, as in whatever collectivity you belong to at work in different ways, how to listen and how to make sure that everyone's listened to and is able to speak given their particular context. How to connect to the peoples who have been there all along caretaking the land and territory, how to connect as was suggested at the beginning of the in the introduction to our local indigenous movements and listen to the women who have been not heard as much as the men. So nurturing these practices of collectivity takes many forms, collective work which we call thick you in Spanish, but also collective celebration, the fiesta is very important part of collective resistance, sharing our resources, sharing whatever plots of land we can offer for gardening with friends and neighbors, caring for each other when we're sick when we're all the ways that we were challenged to do to care for each other during COVID but also sense well we're still in COVID. You know in getting to know each other because we don't know each other a lot of the time. We don't know the creatures of the lands we inhabit, getting to know the histories. So all of this.

Zara: Beautiful. And you also mentioned right in this in this spirit in terms of practices just of the role of politicized memory and the Zapatistas nurturing of long historical memory and what you were also just speaking to in terms of this listening, learning intergenerationally and nurturing long historical memory in our society which is so invested in forms of amnesia is itself ongoing revolutionary practice.

Charlotte: I'd love to close and with a very brief recap of it's a story fragment of a recent communique from the Zapatistas just released in the last few weeks. And in it they tell the story of the first gods which I alluded to at the beginning and they're stumbling around in the dark because the lights have been lost. And so they're stumbling in the dark trying to figure out what to do and so they call people they call us humans together to gather with them and to hold an assembly together. And so there's all this funny storytelling that you can all read for yourselves in the communique about you know how they're tripping over each other and injuring themselves going through the brush you know getting scars and getting all scratched up. But they finally do sit together in the dark in first in silence and then listening to each other and how little by little people start to speak and offer ideas. And so the lesson of the story is really about about forging this path forward together in the dark figuring out what happened to the light how did it get lost. What are we going to do to bring it back. And I'll just read a little tiny bit of it just so you can hear the cadence from from the communique itself. “Ishmukkane, who is the mother goddess gathered the men women and Otróas of corn, that is us humans, who came who come in many colors and everyone has their own way. There were no religions no nations no states no political parties nor everything that was later born as seeds of war. And then Ishmukkane said come little siblings and guided by her voice all the men and women arrived with the Otróas too because they did not feel excluded. So they met in an assembly they didn't look at each other because there was no light but they could talk and listen to each other. Ishmukkane asked them what are we going to do. The men women and Otróas did not look at each other because there was no light but remained silent until a voice said well you tell us what we're going to do. Applause was not seen but it was clearly heard. Ishmukkane laughed heartily and said do you think I know. We don't know as it is but maybe maybe gather together in an assembly and talking suddenly some ideas emerge about what we're going to do. They were all silent wondering what they were going to do. Many ideas and words were said and they no longer fit in Ishmukkane's head. So she began to keep them in her hair and her hair became long. That's why women sometimes have long hair. But then it wasn't enough either because she adjusted her hair and that's when the hair press was invented which as its name indicates means grab ideas. Ishmukkane's hair was already reaching the ground continued speaking ideas and words and then Ishmukkane began to keep her ideas in the wounds that she had gotten when she fell against thorns and vines. She had wounds everywhere on her face, her arms, her hands, her legs, her entire body was full of wounds so she was able to save everything. That's why they say that old people that is sensible people who have many wrinkles and scars means they have many ideas and stories. That is to say they know a lot. Later on I will tell you what they agreed on in that first assembly that took place in the House of Beans. But this one in this one I will tell you what Ishmukkane said. Well we already have as it were a plan to face this problem that we have. Since the world is just being born and we are given a name to each thing so as not to confuse ourselves we are going to call this thing we did in common because we all participated. Some giving ideas others proposing other ideas and then there are those who speak and there are those who keep notes of what is said. There was silence first heavy strong was the silence. Then you could hear someone start to applaud then another and then everyone applauded and you could hear that they were very happy and they didn't dance because they couldn't see anything at all but they laughed a lot because they'd found a new word called in common which means to seek the path together and it was not that the first gods invented it those who created the world but it came to be that it was the men women and otroas made of corn who in common found the word that is the way.” And it goes on but this is just a small fragment from the mountains of the Mexican southeast.

Zara: What a potent closing thank you so much it is a profound joy and honor to hear these perspectives and lineages and thank you so much just for your incredible synthesis and sharing.

Charlotte: Thank you, Zara. It's been such a pleasure to collaborate with you on this conversation. Thank you, everyone.

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live.

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