IMAGINING RAMONA:

THE MYTHOLOGIZATION AND MARTYRDOM OF A

ZAPATISTA RESISTANCE FIGHTER

A Thesis

Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

Special Case

Doctor of Philosophy

in

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of Regina

By

Bridget Kathryn Keating

Regina, Saskatchewan

May 2020

Copyright 2020: B.K. Keating

UNIVERSITY OF REGINA

FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH

SUPERVISORY AND EXAMINING COMMITTEE

Bridget Kathryn Keating, candidate for the degree of Special Case Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies, has presented a thesis titled, Imagining Ramona: The Mythologization and Martyrdom of a Zapatista Resistance Fighter, in an oral examination held on April 29, 2020. The following committee members have found the thesis acceptable in form and content, and that the candidate demonstrated satisfactory knowledge of the subject material.

External Examiner: *Dr. Miranda Brady, Carleton University

Co-Supervisor: *Dr. Carmen Robertson, Adjunct

Co-Supervisor: *Dr. Mark Anderson, Adjunct

Co-Supervisor: *Dr. Sherry Farrell-Racette, Department of Visual Arts

Committee Member: *Dr. Randal Rogers, Department of Visual Arts

Committee Member: *Dr. Christine Ramsay, Department of Film

Committee Member: *Dr. Darlene Juschka, Women’s and Gender Studies

Chair of Defense: *Dr. Fanhua Zeng, Faculty of Graduate Studies & Research

*via ZOOM Conferencing

Abstract

During the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN/Zapatista) campaign, images of insurgent leader La Comandanta Ramona circulated across Mexico and the globe, encouraging popular support for the Indigenous resistance movement, which was launched from

Chiapas’ Lacandón jungle on January 1, 1994.1 Deemed “the petite warrior” 2 and a “modern-day

David battling Goliath,” 3 the masked Maya woman, according to political scientist Karen

Kampwirth, captured “[m]ore than any other single Zapatista woman…the imagination of millions.”4 Indeed, by challenging the Mexican government and defending the rights of

Indigenous peoples, Ramona became one of the most important revolutionary women in the country’s history. In an official pantheon of virile heroes and hypermasculine icons, including

Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, Comandanta Ramona exists, however, as an enigmatic figure—largely overlooked and dismissed in the nation’s revolutionary canon. For instance, while an extensive body of literature explores the Zapatista uprising and its strategic use of imagery, there is a paucity of work interrogating Ramona’s significance in this resistance movement.

This dissertation argues that discursive representations in Mexico’s national press render

Ramona within archetypal and bifurcated framings that reproduce dominant ideologies in textual

and visual news sources. While these imaginings attempt to weaken her political agency and

1 Comandante/a refers to an officer in command of a military unit.

2 Rene Villegas, “Dying Rebel Takes Zapatista Cause to Capital,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 11, 1996, A 23.

3 Villegas, “Dying Rebel Takes Zapatista Cause to Capital,” A 23.

4 Karen Kampwirth, Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 214.

ii diminish the complexities of history, gender, and race in the theatre of resistance, Ramona ruptures and subverts such ideological trappings, wresting herself from the stranglehold of mediated determinations. In doing so, Ramona defines herself as a dissident agent in the counter-archive of women’s insurgency.

iii

Acknowledgements

As a member of the Irish-Canadian settler population who has lived, studied, and worked on Treaty Four Territory throughout the duration of this research, I want to begin by acknowledging the original stewards of this land—the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda, and the Métis/Michif Nation.

For Dr. Carmen Robertson and Dr. Mark Cronlund Anderson, I will never be able to express the depth of my gratitude for your support and guidance during this project. This has been a long journey—one that has taken many circuitous routes, along with a few abrupt and wild turns. Thank you for staying the course. And, thank you for believing in me. Your presence in my life has been a gift—and I am honoured to have had the opportunity to work with you.

I am deeply indebted to the members of my committee: Dr. Darlene Juschka, Dr. Randal Rogers, Dr. Christine Ramsay, and Dr. Sherry Farrell-Racette. Thank you for devoting your time to this work—and thank you for your generosity of spirit. In addition to providing careful direction and feedback, you gave me emotional support that sustained me during difficult times.

I also want to thank Dr. Miranda Brady of Carleton University. I could not have been had a better external examiner oversee this work. I am a fan of your research—and I hope our paths will cross in the future.

Kokum Brenda Dubois, your wisdom, strength, and love not only carried me, but also grounded me. You have given me many gifts. Undoubtedly, I would not have finished this research without the women and the students at the ta-tawâw Student Centre, who embraced me with “hoops of steel.” Thank you for giving me a home and a family on campus.

For my mother, who stood by me at the lowest point in my life. For my father, who taught me how to fight. I am blessed.

Ciaran, for your exquisite patience and your beautiful heart. There is no one who has loved me greater.

I would also like to acknowledge the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research for its financial support.

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

iv

To Shannon and Rachel, for your friendship, wisdom, and unwavering support.

“The interesting thing about weaving is that when you look back, you will see mistakes. You have to make a choice about those mistakes. Do you leave them there to be acknowledged? Do you try to hide them? Maybe, you unravel it. Or, maybe you just start weaving, rather than fighting it.” – R. Janze.

v Table of Contents

Abstract ...... i

Acknowledgements ...... iv

Dedication ...... v

Table of Contents ...... vi

List of Illustrations ...... vii

CHAPTER ONE: IMAGINING RAMONA ...... 1

CHAPTER TWO: LOOKING FOR RAMONA ...... 51

CHAPTER THREE: RESEARCHING RAMONA ...... 88

CHAPTER FOUR: SCRIPTING RAMONA ...... 131

CHAPTER FIVE: THE RETURN OF IX CHEL ...... 174

CHAPTER SIX: RAMONA’S REVOLUTION: MILITANT MOTHERS AND WAILING WOMEN ...... 234

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE DEATH AND LIFE OF LA COMANDANTA RAMONA ...... 282

CHAPTER EIGHT: CONCLUSION ...... 312

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 315

vi

List of Illustrations

Chapter One

Figure 1: Diego Treviño, Reforma, October 11, 1996, A2. Figure 2: Comandanta Ramona, Reforma, October 13, 1996, 20A.

Figure 3: Amando Salmerón, Emiliano Zapata, March 1914, Fondo Casasola, SINAFO-Fototeca Nacional del INAH, accessed September 12, 2017, http://zapataproject.org/content/emiliano- zapata-his-horse.

Figure 4: Frida Hertz, Subcomandante Marcos, Guadalupe Tepeyac, at the Selva (Rainforest) Lacandona, State of Chiapas, México, May 1994, accessed September 17, 2017, http://www.famouspictures.org/subcomandante-marcos/.

Figure 5: Principal conflicts between the Federal Army and the EZLN, 1994-1995, accessed August 13, 2014, https://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/insurgent-mexico/.

Figure 6: P. Flores Perez, Mujeres Patriotas (Patriotic Women), n.d., accessed October 2, 2029, https://www.12storylibrary.com/2018/10/women-fought-in-the-mexican-revolution/. Figure 7: Casasola, Margarita Neri, Mexico 1915, Casasola. Gelatin dry plate, Casasola Archive, 186387, accessed November 13, 2012, http://noblebandits.asu.edu/Topics/RevWom.html.

Figure 8: Agrarian Reform, Chiapas, 1950, accessed December 15, 2016, https://homerdixon.com/environmental-scarcity-and-violent-conflict-the-case-of-chiapas- mexico/. Figure 9: Agrarian Reform, Chiapas, 1975, accessed December 15, 2016, https://homerdixon.com/environmental-scarcity-and-violent-conflict-the-case-of-chiapas- mexico/.

Chapter Two

Figure 1: Hulton Archive/Getty Images, Djamila Boupacha, March 14, 1963, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/news-photo/algerian-resistance-fighter-and- member-of-the-algerian-news-photo/1053494440. Figure 2: Pablo Picasso, Djamila Boupacha in Simone de Beauvoir and Gisele Halimi’s 1962 publication, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.lesoirdalgerie.com/culture/rendez-nous- notre-djamila-boupacha-1501/print/1.

vii

Chapter Three

Figure 1: Julio de la Fuente, Yalálag, Oaxaca, 1940, accessed October 27, 2019, http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2007-81102008000200006.

Figure 2: No More Marginalization, gacetilla featuring Donaldo Colosio (Insert in national press publications), Special Collectable Edition for Presidential Candidates, February 1994. Figure 3. Independence, Ideology, and Circulation of Mexico City’s Newspapers (1995-1996), in Chappell Lawson, Building the Fourth Estate: Democratization and the Rise of the Free Press in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 63.

Figure 4: Elsa Medina, 1991, in John Mraz, “Zapata and Salinas, Mexico, 1911 and 1991” in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News eds. Jason Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 38.

Chapter Four

Figure 1: Victor Mendiola, La Jornada, February 23, 1994, 5. Figure 2: Antonio Turok, La Jornada, February 4, 1994, 7. Figure 3: The Coyolxauhqui Stone, c. 1500. volcanic stone, found at the Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan, Museo del Templo Mayor, Mexico City, accessed October 3, 2018, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coyolxauhqui_stone.jpg.

Figure 4: Antonio Turok, La Jornada del Campo, January 25, 1994, 3. Figure 5: Excelsior, February 4, 1994, A.40. Figure 6: Diego Rivera, The Grand Tenochitlan, 1945, (La Malinche, detail of mural), accessed October 18, 2019, https://www.wikitree.com/photo/jpg/Tenepatl-1-3.

Figure 7: Eugenio Bermejillo, Indianismo Indio, La Jornada del Campo, January 25, 1994, 9.

Figure 8: Boris Viskin, Madre Patria, La Jornada del Campo, January 25, 1994, 9.

Figure 9: Antonio Turok, La Jornada, February 6, 1994, 8.

Figure 10: La Jornada, February 6, 1994, 10.

viii Figure 11: La Llorona (Cihuacóatl) depicted as a flying snake, Florentine Codex (ca. 1575), accessed July 15, 2018, https://www.revolvy.com/page/Cihuac%C5%8D%C4%81tl.

Figure 12: Proceso, January 10, 1994. Figure 13: Proceso, February 21, 1994. Figure 14: Tataranieto del Ahuizote, (Supplementary Feature in La Jornada, February 2, 1994, 8. Figure 15: Tataranieto del Ahuizote, February 24, 1994, 8. Figure 16: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 23, 1994, 13.

Figure 17: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 21, 1994, 38.

Figure 18: La Jornada, February 21, 1994, 38.

Figure 19: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 22, 1994, 1.

Figure 20: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 22, 1994, 13. Figure 21: Excelsior, February 25, 1994, 44A. Figure 22: La Jornada, October 22, 1996, 18.

Chapter Five

Figure 1: Ixchel, Codex Dresden, accessed July 5, 2018, https://www.diccionariodesimbolos.com/ixchel.htm.

Figure 2: Ix Chel, Glyph, accessed July 5, 2018, https://www.wikiwand.com/it/Ixchel.

Figure 3: Xmucane, accessed February 6, 2020, https://www.revolvy.com/page/Xmucane-and- Xpiacoc. Figure 4: Moon Goddess giving birth to rabbit. Goddess 0 helps the rabbit nurse (Kerr 559), polychrome vase, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, accessed June 16, 2017, http://research.mayavase.com/kerrmaya_hires.php?vase=559. Figure 5: Mauricio Marat, Cihuacoatl-Tonantzin, Late Postclassic, Museo Nacional de Antropología of Mexico (INAH), accessed January 5, 2019, https://inah.gob.mx/en/foto-del- dia/5357-cihuacoatl.

Figure 6: Virgin of Guadalupe, December 12, 1531, Tepeyac Hill, Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico City, accessed March 30, 2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Guadalupe.

ix

Figure 7: Diego Treviño, Reforma, October 12, 1996, 10A. Figure 8: Former President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, April 4, 1977, Tlatelolco, accessed December 3, 2018, https://aristeguinoticias.com/0110/mexico/estoy-orgulloso-del-ano-de-1968-porque-me- permitio-salvar-al-pais-gdo/.

Figure 9: President Zedillo, Proceso, October 6, 1996.

Figure 10: Diego Treviño, Reforma, October 11, 1996, 1.

Figure 11: Reforma, October 13, 1996, 20A. Figure 12: El Universal, October 12, 1996, A1. Figure 13: Tomás Martínez, Reforma, October 12, 1996, 1.

Figure 14: El Universal, October 12, 1996, 16. Figure 15: Hector Garcia, Reforma, October 14, 1996, 24A. Figure 16: Reforma, October 4, 1996, 1. Figure 17: Miguel Velasco, Reforma, October 13, 1996, 1 Figure 18: Augstín Marquez, Reforma, October 12, 1996, 20A. Figure 19: José Luis Fuentes, Excelsior, October 12, 1996, 11A;

Figure 20: Teresa Urrea (Santa de Cabora) in El Paso, Texas, 1896, Fototeca de la Dirección General del Acervo Históric Diplomático de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, México, D.F., accessed January 10, 2019, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Teresa-healing-in-El-Paso- Texas-Courtesy-of-Fototeca-de-la-Direccion-General-del_fig1_327681225.

Figure 21: Excelsior, October 11, 1996, 8A. Figure 22: La Jornada, October 22, 1996, 18.

Chapter Six

Figure 3: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 16, 1997.

Figure 4: Jenny Hart, La Llorona, 2005, cotton with cotton embroidery and metallic threads. Smithsonian Art Museum, accessed June 3, 2019, https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/la-llorona- 83823.

x Figure 3: Ramona Doll, accessed June 17, 2014, https://www.prettyprudent.com/crafty-tourism- mayan-mexico-edition/. Figure 4: Día de Lucha de la Mujer Mexicana en Defensa de la Patria (Day of the Women’s Fight in Defense of La Patria), Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), Mexico City, inv. 869.

Figure 5: Jose Carlo Gonzalez, January 9, 1998, La Jornada, 8.

Figure 6: Pedro Valtierra, La Jornada, January 4, 1998, 8;

Figure 7: Pedro Valtierra, Masiosare (La Jornada’s Sunday Magazine) January 11, 1998, 4.

Figure 8: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 16, 1997, 1.

Figure 9: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 16, 1997, 1.

Figure 10: Reforma, March 9, 1997, 2A. Figure 11: Francisca Zetina Chavez (left), also known as La Paca, and Caralampia Mondogo (right), Reforma, March 5, 1997, 2C.

Figure 12: Jaime Boites, Reforma, March 12, 1997, 1.

Figure 13: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, March, 12, 1997, 8.

Figure 14: La Jornada, March 20, 1997

Figure 15: María Luisa Severiano, La Jornada, March 20, 1997, 8.

Figure 16: Jose Carlos Gonzalez, La Jornada, January 2, 1998, 14.

Figure 17: Jose Carlos Gonzalez, La Jornada, January 2, 1998, 14.

Figure 18: Reforma, January 14, 1998, 6A.

Figure 19: Pedro Valtierra, January 4, 1998, La Jornada, 8.

Figure 20: Pedro Valtierra, La Jornada, January 4, 1998, 8.

Figure 21: Mario Vazquez de la Torre, La Jornada, September 1, 2005, 51. Figure 22: Victor Camacho, La Jornada, September 17, 2005, 16. Figure 23: Victor Camacho, La Jornada, September 21, 2005, 19.

xi Chapter Seven Figure 5. El Universal, January 7, 2006, A10. Figure 2: El Universal, January 7, 2006 A10.

Figure 3: La Jornada, January 9, 2006, 2;

Figure 4: Jim Fitzpatrick, Guerrillero Heroico, c.1968, adapted from Alberto Korda’s original photograph, accessed August 3, 2019, https://www.wallpaperflare.com/search?wallpaper=Che+Guevara.

Figure 5: Ramona, Mexican actor Ofelia Medina, Oliver Stone and Comandante Tacho in San Cristóbal de las Casas, La Jornada, March 25, 1996. Figure 6: Zack de la Rocha, La Jornada del Campo, August 17, 2003, 3. Figure 7: El Universal, January 9, 2006, A1.

Figure 8: Gustave Courbet, A Burial At Ornans, 1849, oil on canvas.

Figure 9: Luís Castillo, Reforma, January 9, 2006, 9. Figure 10: Moon Goddess with bird, Glyph, in Stephen Houston et al., The Memory of Bones: Body, Being and Experience among the Maya, accessed July 10, 2010, https://elespejohumeante.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/the-memory-of-bones.pdf

Figure 11: Rocha, Proceso, January 15, 2006. Figure 12: Yuriria Pantoja Millán, La Jornada (Ojarasca), January 16, 2006, 5.

xii

Chapter One

Imagining Ramona

Among the indigenous commanders there is a tiny woman, even tinier than those around her. A face wreathed in black still leaves the eyes free and a few hairs dangling from the head. In that gaze is the glitter of one who searches. A 12-calibre sawed-off shotgun hangs from her back.... Before she did not exist for anyone, now she exists, as a woman, as an indigenous woman, as a rebel woman. Now Ramona lives, a woman belonging to that race which must die in order to live.1

Figure 1: Diego Treviño, Reforma, October 11, 1996, A2. In 1994, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN/ Zapatista) waged a war of insurgency by using, in part, images to attack the Mexican state. Under the direction of strategist Subcomandante Marcos, the Indigenous resistance group, based in the southern state of

1 Marcos (Subcomandante), Ya Basta! Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising: Writings of the Zapatista Uprising, ed. Žiga Vodovnik (Oakland: AK Press, 2004), 227-228.

1 Chiapas, deployed a “sophisticated” 2 and “well-oiled” 3 communications machine that

successfully transmitted Zapatismo into the mediascape.4 For instance, during a press conference announcing that Ramona would represent the Zapatistas at the National Indigenous Congress in

October 1996, Marcos lauded the insurgent leader as the movement’s “greatest symbol of war,”5

insisting that she “represent[ed] [their] most aggressive side [and the Zapatista’s] most

belligerent, and intransigent part.” 6 This characterization clashed, however, with La

Comandanta’s public persona in this particular period. Noting that she was a “sick and frail”7

Indian woman suffering from kidney failure, national and international news stories debated the

rationale for sending Ramona to the forum. As Journalist Hermann Bellinghausen comments,

this announcement produced the “strongest and most paradoxical” 8 image of Zapatismo since the

January 1, 1994 uprising.

In light of these ambivalent framings and in consideration of Ramona’s central role as an insurgent leader who drafted the “Revolutionary Women’s Law,” how, then, does Mexico’s national press imagine Ramona, both textually and visually, from 1994, the launch of the

Zapatista uprising, until her death in 2006? And, what is the significance of these discursive

2 Hermann Bellinghausen, “A Sweet and Gentle Woman With the Force of a Bomb,” La Jornada, January 7, 2006, 3. Translation mine.

3 Bellinghausen, “A Sweet and Gentle Woman With the Force of a Bomb,” 3.

4 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 35.

5 John Ross, The War Against Oblivion: The Zapatista Chronicles (Monroe: Common Courage Press, 2000), 200.

6 Ibid.

7 “Comandanta Ramona: Zapatista Rebel Leader,” Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/comandante-ramona-6112340.html

8 Bellinghausen, 3.

2 imaginings?

To ground this interdisciplinary investigation, which engages with visual culture, media

studies, and discourse analysis, this chapter identifies lines of inquiry informing my research. I

first address the significance of La Comandanta’s image in the Zapatista movement, locating her in the wider scope of Mexico’s revolutionary canon and discourses of erasure.9 I then discuss the role images play in galvanizing support for the uprising, linking contemporary Zapatismo with revolutionary hero and national icon Emiliano Zapata, the General of the Liberation Army of the

South in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).

Following this examination, I provide a historical framework for my study, tracing

Ramona’s origins, along with Zapatista grievances, to land expropriation in Chiapas during the

1880s. It is important to note that I limit this analysis to Chiapas and events that transpired in this state during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As part of this discussion, I also examine ways in which political projects and cultural ideologies, such as indigenismo, entangle this history, contouring and informing discursive representations of Ramona. Although I present a detailed description of research methodologies in chapter three, chapter one presents a brief overview of the procedures I employ in this study. I conclude this introduction with an overview of subsequent chapters.

9 Sandra Ponzanesi, “Introduction,” in Gender, Globalization and Violence: Postcolonial Conflict Zones, ed. Sandra Ponzanesi (New York: Routledge, 2014), 18.

3 Ramona:

Rebel, Sinner, Insurgent, Saint

In terms of understanding Ramona within the Zapatista movement, José Rabasa, an anticolonial theorist and professor of literature, views La Comandanta as a symbolic weapon in the Zapatista communication’s arsenal. According to Rabasa, her presence at the National

Indigenous Forum in October 1996 “ensured the political survival of the Zapatista movement at a critical juncture.” 10 Author John Ross supports this perspective, arguing that “[s]ending Ramona to the congress was a measure of the EZLN’s ingenuity. Not only did the move put them back on the front page, but the image of this tiny, terminally ill Indian woman traveling alone up to the capital when, for weeks, the mal gobierno had been painting the Zapatistas as war demons, handed the rebels the moral high ground yet again.”11 In “The Unknown Icon,” Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein refers to Ramona as the “much beloved EZLN matriarch.”12 In these readings, La Comandanta rallies popular support for Zapatismo, restoring legitimacy to the movement in a period of wavering prospects.13

Other pundits, scholars, and writers perceive Ramona as an ambivalent, often mythical figure who inspires hope. In 2001, for example, Margarita Gutiérrez Romero, an Indigenous activist from Hidalgo and the national coordinator of Mexico’s Indigenous Women (CONAMI),

10 José Rabasa, “Of Zapatismo: Reflections on the Folkloric and the Impossible in a Subaltern Insurrection,” in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, eds. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, (Durham: Duke UP, 1997), 401.

11 John Ross, The War Against Oblivion: The Zapatista Chronicles, 200.

12 Naomi Klein, “The Unknown Icon,” in The Zapatista Reader, ed. Tom Hayden (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), 120.

13 Rabasa, “Of Zapatismo: Reflections on the Folkloric and the Impossible in a Subaltern Insurrection,” 401.

4 commented, “The presence of Comandanta Ramona [at the National Indigenous Congress] was

an initiative to not fall into pessimism and disillusionment, and it opened our hearts and

nourished us to continue, convinced that it was possible that the women organize ourselves.”14

Likewise, Guadalupe Diaz Castellanos, a feminist journalist, depicts Ramona as a quasi-

messianic figure, commenting:

Ramona’s arrival broke the myth of the indigenous woman as isolated from everything and of the myth of the ‘handed-over’ woman, and of the possibility of peaceful change. She came to transform us, to nourish what is left with hope, to call together our will and commitment.15

Additionally, Gricelle Gómez-Cano, a scholar who examines mythologies and narratives in

Mexican culture, compares Ramona with Ix Chel, the pre-Hispanic goddess of weaving, warfare,

and childbirth from the sacred Maya text, the Popol Vuh.16 Such imaginings draw upon a dense entanglement of intertexts, coded constructs, and conflated pictorial works and iconography—

both pre-Hispanic and Christian—that imprint or, rather, inform Ramona’s representation.

14 Maylei Blackwell, “Weaving in the Spaces: Indigenous Women’s Organizing and the Politics of Scale in Mexico,” in Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas, eds. Shannon Speed, et al. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 140.]

15 Guadalupe Diaz Castellanos, “Ramona en el D.F.”, FEM November 30-31, 1996.

16 Gricelle Gómez-Cano, The Return to Coatlicue: Goddesses and Warladies in Mexican Folklore. (Xlibris Books, 2010), 225-226.

5

Figure 2: Comandanta Ramona, October 13, 1996, 20A.

A photograph published in Reforma further supports these imaginings (Figure 2).17 In

this image, which was taken at the October 1996 forum in Mexico City, Ramona wears her

traditional huipil (blouse), which asserts her Maya ancestry, while hoisting a small bouquet of

roses above her head. In Mexican culture, the rose symbolizes the Virgin of Guadalupe, an

Indigenized revisioning of the immaculate mother whose image derives from Tonantzin, one of

the most prominent deities in the pre-Hispanic pantheon. 18 As historian Eric Wolf asserts, this syncretic reimagining of the virgin serves as a root paradigm, a “master symbol,” 19 that

17 Reforma, October 13, 1996, A 20.

18 Kirstin Noreen, “Negotiating the Original: Copying the Virgin of Guadalupe,” Visual Resources 33, no. 3/4 (2017): 363-364.

19 Eric Wolf, “The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol,” The Journal of American Folklore. 71 (279) (Jan. - Mar., 1958): 35.

6 preserved Indigenous rituals and practices rather than facilitate wholehearted conversion. When

viewed in this context, Ramona, like Guadalupe, enshrines “the major hopes and aspirations of

an entire society” 20 and “embodies a longing to return to the pristine state in which hunger and unsatisfactory social relations are minimized.” 21 Still, in the wider revolutionary canon,

Ramona’s outlier status reveals an essential thorniness and an anxious tension, which can be traced, in part, to official campaigns that emerged in the postrevolutionary landscape.

In Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico, historian Jocelyn Olcott argues

that dominant ideology waged attacks upon women for betraying normative gender roles and

expectations during the revolution.22 In an attempt to bridle such dissidence and prevent it from spreading, official political imaginings branded revolutionary women with a host of new archetypes, including the soldadera (camp follower), the soldada (armed combatant), and la

23 madre abnegada (the selfless and virtuous mother). Summoning La Malinche from the annuals of Conquest, curators of culture also vilified rebellious women as traitorous figures, who, like

Hernán Cortés’s mistress and translator, not only betrayed Indigenous peoples, but also birthed a new Mexican race, thus conflating the victim/betrayer trope with that of the virgin/whore.

According to Olcott, these tropes facilitated the erasure of agency, trivializing revolutionary women’s roles and rendering them without a face or name.

As historian Francie R. Chassen–López points out in “Distorting the Picture: Gender,

Ethnicity, and Desire in a Mexican Telenovela,” similar patterns of insurgency and erasure recur

20 Wolf, “The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol,” 34, 36.

21 Ibid.

22 Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 17.

23 Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 15.

7 at the height of the Zapatista crisis in 1994, demonstrating “the erasure of Indigenous women’s

agency not only by nineteenth–century nation builders but also twentieth–century

neoliberals.”24 At this time, Televisa, Mexico’s dominant television network, aired El Vuelo del

Águila (The Flight of the Eagle), a historical telenovela starring a huipil-clad Salma Hayek as

Juana Catarina Romero, an Indigenous cigarette vendor and an “exotic sexual aggressor,” 25 who becomes romantically involved with dictator Porfirio Díaz (1830–1915). According to Chassen–

López, Televisa, which is owned by the PRI-affiliated Azcárraga family, responded to the

Zapatista insurgency through the deployment of controlling images, reviving the dictator and reimagining Romero, a Liberal spy working against Conservative armies during the revolution.26

In this context, Chassen–López suggests that Romero serves, however, a substitute for Ramona:

“This telenovela transformed a nineteenth–century female patriot into a frivolous and sexualized ribbon vendor, certainly understandable at a moment when Zapatista Comandante Ramona was getting national press.” 27 While outside of the scope of the national press, this research suggests that Ramona’s image functions as a powerful—even threatening—force to the political elite.

24 Francie R. Chassen–López, “Distorting the Picture: Gender, Ethnicity, and Desire in a Mexican Telenovela (El Vuelo Del Águila),” Journal of Women's History 20, no. 2 (2008): 106.

25 Chassen–López, “Distorting the Picture: Gender, Ethnicity, and Desire in a Mexican Telenovela (El Vuelo Del Águila),” 106.

26 Ibid., 106.

27 Ibid., 106, 123.

8 A War of Images

In “Imagining the Zapatistas: Rebellion, Representation and Popular Culture,” M. Clint

McCowan, a theorist of visual culture, argues that the Zapatista uprising was “as much a war of images, or a propaganda war, as a military endeavour.”28 Further to this argument, Paul

Routledge, who examines the use of communications in protest movements, maintains that “the

Zapatista’s manipulation of the media served as a political strategy consisting of three interwoven facets: (1) the physical occupation of space; (2) the media-tion [sic] of images (the movement as a form of media); and (3) the manipulation of discourse (a war of words).” 29

Whereas other resistant groups, such as Fidel Castro’s 26 de Julio and Algeria’s National

Liberation Front (FLN), deployed strategic communications to wage insurgency, Routledge

insists the Zapatista’s use of tactical images and words differentiates it from other guerrilla

movements.30 Noting that the this particular campaign proffered a series of “event-actions”31 that

“imagineered resistance,”32 he argues that it subverted and intervened in dominant representations. According to Routledge:

It is tempting to consider the Zapatistas primarily as a media event, since for the many onlookers, the experience of the Zapatistas has been entirely a media-ted [sic] one…. it is more appropriate to consider the Zapatistas as an example of imagineered resistance that exists both as embodied and media-ted for the Zapatistas articulate challenges to both the material political and economic power of the Mexican state, and to the monopoly of representations – imposed by political elites.33

28 M. Clint McCowan, “Imagining the Zapatistas: Rebellion, Representation and Popular Culture,” International Third World Studies Journal and Review XIV (2003), 30.

29 Paul Routledge, “Spatiality, Embodiment, and Mediation in the Zapatista Insurgency,” in Rethinking Geopolitics, eds. Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby, (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 248.

30 Routledge, “Spatiality, Embodiment, and Mediation in the Zapatista Insurgency,” 248.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

9 By reclaiming revolutionary symbols and figures, for instance, historian Lynn Stephen argues that the Zapatista’s cultural packaging and branding of their movement transformed a local rebellion into a global event.

Viva Zapata! Viva Marcos!

Figure 3 (left): Amando Salmerón, Emiliano Zapata, March 1914, Fondo Casasola, SINAFO-Fototeca Nacional del INAH. Digital Image. Available from the Zapata Project. http://zapataproject.org/content/emiliano-zapata-his-horse (accessed September 12, 2017). Figure 4 (right): Frida Hertz, Subcomandante Marcos, Guadalupe Tepeyac, at the Selva (Rainforest) Lacandona, State of Chiapas, México, May 1994. Digital Image. Available from: Famous Pictures, http://www.famouspictures.org/subcomandante-marcos/ (accessed September 17, 2017).

Neo-Zapatismo’s harnessing of Zapata, in particular, reveals a sophisticated understanding of the strategic and persuasive use of imaging to promote its cause (Figure 3).

According to historian Alan Knight, Zapata serves as a Mestizo (mixed) icon of revolutionary struggle, who “dogged[ly] adheres to the ideals of agrarian reform,” 34 “local self-government,” 35

34 Knight, Counter-revolution and Reconstruction, 310.

35 Ibid.

10 and the “defense of culture.”36 Zapata outlined such demands in the Plan of Ayala (1911),

considered the sacred scripture of the Zapatistas,37 which calls for land, liberty, and justice. In

addition to Knight, historian Samuel Brunk identifies Zapata’s staying power with his

masculinity, as the icon embodies qualities of machismo associated with revolution and

resistance.38 He further argues that Zapata is a refracted figure who takes on the beliefs and expectations of his followers, uniting dissimilar interests and transcending regional differences.

As a national icon, he thus represents multiple attributes and meanings, shapeshifting in accordance with the needs of a particular group—not only campesinos but also the state. In the wake of revolution, for example, Mexico’s political elite conducted a campaign referred to as the

“Institutional Revolution,” which appropriated Zapata’s image to promote, but not fulfil rights enshrined in the Constitution (1917).

In the same vein, the Zapatistas re-appropriate this icon, uprooting and rearticulating

Zapata’s revolutionary ideals from the past, which were then transplanted within the context of contemporary insurgency to garner support and captivate media attention. In this reclamation, however, there is a troubling conflation that melds Subcomandante Marcos with Zapata (Figure

4). Unlike the Mestizo farmer from Morelos, Marcos is a middle-class, university-educated, white academic. In his attempt to embody Zapata, Marcos identifies himself as martyr and mythic being in accordance with the revolutionary symbol’s apotheosis. In his home state of

Morelos, for instance, oral histories insist that Zapata was never assassinated in Chinameca, but

36 Ibid., 304-305.

37 John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 393.

38 Samuel Brunk, Emiliano Zapata: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 109-112.

11 lived on in Hungary or the Middle East. 39 The revolutionary figure has also been compared to

the prophet Moses, Jesus Christ, and Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent deity in pre-Hispanic

mythology.40 Here, Zapata’s lore becomes entangled and implicated with other mythologies, including contemporary Zapatismo, creating rich strata of stories, tales, and sagas that contribute to Zapata’s persistence.

By placing Zapata at the centre of their campaign, the Zapatistas reiterate a mythology that resonates with the nation. In doing so, they appeal the hearts and minds of the marginalized who interpret Zapata as an icon of revolutionary struggle for campesino rights and as a mythic figure associated with land, liberty, and justice. 41 Lynn Stephen refers to the Zapatista’s

reconfiguration of national mythology as transvaluation, which denotes a process of assimilating

or hybridizing an idea, narrative, or image as a strategy to reach a broader collective. 42 As evidence, in the immediate days and months following the launch of the uprising, media agencies, along with an entourage of eminent academics, radicals, and famous personalities,

ventured to Mexico’s proverbial heart of darkness, vying for interviews and face time with

Marcos, who controlled the movement’s communications. Celebrity endorsements included Jose

Saramago, the Portuguese novelist and Nobel laureate; Danielle Mitterrand, a human rights

activist and the widow of former French president François Mitterrand; actor Edward James

Olmos, director Oliver Stone; and, lead singer of Rage Against the Machine, Zack de la Rocha.

Considering the prevalence of machismo values in communicating the principles of the

Zapatistas, what, then, is the meaning of deploying Comandanta Ramona—a diminutive woman

39 Brunk, “The Eyes of Emiliano Zapata,” 115.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., 123.

42 Stephen, Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico, 169.

12 and a figure of suffering—to the masculinized frontlines of visual insurgency, deemed the “first

postmodern revolution” and the “first informational guerrilla movement?”43 Importantly, what socio-cultural, political, and economic factors contributed to Ramona’s rising through the ranks of the Zapatistas? From what history does she emerge?

Background of the Problem

Figure 5: Principal conflicts between the Federal Army and the EZLN, 1994-1995. Available from: Insurgent Mexico, https://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/insurgent-mexico/ (accessed September 12, 2017).

On January 1, 1994, Comandanta Ramona and a group of armed insurgent fighters with

the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN)

43 David Ronfeldt et al. The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico (Santa Monica: RAND, 1998), 114.

13 seized the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southernmost state of Chiapas and declared war against the Mexican state. The Zapatistas—an organization with Marxist ideological underpinnings comprised mainly of Indigenous campesinos of Maya descent—launched this resistance movement to contest numerous violations against Indigenous peoples and to protest constitutional amendments that facilitated the passing of the North American Free Trade

Agreement (NAFTA), which took effect on the date the Zapatistas stormed the central highland city (Figure 5).44

In the two years leading up to NAFTA, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari revised

Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution (1917), thus opening ejidal (communal) land to foreign acquisition and allowing campesinos to put up land as collateral to obtain private loans.45

According to Gavin O’Toole, a journalist who specialized in Latin American reporting, Salinas argued that Article 27, with its enshrinement of land redistribution, was no longer relevant in contemporary Mexican society, noting that demographic growth, industrialization, and urbanization had transformed the country and that the Constitution should reflect these changes.46 Salinas further maintained that the ejido land program—a demand that emerged from the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920)—had been accomplished and that such a system had been, to a large degree, unsuccessful.47 As a case in point, Salinas identified Mexico’s poverty-plagued

44 The Maya peoples have, historically, lived in three geographic areas: the southern Pacific lowlands, the highlands, and the northern lowlands. These areas encompass present-day Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, Campeche, and the Yucatán Peninsula. There are eight branches of Mayan languages, consisting of Wastekan, Yukatekan, Ch’olan, Tzeltalan, Chujean, Q’anjob’alan, Mamean, K’ichee’an.

45 Gavin O’Toole, The Reinvention of Mexico: National Ideology in a Neoliberal Era (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 76.

46 O’Toole, The Reinvention of Mexico: National Ideology in a Neoliberal Era, 76.

47 Ibid.

14 Indigenous communities as evidence that this system had failed and that small production

agriculture was ineffective.48 For the Zapatistas, however, these constitutional amendments threatened the livelihood of campesinos: it was, as Marcos stated, “a death sentence to the

Indigenous ethnicities of Mexico.”49

While Salinas’ 1992 constitutional amendments opened ejidal land to privatization, the

history of the Mexican state aiding private capital to obtain land and resources in Chiapas can be

traced to two historical factors: 1) land reform that began, initially, with agrarian laws enacted

between 1826-1850, along with liberal Reform Laws of 1857, which heralded widespread land

redistribution; 50 and, 2) the establishment of an export-oriented, resource-based economy in the

1880s, which concentrated, in part, on large-scale commercial agriculture, which was facilitated by President Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910).51 Characterized as initiating a period of “flawed peace, based on recurrent repression,”52 Díaz’s regime attempted to modernize Mexico by encouraging foreign investment and land purchase that would, potentially, energize the Mexican economy.

48 Ibid.

49 “Zapatistas: Documents of the New Mexican Revolution,” “Chapter One: The Revolt,” Latin American Network Information Center,” accessed December 3, 2015, http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/Zapatistas/chapter01.html

50 Stephen, 92.

51 Mark Wasserman, “Foreign Investment in Mexico, 1876-1910: A Case Study of the Role of Regional Elites,” The Americas 36 (1) (Jul., 1979): 8.

52 Wasserman, “Foreign Investment in Mexico, 1876-1910: A Case Study of the Role of Regional Elites,” 8.

15 The Law of the Land:

Modernization, Export Agriculture, and Campesino Survival

Until the 1880s, Chiapas had been a relative “backwater”53 in terms of—what was considered—modernization. Porfirian economic designs, however, transformed Chiapas, making it one of the most lucrative regions in the country due to agricultural production. To facilitate this economic plan, Díaz invited foreign investors to develop Mexico’s arterial infrastructure—the tributaries of commerce—to access and modernize the region. These companies received privileges, including tax exemptions and independence from government interference.54

Moreover, the government privatized—and thus sold—thousands of hectares of ejidal land—for

“giveaway prices.”55 Agrarian laws allowed the non-Indigenous elite to claim terranos baldíos, or vacant lands, that surrounded Indigenous communities.56 As a result, foreign investment flooded the Mexican market,57 an incursion that meant Indigenous peoples lost communal land to private citizens who acquired title simply through claims to these regions. In Chiapas’ central highland—the heart of the contemporary Zapatista movement—German and American companies purchased large tracts of land, resulting in the state becoming the one of the largest sources of coffee production, chocolate, sugar, bananas, and commercial corn and beans.58

53 Friedrich Katz, “Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 54, no. 1 (Feb., 1987): 1.

54 Ibid.

55 Jan Rus, R. Aída Hernández Castillo, and Shannan L. Mattiace, Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias: The Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas and the Zapatista Rebellion (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, 2003), 2-3.

56 Stephen, 92.

57 Michael J. Gonzales, The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 164.

58 Rus et al., Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias, 2-3.

16 These conditions exacerbated problems that began in 1856 with the passing of the Ley

Lerdo, or the Reform Law. Under this law, the Roman Catholic church was forced to sell large estates to the criollo elite (individuals of Spanish descent born in Mexico),59 thus inciting the loss of Indigenous lands that had been formally protected by church management.60 Díaz’s modernization strategy continued such expropriation, resulting in the loss of more than 95 percent of the communal lands.61 While this restructuring benefited caciques (Indigenous leaders), local elites, and foreign investors, it created a large class of landless campesinos.62

Without access to land, campesinos were forced into systems of indebted servitude, temporary migrant labor, and indentured labour, which tied Indigenous peoples to “servile and coercive conditions”63 on haciendas (agricultural estates) and plantations. Hacendados (estate owners) used debt peonage to control campesino mobility. 64 Specifically, while the peon was

free to leave the hacienda and find other work, debt incurred at the tienda del raya (the company

store) due to advances, the cost of food, and transportation restricted workers from leaving estates.65 In this period, wages also decreased, while inflation increased by 30 percent, causing tension between workers and hacendados from 1908-1911.66

59 James Lockhart, “Encomienda and Hacienda: The Evolution of the Great Estate in the Spanish Indies,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 49, no.3 (Aug., 1969): 418.

60 James Kelly Jr, “Article 27 and Mexican Land Reform: The Legacy of Zapata's dream,” Columbia Human Rights Review 25 (1993): 549.

61 Katz, “Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies,” 1.

62 Ibid.

63 Alan Knight, “Debt Peonage in Latin America,” in Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labor, ed. Leonie J. Archer (London: 1988), 111.

64 Adolfo Gilly, “Rural Economy and Society: 1920-1940” in Encyclopedia of Mexico, Volume II, M-Z, ed. Michael S. Werner, (Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997), 1311.

65 Knight, “Debt Peonage in Latin America,” 111.

66 Ibid.

17 Further, as part of his “order and progress” regime, Díaz’s dictatorship, which was known as the “white man’s government,”67 espoused Indigenous inferiority and reified Mexico’s racist and hierarchical social structure, leading to a rash of socio-economic, political, and cultural conflicts that materialized on plantations in Mexico’s southern frontier.68 Specifically, the internal social structure of southern haciendas produced a complex hierarchy of workers, which was predicated upon descent, biology, and class, thus rationalizing exploitation.69 Wolfgang

Gabbert characterizes the plantation’s social order as a tightly regulated system of segregation that pitted Mestizo (mixed race) workers against Indigenous campesinos, who were considered degenerate in the name of Positivism, a philosophy that buttressed Díaz’s regime’s ideological foundation. Predicated upon European supremacy and pseudo-scientific practices, Positivism reified the country’s traditional social hierarchy, a race-based pyramidal structure that emerged in the aftermath of sixteenth century Spanish colonization. These classifications cast Indigenous peoples as deviant, and thus invited contempt for “the lazy Indian: the bloodthirsty, atavistic savage, half-devil and half-child.” 70

Friction intensified, in particular, between Indigenous workers and Mestizo caciques, who enforced the isolation and enclosure of peasants, resulting in Yucatán’s Caste War (1847-

1901),71 which the local elite viewed as an ethnic or racial struggle against European planters,

67 Gabbert, “Social Categories, Ethnicity, and the State in Yucatan, Mexico,” 466.

68 Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Porfirians, Liberals, and Peasants, 9.

69 Wolfgang Gabbert, “Social Categories, Ethnicity, and the State in Yucatan, Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies 33, no. 3 (2001): 466.

70 Knight, Counter-revolution and Reconstruction, 9.

71 Adolfo Gilly, “Chiapas and the Rebellion of the Enchanted World,” in Rural Revolt in Mexico: U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern Politics, ed. Daniel Nugent (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 285.

18 providing evidence of Indigenous peoples’ innate resistance to progress and civilization. 72 In addition to racial tensions, however, servile working conditions, debt peonage, and the planter-

merchant elites’ paternalistic control of workers incited the Caste War,73 which Latin American

historian Gilbert M. Joseph calls the “bloodiest, most militarily successful Indian rebellion in

Latin American history.” 74 Indeed, contemporary scholars, including Nicholas P. Higgins, Bruce

Vandervort, and Neil Harvey, interpret the rebellion as a symbol of Maya resistance to criollo suppression—and a forerunner of current struggles for Indian autonomy.75

In response to agrarian agitation, planters heavily petitioned Díaz to suppress Indigenous

revolts and protests, resulting with harsh disciplinary actions: “taxes, forced recruitment into the

army, vagrancy laws, and, often enough, agrarian dispossession.”76 Díaz further called upon a paramilitary group known as the Rurales—or the Guardia Rural, first established by President

Benito Juárez in 1861—to intimidate and suppress campesinos.77 Knight claims that the Caste

War catalyzed other agrarian uprisings in the southern region of Mexico, including Michoacán,

Tabasco, Veracruz, Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Morelos.78 In Morelos, for example, campesinos lost vast tracts of land and access to water due to the rapid growth of sugar plantations. Located in

72 Gabbert, “Social Categories, Ethnicity, and the State in Yucatan, Mexico,” 91.

73 Gilbert M. Joseph, “From Caste War to Class War: The Historiography of Modern Yucatan (c. 1750- 1940)” The Hispanic Historical Review 65, no. 1 (Feb., 1985), 114.

74 Joseph, “From Caste War to Class War: The Historiography of Modern Yucatan (c. 1750-1940),” 114.

75 Nicholas P. Higgins, Understanding the Chiapas Rebellion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 80.

76 Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Porfirians, Liberals, and Peasants, 116.

77 Allan D. Meyers and David L. Carlson, “Peonage, Power Relations, and the Built Environment at Hacienda Tabi, Yucatan, Mexico,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 4 (December 2002): 227.

78 Ibid.

19 the central lowlands, Morelos was, in Knight’s words, a “planters’ utopia,” 79 a region with a long history of intra-peasant conflicts that shifted temporarily due to the socio-economic pressures of export agriculture, specifically related to the sugar boom.

In order to meet the international demand for sugar, more sugar cane had to be planted, requiring the purchase of modern machinery and the expansion of haciendas.80 As a result, the sugar boom dispossessed peasants from ejidal lands so much so that historian John Mcneely describes large land holdings as imprisoning Cuautla, a city in Morelos.81 With the assistance of the judiciary, who supported landowners, haciendas swallowed entire villages. 82 Federal legislation further abetted alienation, cutting off access to water or, conversely, flooding entire

villages.83

There was, however, little recourse for campesinos. Demands to produce proof of

ownership obstructed the return of land, as campesinos had lived and worked on ancestral

parcels of land for hundreds of years and lacked, in many cases, written documentation, thus

making such expropriation legal. Moreover, those who appealed for Díaz’s assistance were either

imprisoned or deported to plantations in Quintana Roo.84

79 Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Porfirians, Liberals, and Peasants, 106.

80 Eric. R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 27.

81 John H, Mcneely, “Origins of the Zapata Revolt in Morelos,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 46, no. 2 (1966): 154.

82 Mcneely, “Origins of the Zapata Revolt in Morelos,” 154.

83 John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1969), 37-53.

84 Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Porfirians, Liberals, and Peasants,106.

20 Zapata Rising

In 1909, Emiliano Zapata became the president of Morelos’ junta de defense, a campesino collective demanding the return of stolen land, the end of military service, and rights to water.85 Zapata supported the fledgling Anti-Reelectionist Party under the leadership of

Francisco Madero, the son of a “great landed family in the north,” 86 whose revolutionary manifesto—the Plan of San Luis Potosí (1910)—called for popular revolt; an armed insurrection against the Porfiriato; the end of authoritarianism; and, the institution of democratic reforms.

Zapata’s backing of Madero was, in particular, based on the promise of land restitution to Indian communities, outlined in clause three of the Plan.87

Despite these agrarian objectives and its relevancy to campesinos in Chiapas, when the

Mexican Revolution erupted in 1910, Zapatismo, in particular, and the Mexican Revolution, in general, made little impact upon communities in this state. In the southern “backwater,” counter- revolutionaries, including elite planters and ranchers, fought to protect and preserve Porfirian social order. In “Revolution without Resonance? Mexico’s Fiesta of Bullets and its aftermath in

Chiapas, 1910-1940,” Stephen E. Lewis argues that the state was on the verge of revolutionary violence in 1910, but widespread popular revolution never erupted.88 While Chiapas was subject to periods of “simmering discontent and sporadic rebellion,”89 the army and the planters—who

85 Mcneely, “The Origins of the Zapata Revolt in Morelos,” 157.

86 Ibid., 54-55, 57.

87 Ibid., 70-71.

88 Stephen E. Lewis, “Revolution without Resonance? Mexico’s Fiesta of Bullets and its aftermath in Chiapas, 1910-1940,” in Mexican Revolution Conflict and Consolidation, 1910-1940, eds Douglas W. Richmond and Sam W. Haynes, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 163.

89 Knight, Counter-revolution and Reconstruction, 53.

21 called themselves Mapaches, or raccoons, and who were backed by the Rurales—could not be

broken.

The Mexican Revolution:

Land, Liberty and Factionalism

A number of historians interpret the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) as encompassing

“many revolutions,” 90 as regional grievances punctuated the country. These conflicts were not, therefore, necessarily predicated upon agrarian reform, but, rather, a reflection of factional struggles. It is, therefore, not possible to interpret this event in a cohesive framework that proffers a teleological narrative—or one that presents a Manichean analysis. While traditionalists, such as Frank Tannenbaum, have represented the Revolution as a momentous event—agrarian in nature—with “good guys” and “bad guys,” which ends with a comfortable resolution, such a construction presents a problematic narrative in that differences exist among rural uprisings.

Knight’s The Mexican Revolution, a synthesis of the enormous body of Revolutionary literature, maintains that the community was the cell of revolution in suriano (southern) uprisings that contrasted serrano (northern) revolts, largely multi-class, heterogeneous rebellions of the north.91 Unlike southern movements, northern movements, which were motivated by

resistance to centralizing powers, demonstrated a proclivity for “self-advancement,” “political

90 Luis F. Ruiz, “Where Have all the Marxists Gone? Marxism and the Historiography of the Mexican Revolution,” A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin American 5 no. 2 (Winter 2008): 197.

91 Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Porfirians, Liberals, and Peasants, 303-313.

22 opportunism,” and “cross-cultural alliances.”92 William H. Beezley’s Insurgent Governor:

Abraham Gonzalez and the Mexican Revolution focuses on Northern resistance fighters in

Chihuahua—battalions consisting of entrepreneurs, sharecroppers, miners, muleteers, and peddlers—not campesinos as previously emphasized.93 Likewise, Friedrich Katz’s The Life and

Times of Pancho Villa, which examines the rebel’s rise to national leader, asserts that regional autonomy and the end of hacendado oppression mobilized him into battle. 94

With limited resources, Villa employed a powerful communications machine as a means to manipulate the American press’ interpretation of events.95 In Pancho Villa’s Revolution by

Headlines, Mark Cronlund Anderson refers to Villa as a “master propagandist,” 96 whose

“impressive propaganda operative compare favorably to other noted twentieth-century political figures,” 97 including Franklin Roosevelt and Eva Perón. In doing so, Villa not only controlled

messaging in the foreign press, but also influenced American policymaking, galvanizing support

for his campaign. Although the leader “emerged…as the archetypal Mexican savage,”98 he cleverly promoted himself as a “courageous and valiant fighting man struggling for the good of his country, and an American friend.”99 In addition to Villa, other leaders in the Revolution,

92 Ibid., 306.

93 William H. Beezley, Insurgent Governor: Abraham Gonzalez and the Mexican Revolution in Chihuahua (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973).

94 Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 63-68.

95 Mark Cronlund Anderson, Pancho Villa’s Revolution by Press (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 15.

96 Anderson, Pancho Villa’s Revolution by Press, 16.

97 Ibid., 15.

98 Ibid., 213.

99 Ibid.

23 including Venustiano Carranza and Victoriano Huerta, also used communications to garner political support. As Anderson notes:

In some ways, the competing propaganda machines—Huerta’s, Carranza’s and Villa’s— used similar tactics. They all employed censorship liberally, wired cables directly to American newspapers, attempted to charm and coddle American reporters, exaggerated military gains, and downplayed or lied about military setbacks. 100

While Zapata also used censorship,101 he consistently communicated that his campaign’s

objectives were focuses on land reform and village autonomy. 102

Historians John Womack and Samuel Brunk examine the significance of Zapatismo, locating its birth with the Plan of Ayala (1911), which outlined Zapata’s primary revolutionary objectives and ideology. Womack’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution argues this manifesto represented the southern movement’s militancy, along with the sophistication, as the Plan of

Ayala called for the radical confiscation and redistribution of land.103 For example, Articles 6 and 7 demanded:

[T]he fields, timber, and water which the landlords, científicos, or bosses have usurped, the pueblos or citizens who have the titles corresponding to those properties will immediately enter into possession of that real estate of which they have been despoiled by the bad faith of our oppressors, maintain at any cost with arms in hand the mentioned possession; and the usurpers who consider themselves with a right to them [those properties] will deduce it before the special tribunals which will be established on the triumph of the revolution.

In virtue of the fact that the immense majority of Mexican pueblos and citizens are owners of no more than the land they walk on, suffering the horrors of poverty without being able to improve their social condition in any way or to dedicate themselves to Industry or Agriculture, because lands, timber, and water are monopolized in a few hands, for this cause there will be expropriated the third part of those monopolies from the powerful proprietors of them, with prior indemnization, in order that the pueblos and

100 Ibid., 111.

101 Ibid., 74.

102 Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Porfirians, Liberals, and Peasants, 310.

103 Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, 397.

24 citizens of Mexico may obtain ejidos, colonies, and foundations for pueblos, or fields for sowing or laboring, and the Mexicans' lack of prosperity and well-being may improve in all and for all.104

Under Zapata’s leadership, campesinos from the region of Ayala tore down hacienda fences,

confiscated lands, and assigned them to villagers for planting. As part of his military strategy,

Zapata cut off water supplies and poured gasoline into empty aqueducts, burning federal soldiers

alive as part of the six-day attack in May.105 By the time Díaz went into exile on May 25, 1911,

Zapata’s 4,000 soldiers had advanced through Morelos, occupying Jonacatepec and Cuautla and overtaking an elite federal army.106

The southern general also clashed with Guerrero Maderista leader, General Ambrosio

Figueroa, who was “unsympathetic to agrarian demands.”107 Figueroa, named supreme chief of the Revolution in the south, attempted to vilify and discredit Zapata, referring to Zapata as a bandit and a villain.108 In the hypermasculine and machismo landscape of revolution, “[t]he situation made it appear that Figueroa was the most important and desirable of the southern leaders while concealing the great strength and influence of Zapata among the mass of campesinos,”109 which escalated during the second wave of violence that began in 1913, a period when women’s revolutionary participation dramatically increased.

104 Ibid., 400-404.

105 Samuel Brunk, Emiliano Zapata: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 38.

106 Richard Griswold del Castillo, “The Mexican Revolution and the Spanish-Language Press in the Borderlands,” Journalism history 4, no. 2 (1977): 42-47.

107 Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Porfirians, Liberals, and Peasants, 101.

108 Brunk, Emiliano Zapata: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), xxi.

109 Mcneely, 159.

25 Women in the Mexican Revolution:

The Good, the Bad, and the Mythic

Figure 6: P. Flores Perez, Mujeres Patriotas (Patriotic Women), n.d. Digital image. Available from Story Library, https://www.12storylibrary.com/2018/10/women-fought-in-the-mexican-revolution/ (accessed October 2, 2020). Although women’s participation in the Mexican Revolution has often been overlooked

and undermined in the historiography of the Mexican Revolution, regional warring factions

recruited female soldiers and soldaderas during this second outbreak of hostilities.110 As historian Elizabeth Salas asserts, documentation presents unreliable information concerning the

number of women who supported these campaigns; however, it is estimated that thousands of

women engaged in meaningful revolutionary activities and that such mobilization resulted, in

part, from authoritarianism, exploitation, and the loss of land.111 Women participated, for example, in the Federal army (Federales); in the revolutionary armies of the north and in the

110 Andrés Reséndez Fuentes, “Battleground Women: Soldaderas and Female Soldiers in the Mexican Revolution,” The Americas 51, no. 4 (1995): 540.

111 Elizabeth Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 38-39.

26 Liberation Army of the South.112 For some women, revolutionary armies offered stability and

survival during the uncertainty and chaos of civil war.113 Abduction, accompanied by rape, also forced women into the vortex of factionalism.114

Figure 7: Photographer Unknown, Margarita Neri, Mexico 1915, Gelatin dry plate, Casasola Archive, 186387. Available from Revolutionary Mexican Women in History and Film, http://noblebandits.asu.edu/Topics/RevWom.html (accessed November 13, 2012).

Many of these women’s roles were perilous. For instance, soldaderas transported ammunition and equipment across the border, concealing rounds of ammunition and armaments under their skirts.115 Under Zapata’s leadership, entire battalions of women formed, seeking vengeance for the dead.116 In Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, Womack illustrates:

112 Anna Macias, Against All Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982).

113 Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History, 39.

114 Ibid.

115 Fuentes, “Battleground Women: Soldaderas and Female Soldiers in the Mexican Revolution,” 543.

27 Under the command of a husky former tortilla-maker by the name of China, they raided wildly through Tetecala district. Some in rags, some in plundered finery, wearing silk stockings and dresses, sandals, straw hats and cartridge-belts—these women became the terror of the region.117

Commander Margarita Neri, a Zapatista revolutionary soldier who held the rank of sergeant and lieutenant, commanded a rebel army of 1,000 Maya men. In Agustín Casasola’s 1915 photograph, she poses defiantly with her legs slightly spread in a masculine pose, a pistol protruding from her pocket (Figure 7). Decorated with military honors, Neri refuses to face the

camera, but her eyes veer in its direction, offering a glimpse of one of the many women who

enlisted during this particular period.

Building a Mexican Utopia:

The Spread of Zapatismo and Carranza’s Constitutional Reforms (1917)

During the second wave of revolutionary resistance (1912-1915), Zapatismo spread

beyond Morelos, engaging Indigenous rebel movements in Guerrero, the Federal District,

Hidalgo, Puebla, Veracruz, and Tlaxcala.118 As Knight points out, “There was enough to alarm the state’s landlords, especially since by 1915 something like two-thirds of the state…were

reckoned to be under Zapatista domination.” 119 While he asserts that it is difficult to determine whether incidents of agrarian reform during this period were a result of spontaneous land revindication, Knight argues agrarian reform represents “a major transfer of power and resources

116 Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, 170.

117 Ibid.

118 Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Counter-revolution and Reconstruction, 190-191.

119 Ibid., 191.

28 away from landlord and cacique, and in favor of the peasantry—not just communal

peasantry.”120 Regardless, this movement did not unhinge the state of Chiapas.

As a case in point, in 1914, the Carrancistas confronted this state’s planter elite,

attempting to enforce—at gun point—the Ley de los Obreros (1914), which is also referred to as

the “Peon Liberation Law.”121 The law outlawed debt-servitude, along with other repressive labor practices; it further set minimum wages according to occupation, established disability insurance, and outlined other worker rights, which included a ten-hour workday for campesinos.122 Ranchers and planters vehemently opposed the law.123 Hence, that same year, a conservative, Porfirian-backed government in Chiapas ended the law’s enforcement.

In October 1914, there was another shift in the revolutionary landscape, which Mexican cultural historian Carlos Monsiváis describes as “a succession of intertwining of stages, factions, and military leaders…. conspiracies, tumultuous violations, sacrifices, deeds, betrayals, accords and discords.”124 At this point, Zapata allied with Villa at the Convention of Aguascalientes where the Plan de Ayala was formally adopted—despite Carranza’s rejection. Further, after a

series of military defeats, Huerta fled the country, retreating to Jamaica on a German cruiser

from Puerto México in July 1914. This resulted in Zapata and Villa’s occupation of Mexico City

in November 1914, serving as another fleeting fluctuation in the struggle for power. Indeed, by

mid-1915, both Villa and Zapata were defeated by Carranza’s allies, Álvaro Obregón and Pablo

120 Ibid.

121 Hector Fierro and Jacqueline Martine, “Chiapas: El Escenario de una Rebelión,” Revista de Estudios Políticos 84 (1994): 168.

122 Fierro and Martine, “Chiapas: El Escenario de una Rebelión,” 168.

123 Ladino refers to a socio-ethnic category of Mestizo or Hispanicized people.

124 Monsiváis, “Introduction,” 4.

29 González, and Carranza became head of the preconstitutional government, during which time he

amended the constitution (1857).

Carranza’s victory did not, however, mean the end of Zapatismo. Upon his official instatement as president in 1917, Carranza drew up a new Constitution that included extensive land and labour reforms, and recognized women’s rights (Articles 34 and 35), which, in Knight’s words, established a Utopian constitution—one that exists, but is imaginary. 125 The Mexican

Constitution of 1917 enshrined labour standards, agrarian reform, and improvements to education, along with numerous guarantees for women, including the right to own property.126

Article 123 protected the rights of workers, including the right to strike and the right of association. It further outlined labor relations and protected labor unions. Article 27 outlined

Mexico’s land tenure law and subsoil rights, declaring land, water, and minerals to be the property of the people of Mexico.127 Importantly, it mandated that land be expropriated from large landholders and distributed among Indigenous communities, seeming to fulfill Zapata’s goals for land reform.128 In the context of Chiapas, these progressive promises were largely ignored. According to historian Thomas Benjamin, “Servitude, montería slavery, enganche and the tiendas de raya—abuses that never completely disappeared—again became normal in the countryside of Chiapas.” 129

125 Knight, The Mexican Revolution: Counter-revolution and Reconstruction, 489.

126 James Kelly, Jr. “Article 27 and Mexican Land Reform: The Legacy of Zapata’s Dream,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 25 (January 1994): 542.

127 Kelly, “Article 27 and Mexican Land Reform: The Legacy of Zapata’s Dream,” 542.

128 Knight, 489.

129 Thomas Benjamin, A Rich Land, A Poor People: Politics and Society in Modern Chiapas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 150.

30 By 1919, the year of Zapata’s assassination, stalled social and economic reforms fueled

anger and frustration against Carranza’s government. In particular, Carranza’s forced retirement

of soldiers roused acrimony against his regime. 130 With the backing of disgruntled soldiers,

Obregón staged a military coup and ordered the killing of Carranza, who was assassinated in his sleep. Obregón, in turn, incited greater animosity during his brief tenure from May to December

1920. Historian Randall Hansis comments:

Obregón instructed the Provisional Minister of War, Plutarco Elias Calles, to reduce the number of men and officers in the Federal Army. Officers hostile to the new regime were quickly retired while loyal generals were rewarded by promotion for having served Obregón during the Agua Prieta movement. Faced with harsh political realities and trying to consolidate control, the fledgling Provisional Government did not wish to contribute to a growing band of hostile exiles and retired dissidents. Obregón was aware that demotions often turned military officers into bandit leaders. Thus, reforms, reductions and reorganization during the summer and fall of 1920 were suggested with vigor and enacted with caution. While accomplishing little, such proposals indicated the direction in which Obregón’s efforts would be directed during his Presidential years. 131

Meanwhile, with Governor Fernández Ruiz at the helm of Chiapas in 1920, the long-standing

exploitation and abuse of campesinos continued into the period of reconstruction (1920-1950).132

The Rise of Indigenismo in the

Post-Revolutionary Period (1920-1950)

In the post-Revolutionary period, the Mexican nation-state established Indigenismo as a

130 Randall Hansis, “The Political Strategy of Military Reform: Álvaro Obregón and Revolutionary Mexico,1920-1924,” The Americas 36, no. 2 (October 1979): 201-202.

131 Hansis, “The Political Strategy of Military Reform: Álvaro Obregón and Revolutionary Mexico,1920- 1924,” 201-202.

132 Thomas Benjamin, “¡Primera Viva Chiapas! Local Rebellions and the Mexican Revolution in Chiapas” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies no. 49 (1990): 48-49.

31 means to forge a national Mexican consciousness—and to wage an ideological offensive purporting that the Mexican Revolution had, in fact, accomplished its achievements. Under the

Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM), which became the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) in 1946, the political elite cultivated such propaganda to manufacture a revolutionary imaginary.

Previously viewed as an obstacle to economic progress in accordance with Díaz’s Positivist

platform, the Indio became a symbol of the state, used and exploited in visual propaganda. 133 As

part of this politically motivated institutional rebirth of the Indian, the Mexican state sought to

transform the trauma of Indigenous dispossession, dislocation, and annihilation into a fertility

myth, a creation narrative that might redeem the sins of the Spanish father.134

President Álvaro Obregón (1920-1924), a former schoolteacher cum revolutionary general, who had emerged as the jefe maximo (top leader) of the Sonoran-based political dynasty,135 led this campaign, inscribing and imprinting the indio into various sectors of the state, including culture and education. Obregón charged José Vasconcelos, the Secretary of

Public Education, with the creation of this new nationalism, which would reimagine and utopianize the country’s pre-Hispanic Indigenous roots. Vasconcelos, in turn, determined that artists would play the part of apostles, raising the pre-Hispanic past from the dead and rendering this history in public murals, which served as propagandistic billboards presenting Indigenous

133 Dawn Andes, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 151.

134 Andes, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980, 151.

135 Alan Knight and Jaime Rodriquez, “The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940” Latin American Studies, Accessed November 5, 2019 http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766581/obo- 9780199766581-0033.xml#obo-9780199766581-0033-div1-0001

32 ethnicities as subservient and passive. 136 Vasconcelos thus performed the role of creator and curator, siring Indigenismo and the political rhetoric that aided in the negotiation of mestizaje,

the mixing of Spanish and Indian peoples. He called the mestizo peoples a cosmic race, which presented a solution to Mexico’s long historical anxieties related to Indigenous peoples. Such revisionist mythology fomented the de-Indigenizing of the Indian, thus encouraging a comfortable integration of Indigenous peoples through education and equal opportunities afforded in the 1917 Constitution.137

Museums further exploited Indigenous peoples, material culture, and mythologies, attempting to negotiate the country’s Indigenous foundations.138 In 1939, the state established the

National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), placing Manuel Gamio, Alfonso Caso,

and Gonzolo Aguirre Beltrán, archeologists and indigenistas, at the helm of archaeological and

anthropological projects. This institutional approach promoted the ossification of living cultures

that became, in the process, objects of spectacle, illuminated and examined, within the walls of

Mexico’s foremost cultural centers, including Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology, which

opened in 1964. Hence, fledgling cultural institutions endorsed pre-Hispanic cultural and artistic contributions with large collections amassed from Mexico’s thriving archeological and ethnological pursuits of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Objects previously

obscured became visible and accessible to the public.

136 Adriana Zavala, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 71.

137 Andes, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980, 24.

138 Zavala, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State, 3, 23, 78, 134.

33 In the process of seeking to reclaim the Indigenous past, Indigenismo attempted to

possess and ossify Indigeneity. Such discourse presented a marked departure from colonial

attempts to disappear Indigenous material culture. It enacted what was, ostensibly, a reconquest

that facilitated the manipulation of the Indigenous imaginary,139 tethering Indigenous artistic forms to western classification and categorization. Ethnological displays placed the Indian behind glass and provided subtexts that assigned limited meaning, often incorrect, to various works.140 Scholars and curators mentored and educated in Europe and America made such determinations, ripping artifacts from their cultural and spiritual contexts.141 Such propaganda continues to influence understandings of Indigenous peoples in contemporary Mexican society.

From La Cristiada to Cárdenas

Along with cultural projects, the state attempted, yet again, to secularize Mexican society

in the period of reconstruction, thereby diminishing the political stronghold of the Roman

Catholic Church, which, as mentioned previously, the 1857 Constitution had set in motion.

Despite enshrining the freedom of religious worship, the 1917 Constitution reinforced strict anti- clerical provisions,142 dismantling churches as legal entities in the state. Under this law, churches

could not acquire, own, or manage real estate, nor participate in education. In response, the

139 Ibid.

140 Ibid., 15, 24.

141 Ibid., 150-153.

142 Roderic Camp, Crossing Swords: Politics and Religion in Mexico (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 27.

34 church, a conservative institution backed by large landholders, waged a bloody campaign known

as La Cristiada (1926-1929) to preserve its positioning and power.

Unlike anti-clerical mandate, other provisions in the 1917 Constitution were largely

ignored, including land reform. In fact, significant land reform did not begin until the 1930s under President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), who implemented what was considered a radical agenda. During this term, Cárdenas initiated the redistribution of 45 million hectares of hacienda land to campesinos by expropriating large tracts of land from estates and redistributing such land to laborers on plantations. 143 Hence, campesinos that had communal land taken away under the

liberal reforms of the nineteenth century or stolen by haciendados might receive land.144

Figure 8 (left): Agrarian reform, Chiapas, 1950; Figure 9 (right): Agrarian reform, 1975. Map. Available from Thomas Homer-Dixon, https://homerdixon.com/environmental-scarcity-and-violent-conflict-the-case-of- chiapas-mexico/ (accessed December 15, 2016). In Chiapas, this period marked significant politicization and mobilization, as peasants

began the process of petitioning for land, in addition to forming labour coalitions and political

143 Nancy D. Lapp, Landing Votes: Representation and Land Reform in Latin America (New York: Palgrave McMillian, 2004), 37.

35 organizations, such as the Partido Socialista Chiapenco (Chiapas Socialist Party). 145 Despite this politicization, Lynn Stephen comments that officials in the state often slowed the process of land redistribution, so much so that campesinos did not receive land until the 1950s. Of all states,

Chiapas did, however, receive the largest share of land, with campesinos receiving large ejidal tracts in 1952 and 1963 (Figures 8 and 9).146

From its agenda in the 1930s, Mexico shifted to a repressive authoritarianism in the

1940s under Avila Camacho (1940-1946), a military leader who Cárdenas chose as his

successor. Camacho implemented a strict fiscal strategy intent upon industrializing Mexico that,

once again, invited foreign investors to penetrate the country, which ultimately had the effect of

staging a reversal of revolutionary gains. 147 Camacho’s strategy to spur industrialization forged a new economic partnership between Mexico and the United States, outlined under the Douglas-

Weichers Agreement (1941), which stipulated that Mexico would sell minerals, including iron, aluminum, and copper, to the U.S. 148 Aside from resources, this agreement facilitated American penetration into the political, cultural, and economic spheres of Mexico.149

Further, Camacho’s plan resulted in massive inflation, which, in turn, produced greater socio-economic stratification, making Mexico’s income distribution one of the most unequal in

145 Jocelyn Olcott, “Miracle Workers: Gender and State Mediation among Textile and Garment Workers in Mexico's Transition to Industrial Development” International Labor and Working-Class History, 63 (2003): 45-62.

146 Stephen, Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico, 99-100.

147 Alexander Aviña, Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside (Oxford: Oxford University of Press, 2014), 38.

148 Jerry Garcia, Looking like the Enemy: Japanese Mexicans, the Mexican State, and US Hegemony, 1897- 1945 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014), 116.

149 Garcia, Looking like the Enemy: Japanese Mexicans, the Mexican State, and US Hegemony, 1897-1945, 116.

36 the world. 150 In ¡México, la Patria!: Propaganda and Production during World War II, historian

Monica A. Rankin notes:

As wartime demand for steel, cotton, and foodstuffs rose, production for local consumption in Mexico began to dwindle. The imbalance in war production meant that although more Mexicans were earning a wage and more dollars were pouring into the country, fewer consumer goods were available. Inflation took a serious toll on the country. Between 1939 and 1946 the number of Mexicans participating in the official workforce rose by 11.3 percent, while the cost-of-living index saw an increase of over 280 percent. The average worker had more money than ever in his pocket, but it was not enough to buy basic necessities for his family. 151

Despite economic hardships and the reversal of revolutionary goals, along with widespread

corruption, Camacho—along with the newly established Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI),

which had rebranded itself with a fresh name—remained popular.152

Similar to previous administrations, Camacho used visual propaganda to maintain

political support. Indeed, his government had promoted industrialization as the new Mexican

Revolution, using, initially, the General Press and Propaganda Office.153 Couched in nationalist rhetoric, Camacho’s campaign used revolutionary symbols to spread an agenda of industrialization in government publications, along with artistic projects, popular culture, and advertisements. During debates about Mexico’s involvement in war in 1941, Rankin argues:

Avila Comacho’s administration began a rudimentary program of selling the partnership to the public. The initial government propaganda focused almost exclusively on urging Mexicans to work harder in wartime industries. Avila Camacho worked closely with state governors to sell the industrialization strategy to them first. The president also appealed to the agrarian sector to produce more, comparing their national pursuit of social justice

150 Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 361.

151 Monica A. Rankin, Mexico, la Patria: Propaganda and Production during World War II (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 210.

152 Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption, 75.

153 Ibid., 320-332.

37 with the global fight against totalitarianism. The underlying theme in this propaganda strategy was that production equaled patriotism and that Mexicans who loved their country and want to defend their honor should be productive. 154

Here, then, Camacho drew upon Revolutionary ideals and images to implement a policy that

contradicted the goals of the Mexican Revolution—and that suspended constitutional guarantees,

which effectively mobilized disparate factions in Mexican society.155 While institutionalization promoted the Revolution, rights enshrined in the Constitution (1917) remained unfulfilled.

Marxism and the Death of the Revolution:

A Turn in Revolutionary Critiques

Indeed, in the period of reconstruction, historians and other scholars debated the meaning

of the Mexican Revolution in a number of works that reflected, in part, the political and social

milieu of their time. In the 1930s, for example, Marxist criticism emerged as a critical conceptual

model in accordance with post-revolutionary political trends.156 Under the leftist regime of

Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), Marxists intellectuals and artists embraced Marxism. In general terms, Marxist historians, including Rafael Ramos Pedrueza and Alfonso Teja Zabre, defined the

Mexican Revolution as: 1) an aborted proletarian revolution; and 2) the victory of the middle class bourgeoisie and the development of capitalism.157 While Bailey dismisses 1930s Marxist criticism as impotent and largely reactionary, other scholars, such as Alan Knight, John Hart, and

154 Rankin, ¡México, la Patria!: Propaganda and Production during World War II, 112.

155 Ibid., 119.

156 Luis F. Ruiz, “Where Have all the Marxists Gone? Marxism and the Historiography of the Mexican Revolution” A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin American 5 (2) (Winter 2008), 199.

157 Ruiz, “Where Have all the Marxists Gone? Marxism and the Historiography of the Mexican Revolution,” 196.

38 Michael J. Gonzales, criticized the 1930s Marxists for two main reasons: “they manipulated facts

to fit a rigid ideology and they upheld repetitive or unoriginal conclusions.”158 Hence, as an early

theoretical model, Marxism reduced the Revolution to class struggle and economic

marginalization, while disregarding other significant factors compelling revolt. Regardless, Luis

F. Ruiz notes that Marxists laid the conceptual groundwork for models that historians later drew upon to construct alternative narratives of the Mexican Revolution.159 As a trend, Marxism fell

out of favor with the end of Cárdenas’ term, which heralded a shift towards conservativism

between 1940 and 1968.160

By the 1950s, Mexican and American intellectuals had dismissed the Revolution,

pronouncing its demise. Economist Jesus Silva Herzog and Jose R. Colin were among those who

argued Revolutionary goals had not been achieved. Published in 1966, Stanley Ross’ Is the

Mexican Revolution Dead? debated this very question. 161 As part of this collection, historians questioned whether societal transformation had taken place, examining the Revolution’s successes and failures. Daniel Cosio Villegas’ work Historia Moderna de México, a seven- volume epic that took 17 years to complete, resulted from the author’s disenchantment with

Mexico during the “developmentalist” stage after 1940.162

During this period of economic transformation, specifically the period from 1946-1952,

the Mexican political and economic elite lauded the import substitution industrialization (ISI)

158 Ibid.,199.

159 Ibid., 198.

160 Ibid.

161 Stanley Ross, Is the Mexican Revolution Dead? (New York: Knopf, 1967).

162 Daniel Cosio Villegas, Historia Moderna de México, vol. 1-7 (Austin: University of Texas, 1960).

39 policy, which was viewed as a modernizing force in Mexico. Cosio Villegas believed, however, that this economic policy, which resulted in foreign investment, rapid industrialization and urbanization, benefited a small minority of Mexican society. Specifically, while the social elite prospered, the majority of Mexicans did not see dramatic social or economic transformation.

Cosio Villegas argued that ISI abandoned Revolutionary ideals and, instead, encouraged a constant infusion of foreign investment, which secured a one-party state.163 He thus argued that political democracy and economic and social justice had been sacrificed in the period of restructuring when Cardenas left office.164 Cosio Villegas’ work also criticized the corruption

embedded in public services and the lack of implementation of Constitutional reform in electoral

processes, which, as he posited, constituted the death of the Revolutionary movement.

War within a Breath/It's Land or Death:165

From Tlatelolco to Zapatismo

Various scholars trace the formal organization of the EZLN to the state’s October 1968

massacre of students whose protests and strikes threatened to embarrass the nation at its

“moment of developmental glory:”166 the 1968 Summer Olympics, which was scheduled to

begin in Mexico City on October 12. As a Latin American nation, Mexico had to prove that it

163 Charles A. Hale, “The Liberal Impulse: Daniel Cosío Villegas and the Historia moderna de México” The Hispanic American Historical Review 54(3) (August 1974): 483.

164 Ibid.

165 Rage Against the Machine, “War Within a Breath,” Battle of Los Angeles, Zack de la Rocha, 1999.

166 Eric Zolov, “Showcasing the 'Land of Tomorrow': Mexico and the 1968 Olympics,” The Americas 61(2) (October 2004), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tam/summary/v061/61.2zolov.html

40 was worthy of hosting this international event and, as such, the state spent considerable effort in

portraying itself as a peaceful, vibrant, youthful, exotic and beautiful nation.167 As one example,

Mexico’s Olympic committee painted the city in vibrant colors and used an iconic peace dove to represent its role as peacemaker.168 Despite this vibrant and youthful imaginary, student demonstrations threatened to disrupt Mexico’s carefully constructed optics.

In the months leading up to the Olympics, students began protesting President Gustavo

Diáz Ordaz’s administration (1964-1970), calling for democratic reforms, university autonomy, freedom of the press, and the release of political prisoners. They also demanded that Díaz’s regime implement provisions outlined—but not fulfilled—in the 1917 Constitution. In response, the president ordered the army to remove students from Tlatelolco’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas

(Plaza of Three Cultures), located in a borough of Mexico City, ten days before the opening ceremonies. Rather than force students to end their occupation, government troops and snipers open fired, killing and disappearing hundreds of students. In the aftermath, the state blamed for the protestors inciting violence and concealed the official numbers of casualties. The Olympics went ahead as planned.

In Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico, historian Elaine

Carey asserts that state brutality and repression spurred radical organizing, inciting politicization and popular protest, along with the formation of guerrilla movements throughout Mexico, in the

1970s and 1980s.169 In both rural and urban areas, fifteen guerrilla focos (a small group of armed civilians) erupted in the wake of Tlatelolco, which included the Liga Communista 23rd de

167 Ibid.

168 Ibid.

169 Elaine Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2005), 3, 4.

41 Septiembre, the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), and the Party of the Poor. In the

early 1970s, the pro-Cuban Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion National (FLN), an organization founded in Monterrey in 1969, also set up a training camp near Ocosingo in Chiapas, recruiting campesinos from marginalized Indigenous communities. Kampwirth identifies the origins of the

EZLN with the FLN, a Guevarist guerilla party comprised, in part, of graduates of the University of Nuevo León.170

In makeshift FLN communities, Maya communities shared political ideas about

resistance, sovereignty, and autonomy, which, to a large extent, was influenced by Roman

Catholicism’s liberation theology that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s—and not the political rhetoric of Emiliano Zapata.171 With its mandate of social justice and human rights, Harvey argues that this theological movement ignited resistance among campesinos.172 Likewise,

Kampwirth notes:

[F]or the purposes of tracing the roots of Zapatismo, the most important religious organizing was that of the liberation theology…. This is not to say that the church had any intention of creating a guerilla movement, but simply that the church’s advocacy of basic human rights had the effect (in a state where basic human rights were often ignored), of preparing some indigenous people for later mobilization in the Zapatista army.173

Bishop Samuel Ruiz García, who advocated for the rights of Maya peasants and, later, Zapatista rebels, organized the first Indigenous Congress in San Cristóbal de las Casas in 1974.174 A

170 Kampwirth, Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, 122.

171 George A. Collier and Elizabeth Lowery Quaratiello, Basta!: Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas (Oakland: First Books, 1994), 158.

172 Neil Harvey, The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 124.

173 Ibid., 96.

174 Julie Preston, “Bishop Samuel Ruiz García, Defender of Mexico’s Mayans, Dies at 86,” New York Times, January 26, 2011, A 23.

42 number of peasant organizations emerged in the wake of this Congress, including the Union de

Uniones Ejidales y Grupos Campesinos Solidarios de Chiapas (Union of Ejido Unions and

Solidarity Peasant Groups of Chiapas-UU) and the Asociacion Rural de Interes Colectivo-Union

de Uniones (Rural Collective Interest Association, Union of Unions-ARIC-UU), which later supported Zapatista rebels.175

Rule of Three:

Salinas, NAFTA, and Ramona

Prior to rising through the ranks of the EZLN, Ramona joined one of the early co-

operatives due to her work as a weaver—and her exploitation as an artisan. 176 In the 1980s, women in Chiapas formed weaving coalitions, including San Jolobil, which functioned alongside the Zapatista movement.177 By 1989, a group of diverse women, among them Mestiza and

Indigenous, along with displaced women from Guatemala, formed the Women’s Group of San

Cristóbal, an independent feminist organization established, initially, to fight widespread sexual violence in the region.178 Weaving and baking co-ops, such as Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya,

175 Harvey, The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy, 124.

176 Terry Wolfwood, “Who is Ramona? The Transformation of a Street Vendor into a Revolutionary Leader” in Briarpatch, 26, no. 9 (November 1997): 22-23.

177 Christine Eber, “That they be in the Middle, Lord: Women, Weaving, and Cultural Survival in Highland Chiapas, Mexico” in Artisans and cooperatives: Developing Alternative Trade for the Global Economy eds. Grimes, K. & Milgram, B.L., Eds. (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. 2000): 45-64.

178 Kampwirth, 134-142, 161-164.

43 Mujeres Marginadas, and Tsobal Antzetik, also emerged during a decade of turbulent economic

reforms implemented by Salinas de Gotari (1988-1994).179

Under his administration, Salinas crafted an economic model that would modernize

Mexico and invite foreign penetration into the country. Affectionately deemed

“Salinastroika,”180 a term deriving from the Russian “perestroika” and the restructuring of the

Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, Salinas’ plan encouraged “the widespread privatization

of state industries, the revision [of Article 27 in] the Mexican Constitution to help ensure the

property rights of foreign investors, and the lifting of protectionist trade barriers under the North

American Free Trade Agreement.”181 While this “market-friendly” modernization regime pauperized Mexico’s campesino class, Indigenous women suffered the greatest socio-economic marginalization during Salinas’ tenure. As Harvey confirms, the lack of economic stability encouraged Indigenous women’s politicization on a new level: “Two of the most traditionally marginalized sectors of Mexican society, women and indigenous peoples, became leading protagonists in the democratization of gender and ethnic relations.”182 Indeed, Chiapas’ fledgling

co-operative movement attracted a number of women who would later join the EZLN in the

1990s.

Marginalized women also became leading protagonists in new works examining the

Mexican Revolution. During the late 1980s and 1990s, a number of scholars shed light on the

179 Ibid.

180 Beldon Butterfield, Mexico Behind the Mask: A Narrative, Past and Present (Washington: Potomoc Books, 2013), 147-148.

181 Sarah Babb, Managing Mexico: Economists from Nationalism to Neoliberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 1.

182 Harvey, 2.

44 role of gender in shaping the discourse and structure of the Revolution, thus contributing to

emergence of subaltern studies within this canon.183 Subaltern studies, which emerged in the

1980s and 1990s, refers to the recovery of the historical, political, cultural, social and economic contributions of the subaltern—anyone who has been subordinated or subjugated due to class, gender, or race.184 Mexican historian Mark Wasserman comments that these works recognized:

[T]he revolution itself was very much the work of subaltern classes. The more that historians investigated the revolution at the local level, the clearer it became that, whether it succeeded or not, it was the product of workers and peasants. Third, as historians looked more closely at the grassroots revolution, it became apparent that the initial protests and subsequent long period of violence did not arise from strictly economic and political factors; instead, there was a strong cultural element.185

Other scholars, including Joseph Gilbert, Patricia Seed, and Florencia E. Mallon, also explored

quieter or, rather, overlooked aspects of revolutionary histories, including Indigenous women’s

contributions to revolution.186

In this milieu, Ramona joined the Zapatistas in the early 1990s and became a member of the Zapatista Leading Council, known as the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee

(CCRI). In March 1993, she travelled throughout the Chiapas countryside, consulting Indigenous women to assess social, political and economic struggles. Based on these discussions, Ramona, along with other EZLN women, authored the “Revolutionary Law on Women.” That same year the EZLN passed the document, which outlined ten articles asserting the rights of women,

183 Wasserman, 261.

184 Ranajit Guha, “Preface” Subaltern Studies 1 reprinted in Selected Subaltern Studies eds. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (New York: 1988), 35-36.

185 Mark Wasserman, “You Can Teach an Old Revolutionary Historiography New Tricks: Regions, Popular Movements, Culture and Gender in Mexico, 1820-1940,” 261.

186 Gilbert Joseph, “On the Trail of Latin American Bandits: A Reexamination of Peasant Resistance,” Latin American Research Review 25 (1990): 7-25.

45 including the right to work and receive a fair salary; the right to reproductive autonomy; the right

to healthcare and nutrition; and the freedom from sexual violence, and other forms of abuse.187

The list also included the right to participate in revolutionary campaigns.188 Silvia Marcos, a scholar of Indigenous movements, maintains that the Law encouraged Indigenous women to enlist in the movement and that women—like Ramona—were responsible for the Zapatista’s siege of San Cristóbal de las Casas on January 1, 1994.189

From the onset of this date, mediated representations christened Ramona “in an instant,

an icon of feminine and feminist rebellion,”190 framing her as “a legend, endowed with almost

mystical powers.” 191 Widely noted as the most famous Zapatista woman, Ramona’s image

transcended Mexico’s borders as a result of the Zapatista’s global deployment of symbols and

other image-making strategies. The potency and pervasiveness of journalistic images, both

textual and visual, further facilitated the mythologization of La Comandanta Ramona.192 In light of these discursive imaginings—fraught with contradictory ideological positionings—I examine the significance of visual and textual representations of La Comandanta in the national press.

187 Stéphanie Rousseau and Anahi Morales Hudon, Indigenous Women’s Movements in Latin America: Gender and Ethnicity in Peru, Mexico, and Bolivia (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), 118.

188 Kampwirth, 115.

189 Sylvia Marcos, “Decolonizing Feminism: The Indigenous Women’s Movement in Mexico,” http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/wp-content/fem7.pdf

190 Ellen Calmus, “We are all Ramona: Artists, Revolutionaries, and Zapatistas with Petticoat,” Zone Zero Magazine, July 1995 http://zonezero.com/magazine/essays/distant/articfram2.html

191 Calmus, “We are all Ramona: Artists, Revolutionaries, and Zapatistas with Petticoat.”

192 Kampwirth, 214.

46

Summary of Methodology

This research takes an interdisciplinary, qualitative approach to analyze discursive representations of Ramona in Mexico’s national press. As part of this investigation, I critique dominant cultural mythologies and archetypal tropes imprinted in textual and visual news sources. Using anti-colonial feminist theory to ground my research, I employ critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Gillian Rose’s methodologies for analyzing visual texts, which call for the study of power relations inscribed in images; an investigation of social difference; the demonstration of agency in the image; and, how visual images exist within a greater socio- cultural context.193 As a note, I view visual images as more than mere illustrations for the written

text. Visual and textual images, when paired and interpreted together, proffer the possibility of

producing a far richer analysis for mining the coercive power of language, image, and mythology

in journalistic narratives.

The timeframe for my research covers the period from January 1, 1994, the date marking

the Zapatista uprising, to Ramona’s death in January 2006. Within this 12-year span, I focus on

distinct media events in which La Comandanta’s role and participation with the Zapatistas would elicit coverage, including: 1) the January 1, 1994 occupation of San Cristóbal de las Casas; 2) her participation at first peace negotiations with the Mexican state in February 1994; 3) Ramona’s attendance at the National Indigenous Forum in October 1996; 4) Ramona’s 1997 speech to students in Mexico City on International Women’s Day; and, 6) Ramona’s death in 2006. I examine three weeks of coverage leading up to and following each news cycle.

193 Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (London: Sage, 2007), 137.

47 My research draws information in four national newspapers published in Mexico City:

Excélsior, La Reforma, La Jornada, along with its investigative magazine, Proceso, and, the

bilingual newspaper, El Universal. Using Sallie Hughes’ and Chappell H. Lawson’s research on

Mexico’s print media as a frame of reference for this investigation, my rationale for selecting

these newspapers is based on three factors: 1) political orientation; 2) ideological position; and,

3) standing (circulation and readership) in the national press.

Although I present a detailed history of each newspaper, in addition to discussing the

press’ relationship to Mexico’s one-party regime in chapter three, as a brief note, the line

between the press and the government until the late 1990s was nonexistent, thus producing “a

relatively docile and domesticated press” 194 that worked in collusion with the state. Historically, from 1929-2000, the long governing PRI established a veiled dictatorship with the assistance of privately owned media, which was “viewed and utilized as a mouthpiece of the ruling elite.”195

The state used, for example, the power of subsidies, advertising, licensing, newsprint control, and payments to journalists to direct and to articulate discourse, thus establishing public agenda and shaping public consciousness, which buttressed the power of the political regime. 196

Chapter Outlines

In Chapter two, I present my literature review, which locates my research within three thematic areas of scholarly literature: 1) studies that examine the portrayal of insurgent women

194 Lawson, 8.

195 Christopher J. Coyne et al. Media, Development and Institutional Change (Cheltenham: Edgar Elgard Publishing, 2009), 110.

196 Lawson, 8.

48 resistant fighters in war propaganda; 2) visual cultural studies examining the imagining of

women in the Mexican nation-state during and after the revolution; and, 3) studies examining specific articulations of Comandanta Ramona in the Zapatista movement. For this literature review, I rely upon a body of work that includes, for example, Monique Gadant, Sandra

Ponzanesi, and Marisa Belausteguigoitia, whose research focuses on women’s representation in the Zapatista movement.

Chapter three provides a comprehensive outline of the methodological and theoretical framework for my investigation. In addition to using CDA, I employ a Foucauldian analysis, which underscores my rationale for using a historical framework to interpret discursive imaginings of Ramona. Further to presenting an overview of my visual methods, I also identify the historical, political, and institutional contexts of the four newspapers in this research. This information undergirds my rationale for my selection of news resources.

I present my body of research in chapters four through seven. Chapter four argues that

Ramona both performs and resists real and imagined specters, personas, and beings inscribed in

Mexico’s rich mythos. In this period of coverage, mediated imaginings imprint archetypal tropes and constricting ideologies that, following Slavoj Žižek, turn Ramona’s disorder into order, providing the revolutionary figure with stability and “readability.” 197 Despite the stranglehold of mediated tropes, I identify moments of rupture in which La Comandanta demonstrates countervailing acts that assert autonomy and agency.

In chapter five, I explore mediated imaginings of Ramona during the National Indigenous

Congress in October 1996. Here, I argue that Ramona enacts ritualized performances from the

197 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 45.

49 pre-Hispanic past, which serve as discursive ruptures that subvert dominant press framings.

Specifically, through corporeal manifestation, Ramona embodies Ix Chel, the Maya deity of

weaving, war, and childbirth, thus undermining the success of historical conquest and

challenging subjugation in the contemporary nation-state.

Chapter six examines press coverage of Ramona’s public address to students on

International Women’s Day in 1997 following a kidney transplant. I suggest that her illness and subsequent reemergence in the public sphere allows her to perform and subvert the archetype of the Mater Dolorosa, a dominant cultural narrative that invokes the iconography of the Sorrowing

Virgin Mary from Christian mythology. Here, Ramona revisions the grieving virgin, elevating her from the allegorical imprisonment of frailty to an icon of strength and resilience— transforming the passive icon into a vengeful Desmadre.198 In doing so, Ramona leverages the essentializing power of the Mater Dolorosa archetype to make indictments against the state in the press.

Using sociologist Marisol López-Menéndez’s examination of martyrdom in contemporary Mexico as a framework for my analysis, chapter seven explores discursive representation of La Comandanta Ramona following her death on January 6, 2006. I argue that journalistic narratives elevate her to status of martyr in the nation, thereby surrendering to the power of the Zapatista imaginary and deploying its weaponry.

198 The root of Desmadre is madre, meaning mother. The prefix des refers to the opposite meaning of the word it modifies. The idiomatic expression “Desmadre” denotes disorder, chaos, and aggression.

50 Chapter Two

Looking for Ramona

My framework for interrogating visual and textual imaginings of Comandanta Ramona in

Mexico’s national press from 1994 to 2006 falls within three substantive areas related to the

representation of women in war propaganda.1 Specifically, I draw upon literature examining: 1) women’s insurgency in anticolonial movements; 2) revolutionary women in Mexican history; and, 3) Ramona’s portrayal and narrativization in Zapatismo.

The first arterial thread in my research locates works examining visual and textual

imaginings of women’s insurgency in revolutionary campaigns. This canon predominantly

focuses on representations of women combatants in regions experiencing prolonged periods of

armed conflict due to intra-national hostilities and anti-colonial uprisings. Scholarly works interrogate, for example, depictions of Muslim and Chechen women, along with the representation of women in the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Despite the social and cultural specificities of these conflicts, this literature, albeit limited, provides a critical framework for interpreting images of Comandanta Ramona. For instance, scholars such as Sandra Ponzanesi and Faegheh Shirazi present evidence that propaganda fashions insurgent women as bifurcated symbols or icons—predominant archetypes that recur regardless of regional or cultural context— which not only attempts to weaken their political agency, but also diminishes the complex factors compelling women to join resistance movements.

In addition to examining insurrectionary women in anti-colonial literature, I locate my

research in the context of visual cultural studies investigating revolutionary women in the

1 While there is an emerging literature that explores women in the military, I do not use these scholarly works in my research. There are pronounced differences between women’s participation in state military organizations and women’s participation in insurgent organizations.

51 Mexican nation-state. This literature asserts that, in the aftermath of insurrectionary activities, the historical canon dismisses or silences women’s narratives, privileging the purview of heroic

male figures. Hence, the traditional revolutionary canon preserves patriarchal social order,

pushing dissident women into quieter, less disruptive domains. Such works further argue that

insurgent women’s narratives exist uneasily in the revolutionary canon. As Elizabeth Salas,

Jocelyn Olcott, and Jean Franco contend, textual and visual representations predominantly cast

insurgent women as sexualized figures or unruly rebels who disrupt social order and, thus,

violate codes of normative femininity.

Finally, I draw upon literature that explores Ramona’s positioning in Zapatismo.

Generally, critical analyses of the Zapatista uprising undermine or overlook La Comandanta,

focusing, instead, on Subcomandante Marcos. Indeed, in the extensive body of literature

investigating, for example, the history of the Zapatista movement, its strategic deployment of

images, and Indigenous women’s participation, scholarly works infrequently discuss Ramona’s

significance in the EZLN. Despite this lacuna, canonical fissures serve as disruptive

intercalations, providing crucial context and details about La Comandanta’s contributions to

contemporary Zapatismo. As a case in point, Mexican journalist Guiomar Rovira’s 1996 work on

Zapatista women presents a nuanced examination of Ramona’s role in uprising that

acknowledges the interrelationship between marginalization and insurgency.2

2 Guiomar Rovira, Women of Maize: Indigenous Women and the Zapatista Rebellion trans. Anna Keene (London: Latin American Bureau, 2000), 66-77.

52 Framing Propaganda

Drawing upon previous literature that examines mediated representations of women in conflict zones, my research uses frame analysis to assess “the politics of portrayal: how discourse, frames, and images are used to represent the reality of war and the use of violence.” 3

In addition to a news story’s focus, media theorist Robert M. Entman argues that language and

images frame and “highlight some features of reality and obscure others in a way that tells a

consistent story about problems, their causes, moral implications, and remedies.” 4 Hence, as a foundation for my investigation, frame analysis not only queries how news stories portray

Comandanta Ramona, but also considers how journalistic narratives construct meaning and shape perceptions of reality.5

Research using frame analysis to study discursive representations of insurgent women

reveal “ongoing patterns of gendered coverage”6 that contribute to a “distorted…framing of war.” 7 In particular, dominant journalistic framings most often deny or minimize women’s agency in conflict, depicting them “as passive victims rather than as activists and combatants.” 8

Indeed, in “More of the Same Old Story? Women, War, and News in Time Magazine,”

3 Jolle Demmers, “Neoliberal Discourses on Violence: Monstrosity and Rape in Borderland War,” in Gender, Globalization, and Violence: Postcolonial Conflict Zones, ed. Sandra Ponzanesi (New York: Routledge, 2014), 29.

4 Robert M. Entman, “Reporting Environmental Policy Debate:The Real Media Biases,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 1, no. 3 (June 1996): 77-78.

5 Dustin Harp, Jaime Loke, and Ingrid Bachmann. “More of the Same Old Story? Women, War, and News in Time Magazine,” Women's Studies in Communication 34, no. 2 (2011): 203.

6 Augusta C Del Zotto. “Weeping Women, Wringing Hands: How the Mainstream Media Stereo-typed Women’s experiences in Kosovo,” Journal of Gender Studies, 22, no. 2 (2002): 149.

7 Del Zotto, “Weeping Women, Wringing Hands: How the Mainstream Media Stereo-typed Women’s experiences in Kosovo,” 142.

8 Ibid., 149.

53 communication theorists Dustin Harp, Jaime Loke, and Ingrid Bachman argue that news stories

reproduce normative gender tropes, scripting women as suffering wives and mothers.9 The authors also assert that journalistic narratives trivialize women’s experiences or condemn their insurgency, identifying combatants as deviant figures and negating the social, political, and gendered contexts for their participation in resistance movements.10

Political scientist Augusta C. del Zotto reinforces this argument in “Weeping women,

Wringing Hands: How the Mainstream Media Stereotyped Women’s Experiences in Kosovo.”11

According to Del Zotto, news media rely on familiar imagery to manage “unmanageable”12 women, which “attempt[s] to reframe or misinterpret the women’s behaviors, if not ignore them entirely.” 13 Using sociologist Gaye Tuchman’s 1978 theory of “symbolic annihilation,” 14 which

employs frame analysis to interrogate gendered representations in news, both Del Zotto and Harp

et al. assert that the exclusion of women in armed conflict serves as “the norm instead of the

exception.”15 As Historian Linda Grant de Pauw confirms in Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present, heroic narrative conventions demand the erasure of women to accommodate ritualized storytelling formulas, which derive from literary traditions.16

9 Harp et. al, “More of the Same Old Story? Women, War, and News in Time Magazine,” 203.

10 Ibid., 211.

11 Del Zotto, 141-151.

12 Ibid., 143.

13 Ibid.

14 Gaye Tuchman, “The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media,” in Culture and Politics, eds. L. Crothers and C. Lockhart (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).

15 Harp et. al, 211.

16 Linda Grant de Pauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 17.

54 If, and when, women interject these stories, de Pauw insists that authors and journalists reiterate

archetypal constructs, relegating female agents to that of oppressed victims, mythic beings, self-

sacrificing camp followers, or vengeful and violent femme fatales.17

Frames that render these imaginings seduce and sway, serving as propagandistic

machinations for news organizations. In At War with Metaphor: Media, Propaganda, and

Racism in the War on Terror, communication theorists Erin Steuter and Deborah Wills affirm that the “frames through which we see the world are built from the language propaganda offers us, and that the media, echoing it, ratifies.”18 The authors emphasize that journalistic narratives espouse dominant ideology by obscuring, diminishing, and fragmenting complex historical, political, and cultural contexts, asserting that “[p]ropaganda’s intent is not to educate but to generate and direct emotion, to boil the blood while it narrows the mind.” 19 Noting the relationship between propaganda and Orientalist discourse, they contend that news frames draw upon bifurcated constructs to wage ideological war: a battle between the Self and Other predicated upon what is deemed good or evil and just or unjust.20 This oppositional construction lends itself to a simplistic, neatly composed narrative—one that is highly persuasive and effective in either supporting or attacking a particular cause.

Cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek further develops this idea, arguing that “master signifiers”21 manage and organize complex discourses, thus assigning coherence and unity to

17 Grant de Pauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present, 18-20.

18 Erin Steuter and Deborah Wills. At War with Metaphor: Media, Propaganda, and Racism in the War on Terror (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008), 17.

19 Steuter and Wills, At War with Metaphor: Media, Propaganda, and Racism in the War on Terror, 14.

20 Ibid., 24-31.

55 unwieldy or abstract narratives. By reiterating culturally-coded symbols and identifiers, master- signifiers create order, stability, and “readability”22 through linguistic and visual associations that reproduce dominant ideologies. 23 According to Žižek, this causal chain triggers and reinforces understandings about, for instance, nationalism or religious beliefs, along with notions relating to race and gender, which construct illusory realities. 24

Un-becoming Mothers, Wayward Whores, and Anxious Antiheroes:

Women’s Insurgency in Resistance Movements

This section provides a survey of literature examining discursive representations of

insurgent women in anticolonial movements. I organize this corpus according to dominant

frames that appear in scholarly works, beginning with research findings that identify liberation

activists, female combatants, and freedom fighters as flawed or damaged women who deviate

from maternal archetypal tropes. Editors Sandra Ponzanesi, Monique Gadant, and Caroline

Moser and Fiona Clark, for instance, argue that essentialist notions of femininity and, in

particular, those relating to motherhood position women as inherent nurturers, a cultural scripting

that not only defines normative and idealized constructs of womanhood, but also casts insurgents

as ill-fitting and non-conforming figures who use their bodies as weaponized instruments.25 As

21 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 45.

22 Žižek, The Parallax View, 45.

23 Ibid., 30.

24 Ibid.

25 Sandra Ponzanesi, “Introduction,” in Gender, Globalization and Violence: Postcolonial Conflict Zones, ed. Sandra Ponzanesi (London: Routledge, 2014), 2.

56 this literature reveals, reiterations of maternal imaginings in resistance narratives, including

journalistic accounts, attempt to disappear or silence revolutionary women. However, by

absconding from maternal tropes, female dissidents also disrupt, disorder, and rupture canonical

traditions, 26 fashioning themselves as subversive agents and political actors who unsettle patriarchal order.

In Gender, Globalization, and Violence: Postcolonial Conflict Zones, Ponzanesi, a

professor of women’s studies, argues that the “traditional, natural link between pacifism, an

assumption based on the feminized qualities of caring, nurturing, mourning, and empathy”27 serves as a form of silencing that denies political agency.28 Women become, instead, symbols— without subjectivity, engendered as vulnerable and exploited victims who are oppressed. In their introduction to Victims, Perpetrators or Actors: Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence,

Caroline Moser and Fiona Clark support this contention, asserting that armed conflict and political violence are predominantly viewed as “male domains”29 and that “women ha[ve] received far less attention with a tendency to portray a simplistic division of roles. Consequently

the gendered causes, costs and consequences of violent conflicts have been at best

underrepresented, while more often misrepresented.”30 Likewise, sociologist Cynthia

Cockburn’s chapter, “The Gendered Dynamics of Armed Conflict and Political Violence” argues

26 Ponzanesi, “Introduction,” 2.

27 Ibid., 1.

28 Ibid.

29 Caroline O. N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark, Victims, Perpetrators or Actors: Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2001), 3.

30 Moser and Fiona C. Clark, Victims, Perpetrators or Actors: Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence, 3.

57 that “[w]omen are reminded that by biology and by tradition they are the keepers of hearth and

home, to nurture and teach children.” 31 Italian journalist Rossana Rossanda echoes this idea in

Gadant’s collection of essays, commenting that “[h]ome, children, motherhood are not only symbols—they are powerful principles of identification” 32 used to silence and dismiss women.

In Women of the Mediterranean, Gadant maintains that motherhood imprisons politicized women, becoming “the sole means of fulfillment; by the power of the mother who obtains social recognition for her function as reproducer.” 33 The editor of this early anthology on women’s participation in armed conflict also asserts that the “Mummy-Whore” 34 narrative manifests as a

predominant framing that attempts to discipline women who reject their prescribed roles as

nurturers and life-givers.35 According to Gadant, the bifurcated virgin/whore construct serves as a form of backlash that exposes the threat of dissident women who “define their own identity…rejecting saintliness and abasement.” 36 Hence, because women’s participation in insurrectionary movements challenges masculine order, discursive representations imagine these actors as deviant and highly sexualized figures. 37 As another example, in Mothers, Monsters,

Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics, political scientists Laura Sjoberg and Caron E.

31 Cynthia Cockburn, “The Gendered Dynamics of Armed Conflict and Political Violence,” (lecture, The World Bank, Washington, D.C., June 10-11, 1999), 19.

32 Rossana Rossanda, “A Feminine Culture,” in Women of the Mediterranean, ed. Monique Gadant (London: Zed Books, 1986), 188.

33 Monique Gadant, “Introduction,” in Women of the Mediterranean, ed. Monique Gadant (London: Zed Books, 1986), 1.

34 Gadant, “Introduction,” 1.

35 Ibid., 2-3.

36 Ibid., 1.

37 Sue Malvern and Gabriel Koureas, “Introduction,” in Terrorist Transgressions: Gendered Representations of the Terrorist in Visual Culture, eds. Sue Malvern and Gabriel Koureas (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 3-4.

58 Gentry argue that dominant framings identify women insurgents as traitors to their “biological

destinies,”38 “blam[ing] women’s violence on the evils of female sexuality” 39 and claiming that

“their “willful participation in political violence…transgress[es] the norms of typical female

behaviour.”40 Similarly, Ponzanesi’s “Female Suicide Bombers and the Politics of Gendered

Militancy” suggests that journalistic depictions assign female suicide bombers the maligned role of the “fallen” 41 woman who is “shameful”42 and “unredeemable.”43 In this case, coded references invoke the biblical figure of Eve, a transgressor, who is punished with the pain of childbirth, along with submission, for her sin of sexual temptation.

In addition to journalistic texts espousing the virgin/whore narrative, themes related to motherhood and treachery emerge throughout my research. As a case in point, in chapter four, one of the earliest news stories featuring Ramona emphasizes that La Comandanta has rejected motherhood, preferring Zapatismo to child-rearing. Moreover, iconographic revisionings of the

Mater Dolorosa—the sorrowing virgin—materialize throughout my study. These scholarly works thus provide support and weight for my investigation.

38 Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry, “Introduction,” in Women, Gender, and Terrorism eds. Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 12-13.

39 Sjoberg and Gentry, “Introduction,” 12-13.

40 Ibid., 13.

41 Sandra Ponzanesi, “Female Suicide Bombers and the Politics of Gendered Militancy” in Gender, Globalization and Violence: Postcolonial Conflict Zones, ed. Sandra Ponzanesi (London: Routledge, 2014), 83.

42 Ponzanesi, “Female Suicide Bombers and the Politics of Gendered Militancy,” 83.

43 Ibid.

59 Breaking Bad Girls:

Terrorists, Martyrs, and Monstrous Mystics

As other scholars note, by engaging in political violence and by abandoning normative

conceptualizations of femininity, women’s revolutionary activities have been perceived as more

excessive—more destructive than the actions of their male counterparts.44 In Terrorist

Transgressions: Gender and the Visual Culture of the Terrorist, art historians Sue Malvern and

Gabriel Koureas refer to this betrayal as a “double act of transgression.” 45 In response to this portrayal, political scientist Brigitte L. Nacos suggests the press depicts dissident women as

“terrorists” 46 and “interlopers in an utterly male domain.” 47 Indeed, as cultural theorist Sara

Struckman conveys in “Black Widows in the New York Times: Images of Chechen Women

Rebels,” dominant journalistic representations imagine female separatists as “vengeful actors,”48 stating that their participation is part of a “new unnerving trend.” 49 In her study, Struckman argues that news stories dismiss or minimize the political motivations of the shakhidki, or “black widows,” who are cast as racialized, illegitimate actors and monsters, rather than political agents who perform acts of self-determination and defiance against state repression.50 In light of this

44 Malvern and Koureas, “Introduction,” 6.

45 Ibid.

46 Brigitte L. Nacos. “The Portrayal of Female Terrorists in the Media: Similar Framing Patterns in the News Coverage of Women,” Politics and in Terrorism, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 28, no. 5 (2005): 435.

47 Brigitte L. Nacos. “The Portrayal of Female Terrorists in the Media: Similar Framing Patterns in the News Coverage of Women,” 435.

48 Sara Struckman. “Black Widows in the New York Times: Images of Chechen Women Rebels,” in Muslim Women in War and Crisis: Representation and Reality ed. Faegheh Shirazi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 94.

49 Struckman, “Black Widows in the New York Times: Images of Chechen Women Rebels,” in Muslim Women in War and Crisis: Representation and Reality, 94.

50 Ibid., 89.

60 lacuna, female suicide bombers become veiled outlaws without a cause, an argument Harp et al.

espouse in “More of the Same Old Story? Women, War, and News in Time Magazine.”51 As their research shows, news stories manage unruly resistant fighters by selecting convenient socio-cultural and religious narratives that simplify and minimize women’s motivations for participating in revolutionary movements.52

It is worth noting that in Women as Terrorists: Mothers, Recruiters, and Martyrs, security advisors R. Kim Cragin and Sara A. Daly identify Comandanta Ramona as a

“terrorist” 53 and a “vanguard”54 of Zapatismo, a movement they designate as a terrorist organization. This work, which attempts to understand why women terrorists “believe violence against innocent civilians is a credible pathway,”55 compares Ramona to Bernadette Sands-

McKevitt, a founding member of 32 County Sovereignty Movement, the political wing of the

Irish Republican Army (IRA).56 In 1998, Sands-McKevitt formed the Real IRA, a splinter paramilitary group that has been criticized for its rejection of peace negotiations and for its violent attacks against British institutions, including the Police Service of Northern Ireland

(PSNI).57

51 Dustin Harp, Jaime Loke, and Ingrid Bachmann. "More of the Same Old Story? Women, War, and News in Time Magazine." Women's Studies in Communication 34, no. 2 (2011): 211.

52 Harp et al., 204.

53 R. Kim Cragin and Sara A. Daly, Women as Terrorists: Mothers, Recruiters, and Martrys (Santa Barbara: ABC Clio, 2009), 108.

54 Cragin and Daly, Women as Terrorists: Mothers, Recruiters, and Martrys 87.

55 Ibid., viii.

56 Ibid., 87.

57 Jonathan Tonge, Jonathan. “They Haven’t Gone Away, You Know: Irish Republican ‘Dissidents’ and Armed Struggle,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 3 (2004): 681-684.

61 It is, perhaps, not surprising that mediated representations identifying women insurgents

as terrorists most often coincide with depictions invoking monstrous femininity. In addition to

the abject, this literature demonstrates that discursive imaginings script female combatants as

mythical beings and martyrs. By embodying monstrous and preternatural qualities, revolutionary

women transform into vexed—and exceptional—figures, who are devoid of reasoning and logic.

According to Sjoberg and Gentry, such portrayals “eliminate rational behavior [and] ideological

motivation…. Instead, they describe violent women as insane, in denial of their femininity, no

longer women or human.”58 This contention is evident in Jayne Steel’s work, Demons, Hamlets and Femmes Fatales: Representations of Irish Republicanism in Popular Fiction, which interrogates images of IRA women in four United Kingdom newspapers from 1986 to 1996.

Steel notes that three predominant framings characterize republican women: the mystical, the martyred, and the monstrous—the feminine abject.59 Referring to IRA women as “vampiras,”60

an archetype that conjures the trope of the devouring mother from Irish literature and popular

culture, Steel maintains that comparisons linking rebellious and unruly women with mysticism

convey the threat of unbridled femininity in contexts of political and socio-cultural upheaval.

Likewise, in “Images of Women in Northern Ireland,” art historians Margaret Ward and Marie-

Thérèse McGivern’s reinforce Steel’s findings, noting that journalistic imaginings portray IRA women, on one hand, as “deviant” 61 and “unstable,”62 while describing them, on the other, as

58 Sjoberg and Gentry, 13.

59 Jayne Steel, Demons, Hamlets and Femmes Fatales: Representations of Irish Republicanism in Popular Fiction (Frankfort: Peter Lang, 2007), 276.

60 Ibid., 173-187.

61 Margaret Ward and Marie-Thérèse McGivern, “Images of Women in Northern Ireland,” The Crane Bag 4, no.4 (1980): 70.

62 Ward and McGivern, “Images of Women in Northern Ireland,” 69.

62 “passive victims, viragos of the barricades, [or] advocates of a messianic peace.”63 The authors suggest that these assignments reveal the instability and volatility of bifurcated categorizations.

By casting revolutionary women as mystics, Rossanda argues that dissident women become conduits of the spiritual realm, summoning their association with witchcraft.64

According to Rossanda, this codified representation attempts to “doubly” 65 dispossess women of

a “public existence and of a private existence, so [their] destiny is to disappear.”66 Rather than disappearance or death, Natalya Vince, a scholar of North African studies, argues that insurgent women in the National Liberation Front (FLN) have been immortalized as religious martyrs and mythic symbols. In “Colonial and Post-Colonial Identities: Women Veterans of the Battle of

Algiers,” Vince’s research, which draws upon Algerian and international press stories, finds that journalistic framings apotheosize the mujahidat (women warriors), who attain martyrdom through their participation in revolution.67 Despite this status, Vince concedes that press narratives fail to acknowledge how the mujahida contributed to the FLN or that they enacted subversive identities to facilitate clandestine activities.68

In the context of my investigation, this literature strengthens my findings, as journalistic

texts and images in Mexico’s national press reiterate similar narratives. For instance, chapter five

63 Ibid., 71.

64 Rossana Rossanda, “A Feminine Culture,” in Women of the Mediterranean, ed. Monique Gadant (London: Zed Books, 1986), 186-191.

65 Ibid, 191.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., 167.

68 Natalya Vince, “Colonial and Post-Colonial Identities: Women Veterans of the Battle of Algiers” French History and Civilization 2 (2009): 166-168.

63 explores discursive analyses that identify Ramona as a mystic and a healer who destabilizes

political power, while chapter seven examines framings that cast her as a martyr and folk saint.

Exotic Outliers

Faegheh Shirazi’s Muslim Women in War and Crisis: Representation and Reality

presents a collection of essays that explores, in part, how the ideology of Orientalism informs

discursive framings of Muslim women in conflict.69 Shirazi, a professor of Middle Eastern studies, argues that Western media’s “sense of fear, fascination, and superiority”70 manifests in

“polarizing representations of Muslim women, whether veiled or exposed, passive or wielding

weapons.”71 Informed by Orientalist constructs, these imaginings misrepresent and misconstrue meaning, failing to capture nuanced articulations of resistance, which expose the problematic interplay between journalistic interpretation and self-representation. Shirazi notes, in particular, that the fashioning of women’s bodies and the semiotics of clothing function as tools of resistance, which Western journalists often misread or fail to understand due to their location as cultural outsiders.72 For example, while the hijab serves as a subversive expression of resistance, it has been interpreted, however, as a symbol of women’s passivity. 73 Shirazi’s work provides

69 Faegheh Shirazi, “Introduction,” in Muslim Women in War and Crisis: Representation and Reality ed. F. Shirazi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 6.

70 Shirazi, “Introduction,” 6.

71 Ibid., 6.

72 Ibid., 9.

73 Ibid.

64 substantial backing for my own research. Rather than Orientalism, the ideology of indigenismo

infiltrates representations of Ramona in the Mexican national press and, additionally, La

Comandanta’s clothing also expresses resistance.

Similarly, Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled,” which functions as a seminal text in anticolonial discourse, deconstructs the imaginings of women resistance fighters in FLN during the Algerian

Revolution (1954-1962). Fanon’s 1959 essay, which appears in A Dying Colonialism, addresses the dynamics of colonial identity, hybridity and mimicry, and the fraught terrain of representational politics relating to insurgent women’s bodies, along with the anxiety of women’s costuming in revolutionary movements. His work argues that Algerian women— specifically, freedom fighters or fidayate (female weapon carriers)—contest and redefine notions of identity during the Revolution, upsetting and playing with Western constructions of Muslim women’s passivity that are predicated upon strict Orientalist notions.74 Fanon describes these insurgent women as the “flesh of the revolution,” 75 an analysis that further unites women’s bodies with the machinery of violence. In the historical canon, Fanon’s work presents, however, an oversimplification and an overdetermination that casts revolutionary women as voiceless actors. He writes about and represents Algerian women insurgents, never drawing upon women’s stories or voices, and becomes, instead, spokesperson for the Algerian mujahida.

74 Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 35-37.

75 Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” 54.

65

Figure 1: Djamila Boupacha, March 14, 1963. Digital Print. Available from: Hulton Archive/Getty Images. https://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/news-photo/algerian-resistance-fighter-and-member-of-the-algerian-news- photo/1053494440 (accessed October 23, 2019). A point of departure, Simone de Beauvoir and Gisele Halimi’s 1962 work, Djamila

Boupacha: The Story of the Torture of a Young Algerian Girl Which Shocked Liberal French

Opinion, draws upon the testimony of FLN freedom fighter Djamila Boupacha, who confessed to attempting to bomb a café after French soldiers tortured and raped her with a bottle during interrogation (Figure 1). As an early example of feminist literature on women’s insurgency,

Beauvoir and Halimi’s examination presents a media analysis that confronts the complexities of gender, race, and socio-cultural positioning in the theatre of anticolonial conflict. According to the authors, the French Press employed orientalist ideologies to vilify Boupacha, calling her “the hand-grenade terrorist”76 and a “bomb-dropper”77 responsible for the deaths of women and children. Such characterizations thus cast the freedom fighter as a traitor whose emancipatory

76 Simone De Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, Djamila Boupacha: The Story of a Young Algerian Girl Which Shocked Liberal French Opinion (New York: MacMillan, 1962), 84.

77 Beauvoir and Halimi, Djamila Boupacha: The Story of a Young Algerian Girl Which Shocked Liberal French Opinion, 84.

66 struggle caused harm to her own people. As the authors comment, journalists also mocked

Boupacha, referring to her as a mystic and comparing her to Joan of Arc,” 78 a French martyr who was burned at the stake. By drawing upon her personal narrative, however, Beauvoir and Halimi

counter representations that position the insurgent as a terrorist, allowing her voice to reframe

these imaginings. The work also makes the case that, while mediated discourse script Boupacha

as a violent instigator—and as an enemy of the state—she, herself, is a victim of state terror and violence.

Figure 2: Pablo Picasso, Djamila Boupacha in Simone de Beauvoir and Gisele Halimi’s 1962 publication. Available from Le Soir d’Algerie. https://www.lesoirdalgerie.com/culture/rendez-nous-notre-djamila- boupacha-1501/print/1 (accessed August 18, 2018). This work also provides an important discussion regarding the use of sexual torture

against women in armed conflict, a narrative largely invisible in analyses of armed conflict.

Citing the French Press, Beauvoir and Halimi examine stories that question Boupacha’s virginity

and focus on her style of dress and hairstyle, 79 a strategy that invokes the archetype of whore. In

78 Ibid., 99.

79 Ibid., 84.

67 exposing her torture and violation, Boupacha’s account of rape contests these depictions, thus

recasting herself as a survivor of colonial violence and as a martyr of anticolonial struggle in

Algeria. Indeed, this publication elevated Boupacha to celebrity status—problematic in its own

right—casting her as a feminist symbol, albeit an appropriated one. As a case in point, Pablo

Picasso’s portrait of the freedom fighter graces its inside cover (Figure 2), accorded the book, image, and Boupacha an international visibility that would not have been possible without this commissioned lithograph.

In the context of my research, Boupacha’s vilification in the French press provides a framework for interpreting early discursive representations that imagine Ramona as a traitor whose participation in uprising, rather than liberating, enacts violence against her own people. I also analyze how Ramona reframes and renegotiates these identities, storying herself through countervailing performances and actions. Like Fanon and Shirazi, I provide a semiotic exploration of Ramona’s appearance and dress in the press, arguing that she fashions her body as a site of resistance that thwarts journalistic determinations.

Warriors, Soldaderas, and Adelitas

Representations of Mexican Insurgent Women

The second thematic focus in my research draws upon literature that investigates

imaginings of revolutionary women in Mexican culture. Similar to the previous section, I

organize this literature according to prevailing framings, which parallel, in many cases, dominant

depictions of insurgent women in anti-colonial analyses. As a point of entry to examine this body

of work, I begin with Elizabeth Salas’ Soldaderas in the Mexican Military, which presents a

68 genealogical analysis tracing contemporary women’s participation in Mexican revolutionary

campaigns to historical traditions of Indigenous warring. Using pre-Hispanic mythologies as

evidence for her argument, Salas, a professor of Chicano studies, asserts that women figured

prominently as both war goddesses and legendary warriors. 80 Despite this tradition, Salas acknowledges, however, that “[t]he connection between these myths and real women who engaged in warfare is often obscured by scholars.”81 Arguing that patriarchal historicization

revisions and undermines these warriors, she comments that these women are “viewed as

mythical fantasies created by men and not at all reflective of women’s varied roles over several

centuries as tribal leaders, defenders and warriors.”82 Hence, shifting perspectives in historical accounts cast soldaderas as heroic fighters in one war, while condemning them as prostitutes and unnatural women in another era.83 By locating women’s resistance in pre-Hispanic mythologies,

Salas’ work provides rare insight into histories of women’s insurgency. In doing so, she makes a

vital contribution to my research. As I demonstrate in chapters four and five, Ramona reclaims

these identities from cultural mythologies, scripting herself as a warrior and as a defender of her

people.

Like Salas, other scholars have queried the negation, erasure, and derogation of

revolutionary women from canonical accounts. In “Battleground Women: Soldaderas and

Female Soldiers in the Mexican Revolution,” historian Andrés Reséndez Fuentes explores how

writers and journalists of the Mexican Revolution struggled to portray revolutionary women in

80 Elizabeth Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 1.

81 Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Revolution, 1.

82 Ibid., 1.

83 Ibid., xi.

69 meaningful and complex ways, focusing, instead, on men’s contributions.84 Fuentes asserts that women soldiers “were generally regarded as marginal to the fighting and extraordinary, or strange, in character.”85 Likewise, literary theorist Tabea Alexa Linhard’s Fearless Women in the

Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War asserts that when women were acknowledged or recognized in revolutionary narratives, it occurred, most prominently, through the photographic lens,86 relegating women to the visual sidelines of revolution, their actions and contributions dismissed and undermined with little value or purpose. Linhard further notes that these images erase individual experience and identity, as soldaderas are referred to as “Adelitas,” a collective name assigned to women participants in the Revolution.87

In the “Introduction” to The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910-1953, a collection of

essays that interrogates women’s struggle for power in the political sphere, along with

citizenship, during the period of national rebuilding, editor and historian Stephanie Mitchell

underscores this point, commenting that soldaderas have been relegated to the domain of popular

culture, ballads, and photographs: “life stories…eulogized more for the purpose of creating

feminine icons than genuine historical analysis.”88 According to Mitchell, “as soon as the fighting was over, the men who wrote the story of the war rewrote it to exclude women almost entirely, except as romanticized sweetheart Adelitas or wizened old cucarachas, both stereotypes

84Andrés Reséndez Fuentes, “Battleground Women: Soldaderas and Female Soldiers in the Mexican Revolution,” The Americas, 51, no. 4 (1995): 525-526.

85 Fuentes, “Battleground Women: Soldaderas and Female Soldiers in the Mexican Revolution,” The Americas, 525-526.

86 Tabea Alexa Linhard, Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 97, 115. 87 Yascara López, “De Adelitas a Funcionarias,” Reforma, November 20, 2000, https://reforma.vlex.com.mx/vid/adelitas-funcionarias-81159427

88 Stephanie Mitchell, “Introduction,” in The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910-1953 eds. Stephanie Mitchell and Patience A. Schell (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 8.

70 that glossed over the actual relevance of soldaderas’ work.” 89 Similarly, Yascara López, a writer who examines Mexican popular culture, maintains that the Adelita narrative denies insurgent women a meaningful place within the theatre of resistance, a tradition that she suggests continues in contemporary resistance movements: “[T]he Adelitas have not died, they have just changed their image. They no longer carry the gun, the children, the food, now they lead Zapatista movements.”90 By proffering this perspective, López traces the genealogical roots of contemporary insurgency in Mexico to historical revolutions.

Indigenizing the Virgin, the Whore, and the Mystic:

La Malinche, Guadalupe, and La Ilusa

This body of literature also links insurgent women’s erasure to national campaigns and official state culture, such as indigenismo, that attempted to restore order out of revolutionary chaos in the reconstructionist period (1920-1940). During this phase, those with discursive authority attempted to trammel rebellious outliers in response to their supposed transgression of feminine ideals. By obscuring women’s insurgency, revisionist histories reified dominant social order and espoused masculinized narratives of resistance, thus claiming revolutionary terrain as, essentially, a male reserve. Hence, official images of self-sacrificing—and faceless— revolutionary helpmates dominated national propaganda, creating softer, less intrusive narratives that concealed the reality of women’s roles during revolution. However, as a departure from these passive renderings, textual and visual accounts also reified the archetype of the abject

89 Mitchell, “Introduction,” in The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910-1953, 13.

90 Yascara López, “De Adelitas a Funcionarias.”

71 whore, who lurked as an admonitory reminder of women’s contravention. Cultural theorist Jean

Franco asserts that revolutionary narratives curated these tropes to articulate the idea that women

were neither protagonists nor active agents in the public sphere, but narrowly confined and

marginalized figures. 91 Historian Jocelyn Olcott supports this argument in Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico, noting that soldaderas embodied either the archetype of La

Malinche, a traitorous, fallen woman,92 or the mujer abnegada, a selfless woman who epitomizes purity and sublimation, which “became nearly synonymous with idealized Mexican femininity and motherhood.”93 In Mexican culture, these virtues invoke, in particular, associations with the

Virgin of Guadalupe, an iconic national figure who represents “selfless martyrdom, self- sacrifice, an erasure of self and the negation of one’s outward existence.” 94 As Olcott suggests,

in the aftermath of Revolution, this campaign attempted to scrub a sullied society of its

deviance.95

The ideology of indigenismo further reified these imaginings. In Becoming Modern,

Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender, and Representation in Mexican Art and Culture, Adriana

Zavala, a scholar of Mexican visual culture, asserts that indigenismo, a state-ordained project that served as official propaganda, fetishized and romanticized, in particular, Indigenous women, illustrating idealized femininity as passive and non-threatening, as opposed to dissident and

91 Jean Franco, “Manhattan Will be More Exotic This Fall: The Iconization of Frida Kahlo,” in Critical Passions: Selected Essays, eds. Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 39.

92 Jocelynn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 15.

93 Ibid.,16.

94 Ibid.,16.

95 Ibid., 20.

72 unwieldy.96 Mexican literature, art, and film thus scripted Indigenous women as docile and exoticized figures who upheld traditional ideals of motherhood, while embodying notions of nationhood.97 Under the guise of indigenismo, the country’s fledgling cultural institutions also exploited and ossified Indigenous women, objectifying them as historical figures and national symbols in ethnographic displays. In How A Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture, art historian Mary K. Coffey argues that indigenismo waged “aesthetics eugenics,”98 designating

Indigenous peoples as relics of the Mexican past, who, in the modern nation-state, were destined to die out. Julia Tuñón, a Mexican historian and visual theorist, makes a similar assertion in

“Femininity, Indigenismo, and Nation: Film Representation by Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernández.” 99

According to Tuñón, Fernández’s María Candelaria demonstrates indigenismo’s dark

machinations, fating Maria, the main characters who “embodies the soul of Mexico,”100 to die—

like her mother—at the hands of an angry lynch mob.

In addition to these works, Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern

Mexico interrogates discursive representations of revolutionary women in cultural institutions

and popular culture during and after the Mexican Revolution. Edited by Jocelyn Olcott, Mary

Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano, essays in this collection suggest that revolution catalyzed the

96 Adriana Zavala, Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender, and Representation in Mexican Art and Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 5.

97 Zavala, Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender, and Representation in Mexican Art and Culture, 8.

98 Mary K. Coffey, How A Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 6.

99 Julia Tuñón, “Femininity, Indigenismo, and Nation: Film Representation by Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernández” in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico eds. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 89.

100 Tuñón, “Femininity, Indigenismo, and Nation: Film Representation by Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernández,” 93.

73 breakdown of gender conformity, which served as a profound threat to patriarchal order and,

thus, incited visual campaigns that obscured, at best, or minimized, at the very least, the political activities of soldaderas.101 In her essay, “Pancho Villa, the Daughters of Mary, and the Modern

Woman: Gender in the Long Mexican Revolution,” Vaughan, a cultural theorist argues that the

Mexican Revolution “assaulted Victorian morality and rules of sexual repression and brought women into public space in unprecedented ways. Threatened artists and intellectuals turned women into traditional archetypes they could control.”102 As evidence, Vaughan points to a wealth of literary and visual manipulations that attempted to manipulate the imaginary of dissident femininity, noting that “[j]ust as novelist Mariano Azuela turned his female…into the familiar binary of virgin and whore, Diego Rivera painted the nation in patriarchal narrative relying on another tired trope: women represented fertility and nature; women were the rational conquerors of nature.”103 In accordance with the conventions of Indigenismo, Vaughan suggests that cultural expressions depicted Indigenous women as self-sacrificing figures, draped in huipiles (tunics) and bowed in front of mutates (corn grinders),104 who were thus transformed

into witnesses of “male valor, objects of their affections, and nuisances in the march toward modernity.” 105 Likewise, in “The Faces of Rebellion,” another essay in the work, historian

Martha Eva Rocha maintains that revolutionary women’s narratives constituted a radical threat to

101 Mary Kay Vaughan, “Pancho Villa, the Daughters of Mary, and the Modern Woman: Gender in the Long Mexican Revolution,” in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico eds. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 22-24.

102 Vaughan, “Pancho Villa, the Daughters of Mary, and the Modern Woman: Gender in the Long Mexican Revolution,” 25.

103 Ibid.

104 Ibid., 22.

105 Ibid.

74 social wellbeing. To prevent further transgression, dominant narratives either erased

revolutionary women from this canon or cast them as agents of social contamination who spread

syphilis, petitioned for divorce, engaged in prostitution, or turned to lesbianism. 106 In the

national mythos, such women embodied the vexed and troubled figure of La Malinche.

Despite these restrictive framings, scholars, such as Franco, have actively pursued and

interrogated moments where dissident women counter archetypal renderings and fight for the

power of interpretation.107 In Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, Franco asserts that, although La Malinche and Guadalupe serve as “symbolic constellations that maintain [patriarchal] power,” 108 such tropes remain ambiguous, thus creating the possibility of

subversion and rupture. She suggests, for example, that the image of the virgin is not that of a

passive recipient of immaculate conception, but that of “a woman of the Apocalypse”109 who wars and protects. Further, while dominant mythological renderings have imagined La Malinche as a traitor, the mythic scapegoat also takes on other forms: helper, warrior, savior, and mother.

In my own research, I use Franco’s exploration of women’s subversion to analyze the interplay between discursive imaginings and countervailing performances.

In addition to the maternal and the liminal, Franco suggests that revolutionary histories imagine dissident women as visionaries and mystics, who, as ambivalent figures, also proffer the possibility of rupture, subversion, and agency. 110 Referred to as ilusas (delusional women), a

106 Nikki Craske, “Ambiguities and Ambivalences in Making the Nation: Women and Politics in 20th Century Mexico,” Feminist Review 79 (2005): 122.

107 Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), xviii.

108 Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, xviii.

109 Ibid.

110 Ibid., xviii, xx.

75 religious archetype originating in seventeenth century New Spain,111 these women publicly performed “rapture and ecstasy,”112 claiming that their bodies were conduits of divine power and healing. In response to these subversive acts, which threatened patriarchal authority, church

officials imagined ilusas as irrational and fanatical actors who derived preternatural power from

the devil.113 As Franco argues, although these officials classified such women as possessing

“ungovernable bodies,”114 thereby justifying women’s segregation from the public domain, by defining radical women as mystics, the “clergy unwittingly created a space for female empowerment.” 115

In the context of revolution, the ilusa archetype not only exceptionalizes revolutionary women, but also casts them, however, as irrational, malevolent figures. In Elena Poniatowska’s

Women of the Mexican Revolution, for example, the acclaimed Mexican writer reiterates this trope, portraying María Quinteras de Merás, a decorated soldier who fought alongside Pancho

Villa, as a mythic warrior with supernatural powers.116 Poniatowska notes that Merás’ fellow soldiers attributed her ferocity and prowess in battle as a sign that she had formed a pact with the devil.117 As I establish in chapter seven, journalistic depictions, once again, summon the ilusa

archetype from the from historical canon, casting Ramona as an ecstatic healer.

111 Ibid., xx.

112 Ibid.

113 Ibid., 56.

114 Ibid., xv.

115 Ibid., xiv.

116 Elena Poniatowska, Women of the Revolution (Mexico City: CincoPuntos Press, 1999), 21.

117 Poniatowska, Women of the Revolution, 22.

76 Women’s Revolutionary Stories

Rather than erasure and negation, along with bifurcation, other literary works present rich accounts that provide detailed insight into women’s wide-ranging contributions to revolution.

For instance, in Hasta no verte Jesús mío (Here’s to you, Jesusa!), Poniatowska tells the story of

Jesusa Palancares, a fictional woman who fought in the Mexican Revolution and later became a laundress in Mexico City. 118 As part of her novela testimonial, a genre that transgresses literary and historiographical boundaries, fusing historical scholarship and oral history with fiction,

Poniatowska modeled her character after Josefina Bórquez, an actual soldadera. Here, the author represents Palancares, or, rather Bórquez, with a candor that is raw and gritty, allowing readers not only to glimpse the character’s political activities, but also—and perhaps more importantly— to hear her thoughts, feelings and emotions—her interior life—throughout and following the campaign. In the same way, Nelli Campobello’s Cartucho and My Mother’s Hands, published in

1931, presents a semi-autobiographical account that illustrates violence in Mexico’s northern region during the Revolutionary period. 119 In the novel, Campobello, a Mexican writer, examines the life of La Nacha Ceniceros, a respected coronela and a soldadera who was dismissed by

Venustiano Carranza in 1916, despite recognition for her courage in battle. While Campobello represents the contributions of La Nacha, she also provides a nuanced and intimate account of the quotidian during the revolution, with a depiction of Rafaela Luna, her own mother, who struggles to maintain order in overtly hostile conditions. The weaving of these narratives—the political with the personal—offers perspectives and understandings of the complex ways in

118 Elena Poniatowska, Here’s to You, Jesusa trans. Deanna Heikkinen (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001).

119 Nellie Campobello, Catucho and My Mother’s Hands, trans. By Doris Meyer and Irene Matthews (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).

77 which revolutionary women asserted agency during—and after—Revolution. As both

Campobello’s and Poniatowska’s works reveal, not all narratives have been silenced.

Ramona:

A “masterful stroke of imagery.” 120

“Ramona is much more than a Zapatista comandante; she has become a legend, endowed with almost mystical powers. Indian peasants, complaining about an abuse of power by local officials, will say: ‘Just wait till Ramona comes, then they'll see.’”121

In this section, I discuss literature that examines La Comandanta Ramona’s participation

in the EZLN, which, in most cases, accompanies general analyses of women in the Zapatista

movement. This body of work shows representational patterns that reiterate dominant framing

strategies identified in previous sections of this chapter. In terms of understanding Ramona

within the Zapatista movement, this literature reveals reasons why La Comandanta has been

overlooked and negated within discourses of Zapatismo.

Marisa Belausteguigoitia, director of gender and development at the Universidad

Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM), presents one of the most important analyses

concerning Indigenous women and representation in the Zapatista movement. Belausteguigoitia

asserts that women’s voices have been silenced within a campaign that claims to promote gender

equality. For example, in “The Right to Rest: Women’s Struggle to be heard in the Zapatista’s

Movement,” she boldly states that “[i]n the case of indigenous women in Chiapas, the promise of

120 Gary Chapman, Window on Technology and the Poor, Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1996.

121 Ellen Calmus, “We are all Ramona: Artists, Revolutionaries, and Zapatistas with Petticoat” Zone Zero Magazine, July 1995 Accessed March 20, 2014 from http://zonezero.com/magazine/essays/distant/articfram2.html

78 liberation and emancipation does not touch women.”122 The author argues that women’s experiences with violence, oppression, and subjugation “end in bakeries and childcare centres,” referring to the Zapatista’s undermining of women’s demands and the dismissal of gender- specific structural barriers.123 In another study, “On Line, Off Line and In Line: The Zapatista

Rebellion and the Uses of Technology by Indian Women,” Belausteguigoitia examines women’s silencing within the movement, claiming “Zapatista women…do not have a translator, ventriloquist and powerful mediation concentrated in a persona that could unpack and expose sexism.” 124 According to the author, such ventriloquism serves as a staged performance, enacted

mainly by Subcomandante Marcos,125 which preserves long-standing gender oppression and

inequality in the movement.126 This also reifies hierarchical order that denies women’s agency, as male Zapatista leaders represent and filter women’s demands and experiences, allowing men to maintain a privileged standing in revolutionary narratives.

Belausteguigoitia’s research also argues that while women’s work undergirds Zapatismo, women have been reduced to “vitalizers” and “bearers of community traditions.”127 Such a codified framing invokes maternal feminism and reifies Indigenous women’s fraught positioning

122 Marisa Belausteguigoitia, “The Right to Rest: Women’s Struggle to be heard in the Zapatista’s Movement,” Development 43, no. 3 (2000), 85.

123 Belausteguigoitia, “The Right to Rest: Women’s Struggle to be heard in the Zapatista’s Movement,” 85.

124 Marisa Belausteguigoitia, “On Line, Off Line and In Line: The Zapatista Rebellion and the Uses of Technology by Indian Women” in Native on the Net: Indigenous and Diasporic Peoples in the Virtual Age ed. Kyra Landzelius (New York: Routledge, 2004), 106, 107.

125 Belausteguigoitia, “On Line, Off Line and In Line: The Zapatista Rebellion and the Uses of Technology by Indian Women,” 104-105.

126 Ibid., 107.

127 Ibid.

79 within the nation-state. Historically, Mexico’s patriarchal social structure has asserted that a

woman’s place is in the private sphere, the home. This belief adheres to the philosophy of

Marianismo, a philosophy that positions women as morally and spiritually superior to men.

Hence, Belausteguigoitia suggests that it is precisely this narrative that has denied women

economic and educational opportunities, along with their politicization. By making this

argument, she shatters the Zapatista myth of an Indigenous gender revolution, noting that this

campaign reproduces existing power structures in Mexican society.

In Women and Guerilla Movements: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Cuba, Karen

Kampwirth, who is arguably the leading scholar on Latin American women in revolutionary

movements, refutes Belausteguigoitia’s contention that Indigenous women have been silenced in

the movement.128 Instead, Kampwirth asserts that women’s voices fill this revolutionary landscape. While acknowledging the Zapatistas have a male-dominated core, Kampwirth argues that the EZLN’s agenda on the rights of women proves that women have a rightful—and equal— place within the movement. 129 She also insists that the movement facilitated the breaking of gender barriers, which has transformed Maya communities, and that Indigenous women have been working outside the home, achieving economic autonomy, and acquiring formal education for decades. She confirms, “Women, equipped with new independence and new skills—but also new grievances—became open to mobilization directly in the EZLN, or indirectly into a social movement that sympathized with the EZLN.”130 To support her argument, Kampwirth asserts that the work of Major Ana María and La Comandanta Ramona exemplify women’s

128 Karen Kampwirth, Women and Guerilla Movements: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Cuba (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 93.

129 Ibid., 94.

130 Ibid., 93.

80 empowerment and resistance.131

Similarly, historian Lynn Stephen’s “The Construction of Indigenous Suspects:

Militarization and the Gendered and Ethnic Dynamics of Human Rights Abuses in Southern

Mexico,” contends that Zapatista women’s stories are being told and that their politicization is

meaningful.132 In her article, Stephen presents a thoughtful and well-researched account of militarization and the rape of Indigenous women in San Andrés Larráinzar, a Zapatista

community located in the Lacandon jungle.133 While Stephen does not refer to Ramona’s early

campaign to end violence against women or her vocal opposition to the occupation of the

Mexican military,134 this work suggests that Indigenous women’s experiences and voices are being documented. As Stephen’s research notes, rape in conflict serves as a form of punishment and pushback due to Zapatista women’s mobilization and politicization. In another article,

“Naming the Cinderellas of Development: Violence and Women's Autonomy in Mexico,”

Belausteguigoitia argues that Zapatista women’s politicization has created a discursive crisis, resulting in a threatening and disruptive imaginary. In this essay, she argues that historical images of Indigenous women have been used to “organize foundational narratives for nationalist imageries: double discourses about the good and the bad indigenous women provide the images needed to construct the nation's vices and virtues, made flesh by the virtuous and perverse

131 Ibid., 95.

132 Lynn Stephen, “The Construction of Indigenous Suspects: Militarization and the Gendered and Ethnic Dynamics of Human Rights Abuses in Southern Mexico,” Journal of American Ethnological Society 26, no. 4 (November 1999): 822-842.

133 Stephen, “The Construction of Indigenous Suspects: Militarization and the Gendered and Ethnic Dynamics of Human Rights Abuses in Southern Mexico,” 822-842.

134 Ibid.

81 indigenous women.”135 However, since the uprising, “the presence and representation of indigenous women has gone through various transformations,”136 due to Zapatista women’s departure from visual constructs and ideologies embedded in indigenismo. According to

Belausteguigoitia, demands for autonomy and reproductive rights, such as birth control, rupture indigenismo’s prescribed framings, according Zapatista women the position of La Malinche, a vilified figure who “convey[s] women’s, particularly indigenous women’s, ‘inherent’ capacity for betrayal.”137 Such betrayal results, for instance, in violent backlash from the state and military. To support this argument, she points to the PRI-affiliated paramilitary massacre of

Zapatista supporters—32 women and children—in Chiapas’ highlands on December 22, 1997 as a campaign aimed to subjugate and silent Indigenous women. In chapter seven of my dissertation, I, too, address this slaughter as a form of violent suppression.

In Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico, Lynn Stephen deconstructs the image of Ramona in the greater context of Indigenismo, nationalism, and constructs of femininity. Stephen’s approach sharply departs from other scholarly works that overlook investigations of Ramona’s imaging as symbol and icon. According to Stephen,

Ramona is “a living connection to Zapata and the struggle for land.”138 She also argues that

Ramona “became a hero and role model for women all over Mexico”139 and associates Ramona’s

135 Marisa Belausteguigoitia, “Naming the Cinderellas of Development: Violence and Women’s Autonomy in Mexico,” Society for International Development, 47, no. 1 (2004): 64.

136 Belausteguigoitia, “Naming the Cinderellas of Development: Violence and Women’s Autonomy in Mexico,” 66.

137 Ibid., 67.

138 Lynn Stephen, Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 338.

139 Stephen, Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Practices in Mexico, 91.

82 suffering with the Virgin of Guadalupe. Stephen maintains that, during her appearance at the

National Indigenous Forum in Mexico City, Ramona emerges as a “unifying symbol…by

blending local Tzotzil culture with redefined Mexican nationalism projected from below.”140

Further, in Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas,

Kampwirth notes that Indigenous women see Ramona as a sacrificial figure willing to “happily die so that others might live a better, if not eternal, life.”141 Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa

Isherwood—both professors of theology—advance this argument in Controversies in Feminist

Theology, noting that Tzotzil and Tzeltal Maya women consider Ramona the “personification of the Virgin Mary….here Mary is constructed from the image of Ramona and not vice versa.” 142

Such discursive representations create, however, a remarkable silence, encouraging reductionist

narratives that diminish political and socio-economic complexities, and historical patterns of

dispossession and resistance, thereby minimizing Ramona’s politicization.

Rosa Rojas’ 1995 ¿Chiapas. Y las mujeres qué? remains one of the most comprehensive examinations on Indigenous women in the uprising.143 Weaving personal narrative with

reportage, Rojas, a Mexican journalist who worked in Indigenous communities for twelve years, explores themes of silence and “profound invisibility.” 144 Although Zapatista women have made vital contributions to the EZLN, she asserts that they remain marginalized within the movement.

140 Ibid.

141 Karen Kampwirth, Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 141.

142 Marcella Althus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood. Controversies in Feminist Theology (London: SCM Press, 2007), 76.

143 Rosa Rojas, ¿Chiapas. Y las mujeres qué? (Mexico: La Correa Feminista, 1995), 122.

144 Rojas, ¿Chiapas. Y las mujeres qué?, 24.

83 In contrast to other examinations, Rojas includes Ramona’s words in her work and writes about

the leader’s response to false reports of her death in 1995.145 By exploring Ramona’s early work with the Zapatistas—along with the activities of other women—Rojas acknowledges the interrelationship between marginalization and insurgency.

In addition to this examination, Rojas’ work makes a significant contribution to

Ramona’s mythologization. For example, Rojas argues that Ramona’s speeches come from her

“corazón indígena” (Indigenous heart), which intimates passion and emotion—as opposed to

rationality.146 The journalist further describes Ramona as peaceful warrior—presenting an image of tranquility and composure—although she possesses an intense stare that unhinges those around her.147 During the San Andrés Accords, for example, Rojas states that Ramona did not

feel the cold, suggesting that she is able to transcend—or withstand—distressing environmental

conditions.148

Guiomar Rovira's Women of Maize: Indigenous Women and the Zapatista Rebellion provides a nuanced examination of the socio-cultural, economic, and political factors contributing to women’s participation in Zapatismo.149 Like Rojas, Rovira, draws upon personal narratives to provide first-hand accounts of women’s experiences. Unlike her counter-parts,

Rovira’s analysis explores the most intimate aspects of patriarchal dominance: the control and regulation of women’s bodies and sexuality.150 Drawing upon the testimonies of dozens of

145 Ibid., 151.

146 Ibid., 27.

147 Ibid., 33.

148 Ibid., 38.

149 Guiomar Rovira, Women of Maize: Indigenous Women and the Zapatista Rebellion trans. Anna Keene (London: Latin American Bureau, 2000), 66-77.

84 Zapatista women, Rovira presents accounts of forced marriages; dowry exchange; violence in

marriage; and, women’s lack of knowledge about contraception and sexual health, along with the

omnipotence of patriarchal oppression in Indigenous communities.151 Rovira then expands her analysis, exploring myriad and complex structural inequalities existing outside of Indigenous communities.

In this work, Rovira characterizes Ramona as a “diminutive Tzotzil weaver” 152 who mobilized other Indigenous women because they related to her suffering. Referring to the leader as “an icon of a woman warrior, even though her role [was] mainly political,”153 Rovira writes that male reporters refused to interview Ramona during the San Andrés peace accords in

February 1994. She states, “During the negotiations, Ramona gave one interview to a group of four women reporters. No male reporter was interested in her. In fact, she required little publicity: it was Ramona who was carrying the Mexican flag.” 154 My research, in fact, examines this particular moment in Ramona’s campaign, as I explore the significance of the flag in chapter four and five of this dissertation.

The beauty of Rovira’s book is that it challenges patriarchal press depictions of

Indigenous women. It is, moreover, one of the few texts that specifically confronts the role of

journalistic narrative in shaping an understanding of gender inequality in the Zapatista campaign.

Rovira also addresses the emergence of women's cooperatives in relation to Comandanta

150 Rovira, Women of Maize: Indigenous Women and the Zapatista Rebellion, 34-35.

151 Ibid., 44-65.

152 Ibid., 148.

153 Ibid., 148.

154 Ibid., 148.

85 Ramona’s politicization. Indeed, as anthropologist Christine E. Eber notes, Chiapas’ fledgling

co-operative movement attracted a number of women who would later join the EZLN in the

1990s.155 In “Seeking Our Own Food: Indigenous Women’s Power and Autonomy in San Pedro

Chenalhó, Chiapas (1980-1998),” Eber suggests that weaving and baking co-ops, such as

Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya, Mujeres Marginadas, and Tsobal Antzetik, sparked new ideas about democracy and women’s rights in Chiapas.156 Drawing upon personal narratives of women involved in these movements, Eber maintains, “Their experiences require us to reject the notion that these women’s activities are pre-political moments in the lives of women who lack political consciousness…. They open up alternative possibilities within indigenous women’s organizing for democratization and sustainable development in the face of the destructive forces of neoliberalism.” Eber’s 2011 book, The Journey of a Tzotzil-Maya Woman of Chiapas, Mexico:

Pass Well Over Earth, further develops this examination, exploring relationship between

cooperatives and women’s political mobilization. In this work, Eber interviews Antonia, who

argues that her resistance cannot be framed within totalizing constructs that preclude women

from maintaining other roles and responsibilities. 157 Rather, Antonia insists that “activism and motherhood…[are] part of a holy struggle” 158 against subordination and oppression. By presenting the voices of Indigenous women who retaliate against subjugation, Eber’s work ruptures bifurcated representations that attempt to silence and suppress women from political

155 Christine E. Eber, “Seeking Our Own Food: Indigenous Women’s Power and Autonomy in San Pedro Chenalhó, Chiapas (1980-1998),” Latin American Perspectives 26, no. 3 (1999): 6-8.

156 Eber, “Seeking Our Own Food: Indigenous Women’s Power and Autonomy in San Pedro Chenalhó, Chiapas (1980-1998),” 8.

157 Christine E. Eber. The Journey of a Tzotzil-Maya Woman of Chiapas, Mexico Pass Well over the Earth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 118.

158 Eber, The Journey of a Tzotzil-Maya Woman of Chiapas, Mexico Pass Well over the Earth, 118.

86 participation, shedding light on the complexities of women’s dissidence.

Conclusion

The three areas outlined in this literature review neatly dovetail to form the foundation of my research. As these works convey, Ramona’s dissidence—like other insurgent women who participate in conflicts in Algeria, Chechnya, or Northern Ireland—threatens patriarchal order, resulting in erasure or obscuration from the historical archive. When revolutionary women do appear, dominant framings, most often, dismiss the complex political motivations for their mobilization and, instead, define them within strict—and, perhaps, more comfortable—bifurcated boundaries of femininity. Still, there are ruptures—points of discontinuity—that depart from these discursive representations. Such interjections pose countervailing imaginings that reveal the persistence of these insurgents’ revolutionary actions. Indeed, attempts to silence Ramona, along with her insurrectionary sisters, have not been successful.

87

Chapter Three

Researching Ramona

Chapter three provides an outline of the methodological framework I use for examining

textual and visual imaginings of Comandanta Ramona over a twelve-year period (1994-2006) and identifies my procedures for analyzing representational processes in four national newspapers located in Mexico City. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), I investigate codified ideological inscriptions in visual and linguistic texts, tracing discursive meaning to broader historical, socio-cultural, and political contexts. 1 As a qualitative and an interpretive research method, CDA interrogates the relationship between language and power within the complex dynamic—or interplay—of media, representation, and ideology.2 In addition to using

CDA, I employ Foucauldian theory to analyze how history informs, produces, and renders discursive imaginings of Ramona. This chapter further identifies complementary visual methodologies, along with conceptual framings, used for interrogating news images of Ramona.

Prior to discussing these approaches, however, I first outline the theoretical foundation for this study, which employs an anticolonial feminist framework to critique both dominant and disruptive discourses in the Mexican national press.

1 John E. Richardson, Analyzing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 15.

2 Richardson, Analyzing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis, 1-2.

88 Theorizing Ramona

Drawing upon the ideas of Chandra Mohanty, Trinh T. Mihn-Ha, and Pushkala Prasad,

whose theoretical positions derive from Edward Said’s treatise on Orientalism, I use an

anticolonial feminist lens to mine hegemonic meaning and to expose oppositional interjections

inscribed in visual and linguistic texts. This particular theoretical model identifies “patterns of

hierarchical reproduction that are grounded in colonial dynamics” 3 and “investigate[s] the complex and deeply fraught dynamics of modern Western colonialism and anticolonial resistance.” 4 With an emphasis on analyzing how intersections of gender, nation, and race render the other in mediated expressions, this theory not only critiques dominant representational tropes, but also unveils the performative implications of these imaginings, while identifying the other’s defiance against violent, essentializing discourses.

In the context of representational regimes, Prasad argues that colonial discourses are

“rampant”5 in media organizations, which propagate colonial ideologies via news stories and photographic images. According to Mohanty, such colonial imaginings deny women agency, ensnaring them within rigid determinations. Hence, colonial ideologies frame the female other as a “singular monolithic subject”6 through a set of totalizing and “universal images…like the veiled woman, the powerful mother, the chaste virgin.”7 Mihn-Ha refers to these constructs as an

3 Pushkala Prasad, Crafting Qualitative Research: Working in Postpositivist Traditions (Armonk: ME Sharpe, 2005), 280.

4 Anshuman Prasad, “The gaze of the other: postcolonial theory and organizational analysis,” in Postcolonial Theory and Organizational Analysis, ed. A. Prasad (New York: Palgrave Macmillan/St Martin’s Press, 2005), 5.

5 Pushkala Prasad, Crafting Qualitative Research: Working in Postpositivist Traditions, 272.

6 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” boundary 12, no.3 (Spring-Autumn 1984): 333.

7 Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” 352.

89 “overcodification”8 that “de-individualize[s] individualism.”9 Indeed, similar codes emerge in

Margath A. Walker’s 2005 analysis of the portrayal of Indigenous factory workers in Mexico’s industrial maquila zone. Using La Jornada as a primary resource for her study, Walker, a geographer whose work investigates raced and sexed imaginings along the Mexican border, finds that news articles reiterate colonial discourses, depicting Indigenous women as the deviant other or, more specifically, as the “Guada-narco-lupe,” 10 an imagining that fuses the Virgin of

Guadalupe with aberrant femininity. Hence, La Jornada, which is considered “a critical, counterhegemonic news source” 11 and a “progressive daily,”12 exemplifies how journalistic narratives reproduce injurious colonial ideologies that uphold and maintain elite power in the contemporary nation state, despite perceptions that this newspaper contests hegemonic power.

While anticolonial feminist analyses mine and confront discursive representation, this framework also explores textual ruptures and subversive interventions that unhinge colonial

ideologies. As Min-ha suggests, this approach “challenge[s] the regimes of representation that

govern a society.”13 Likewise, Mohanty asserts that this theory rejects constructs that essentialize

women as “powerless”14 victims. Such an analysis thus calls for the interrogation of resistance in

8 Trihn T. Min-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 2-3.

9 Min-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 2, 3.

10 Margath A. Walker, “Guada-narco-lupe, Maquilarañas and the Discursive Construction of Gender and Difference on the US–Mexico Border,” in Mexican Media Re-presentations, Gender, Place, and Culture, 12, no. 1: 96.

11 Walker, “Guada-narco-lupe, Maquilarañas and the Discursive Construction of Gender and Difference on the US–Mexico Border,” 97.

12 Ibid.

13 Min-ha, 2.

14 Mohanty, 352.

90 textual and visual works. Reimagining, restorying, and reclaiming, for example, interject in

dominant narratives, disrupting and contesting colonial determinism. In the context of my research, I address in chapters four through six how the appearance and presentation of

Ramona’s body contests colonial renderings.

In accordance with this theoretical model, I assert that, similar to the positioning of the

West, the Mexican national press—as an apparatus of state power—reproduces colonial discourses. Rather than Orientalism, however, the ideology of indigenismo undergirds asymmetrical relationships, scripting Ramona as the Indigenous other and rendering her as bifurcated imaginings. Indeed, journalistic framings reiterate archetypes inscribed in Mexican cultural narratives, casting La Comandanta as the monstrous mother, a traitorous Malinche, or the suffering savior, a Guadalupean figure who heals and protects. I also view the pages of the

Mexican press as the location of discursive collisions where Ramona asserts autonomy and resistance. In chapter five, for instance, I examine how Ramona enacts subversive performances that draw upon pre-Hispanic ontological notions of embodiment to avert colonial framings, thus unmaking and remaking herself as an agent of history.

Ramona’s Genealogy

Foucault characterizes genealogy as the process of making and unmaking, of continuity and discontinuity, and as an endless negotiation that refuses totality or essentializing discourse, which, thus, rejects delimiting and reductionist historical analysis.15 This process of inquiry is germane to tracing the historical making and unmaking of Ramona—her subjugation and her

15 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 88.

91 struggle against subjugation. While dominant discursive representations define Ramona, she also

counters such determinations. One might consider, for example, that Ramona’s signatory red

huipil articulates this concept. As a symbol of Indigenous identity, the huipil marks Ramona as other in the Mexican nation-state, encoding and determining inferiority. This traditional garment also serves, however, as a synecdoche of Maya resistance and survival,16 signifying autonomy and resistance that, as a marker of gendered positioning, exhibits social status and rank, along with ancestral lineage.17

Rich iconographic designs inscribing the huipil also represent a sacred language that can be read or interpreted by those with knowledge of Maya cosmology and ontology. 18 It is possible, therefore, to view the huipil as an illustration of intertextuality, a Foucauldian notion asserting that text—or, in this case, the body and its apparel—incorporates other texts, narratives, or images, thus forming a network of textual referentiality that resists rigid representational meaning. As a framework for interpretation, the huipil, rather than encoding dominant racialized constructs, invites a multiplicity of meaning that counters and contests hegemonic ideologies, such as those touted vis-à-vis indigenismo.

16 Ámbar Past, Xalik Guzmán Bakbolom and Xpetra Ernandes, Incantations: Song, Spells, and Images by Maya Women (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2005), 65.

17 Margot Blum Schevill, Costume as Communication: Ethnographic Costumes and textiles from Middle American and the Central Andes of South America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986), 1-2.

18 Norma MacLeod, “Maya Dress as Text,” Development in Practice 14 no. 5 (August 2004): 683.

92 The Power of Representation:

CDA and News Analysis

In regard to analyzing the relationship between language and power, CDA, indeed, owes

a debt to Foucault. Encompassing a broad range of theories and methodologies, CDA explores

how words and images reproduce and represent socio-cultural and political meaning, which, in

turn, influences perspectives and shapes understanding. In this way, CDA is particularly relevant

to interdisciplinary scholarship involving the analysis of news text. Although scholars use CDA

in myriad ways, “critique, ideology, and power are constitutive for every approach in CDA,” and

thus form its foundation.19

Theorists Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak, for instance, argue that CDA investigates how dominant ideologies manifest in discursive imaginings, informing the representation of socio-cultural realities. 20 Likewise, Tuen van Dijk asserts that discursive structures “enact, confirm, legitimate, reproduce, or challenge relations of power and dominance.”21 In his earlier

works, van Dijk comments that this approach or stance interrogates social inequalities, including,

but not limited to, sexism, racism, and colonialism. 22 Hence, while this method mines how the workings of power influence or shape dominant imaginings, it also examines moments of representational rupture and defiance that contest power and domination. Because my research

19 Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) (New York: Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, 2017), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251636976_The_Discourse-Historical_Approach_DHA

20 Norman Fairclough and Ruth Wodak “Critical Discourse Analysis,” in Discourse as Social Interaction, vol. 2, ed. Tuen A. van Dijk (London: Sage, 1997), 271-280.

21 Tuen Van Dijk, “Critical Discourse Analysis,” in The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, eds. Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 353.

22 Tuen van Dijk, “Aims of Critical Discourse Analysis,” Japanese Discourse 1 (1995), 17.

93 studies the portrayal of an Indigenous woman within a resistance movement—marking what the

Zapatistas deem “a 500 year struggle against colonialism”23 and state hegemony—CDA presents a relevant methodological structure for my investigation.

Criteria for CDA

Considered both theory and method, CDA examines how individuals and institutions use language to contour certain socio-cultural realities or, rather, imaginings.24 Van Dijk argues that discursive strategies of the dominant group manifest in text, presenting veiled or subtle

hegemonic ideologies that appear to be natural, neutral, or normal—common sense narratives—

in the context of a specific political or cultural event. 25 CDA thus calls for a close critique of language to demystify these constructions, thereby exposing the power relations embedded in textual works. CDA interrogates, for example, style or tone of a particular news article, along with possessive and descriptive adjectives that render dominant discursive representations; the use of pronouns that establish, in some cases, divisive frames; an article’s headline, which connotes the article’s main focus and, importantly, directs the reader’s attention to a specific focus; genre (news article, commentary, or feature), which considers how particular convention structure information; intertextuality, which requires an analysis of historical or cultural references inscribed in textual accounts; and, rhetorical devices that include persuasive and

23 Jose Ramos, Michael Bauwens, and Vasilis Kostakis, “P2P and Planetary Futures,” in Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, eds. Debashish Banerji and Makarand R. Paranjape (San Francisco and New Dalhi: Springer, 2016), 206.

24 Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (London: Longman, 2001), 121.

25 Tuen Van Dijk, “Critical Discourse Analysis,” 279-280.

94 argumentative strategies.26 CDA further calls for an analysis of context and interaction to understand the discursive intricacies of power relations.

Norman Fairclough’s Language and Power identifies text-interaction-context as the three main components of CDA. This tripartite model proposes: 1) that text constitutes the main area of interrogation; 2) that language is both productive and interpretive; and, 3) that text production demands an analysis of wider sociocultural considerations and contexts.27 In terms of textual analysis, Fairclough’s use of CDA also includes the concept of “Members’ Resources” (MR), which asserts that people’s knowledge of language informs and reiterates a representation of social worlds, along with the values, beliefs, and assumptions of that social worlds.28 This aspect

of Fairclough’s work suggests that language carries a history: it draws upon existing images,

notions, and ideas that convey ideological positions. Hence, it is not only the text itself that

demands interpretation, but also the greater social constructs from which text emerges. In order

to decode textual inferences, it is necessary to examine the socio-cultural, historical, and political

contexts that inform language, both visual and textual.

Fairclough’s concept of coherence both employs the idea of MR and expands upon it,

arguing that individuals interpret the connections between parts—or sequences—of a text in relation to previous experiences of the world: the “conception of the world it presupposes. In short, [one] need[s] to establish a fit between text and world.” 29 Fairclough refers to this process as framing, commenting that authors of textual works interpret and translate a specific event,

26 Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, 172-178.

27 Ibid., ix.

28 Ibid., 428.

29 Ibid., 65.

95 reproducing “facets of the world”30 that produce slight “traces of that interpretation.”31 He states that these “traces constitute cues for the text interpreter, who draws upon their assumptions and expectations (incorporated in frames) to construct their interpretation of the text. Thus text interpretation is the interpretation of an interpretation.”32 Such textual fragments serve as convenient and accessible prompts that package, deliver, and expedite meaning, as they move through discursive chains. At the same time, however, an interpretation of another interpretation refutes fixed or stable meaning, inviting multiple readings. Here, Fairclough refers to this process

as stages of interaction, or social cognition, which van Dijk takes up in his extensive discussion

of CDA in relation to discursive dominance.

While van Dijk argues that social cognition, which includes attitudes, ideologies, norms

and values, encourages a study of readership responses to gauge reception of textual meaning, he

maintains, however, that CDA recognizes that external discourses inscribe and inform textual

composition. Hence, language draws upon a pre-existing model that frames and reinforces

general notions, ideas, or historical understandings about events or situations, which are

entrenched in the collective consciousness.33 Language serves, therefore, as a master manipulator, influencing, reminding, and triggering cognitive frames of reference and encoded representational models that circulate as common knowledge.

In “Ideology and Discourse Analysis,” van Dijk suggests that these familiar interpretational tropes and relatable framings infiltrate all levels of society, linking “personal opinions and personal experiences with group attitudes and group relations, including those of

30 Ibid., 67.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Tuen van Dijk, “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis,” Discourse and Society 4 no.2. (1993), 258.

96 power and dominance.”34 In this sense, language stows a reservoir of associations and causal links that produce immediate understandings that can be weaponized and deployed by elite

groups and institutions seeking to control and to protect dominant interests. According to van

Dijk, those wielding power reproduce discourses of domination that effectively manage “social

representation,”35 which strengthens difference and undergirds inequality.

If language calls the world into being or, conversely, obscures it, language resists

objectivity and impartiality, contesting foundational myths of journalistic practice. Inscribed with

historical meaning, language reiterates and reifies dominant cultural narratives and mythologies

that shape an audience’s understanding of a particular issue. Media theorists Elizabeth S. Bird

and Robert W. Dardenne’s “Rethinking News and Myth as Storytelling” contends that

journalists “operate like traditional storytellers, using conventional structures to shape events

into story—and in doing so define the world in particular ways that reflect and reinforce

audiences’ notions of reality.”36

While my research does not gauge readers’ cognitive responses to mediated imaginings, I investigate the historical, cultural, mythological, and political contexts that inform renderings of

La Comandanta Ramona. As a case in point, Mexico’s national press reiterates Indigenismo, a powerful ideological weapon of the state and official propaganda,37 which suggests this ideology

34 van Dijk, “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis,” 258.

35 Ibid., 257.

36 Elizabeth S. Bird and Robert W. Dardenne, “Rethinking News and Myth as Storytelling” in The Handbook of Journalism Studies eds. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsche (New York: Routledge, 2009), 205.

37 César Rivas, “The Rise and Fall of Mexico's International Image: Stereotypical Identities, Media Strategies and Diplomacy Dilemmas,” Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 7, no. 1 (2011): 23-31.

97 serves as a priori knowledge in discursive framings imprinting imaginings of the Zapatista leader.

Indigenismo, CDA, and the

Institutional Production of the Indian in the Press

In “The Ends of Indigenismo in Mexico,” visual theorist Analisa Taylor refers to

indigenismo as official discourses that frame Indigenous peoples in accordance with elite

imaginings. 38 Taylor notes, “In the most general terms, indigenismo inhibits or detracts from indigenous self-representation in both a political sense as well as an aesthetic or symbolic

sense.”39 In Deco Body, Deco City: Female Spectacle and Modernity in Mexico City, 1900–

1939, Ageeth Sluis, a theorist of Mexican visual culture, calls indigenismo “camposcape, a

distinctive form of orientalism that equated exotic landscapes of the countryside with indígenas,

the past, and national identity.”40 Mexican artist and cultural critic Guillermo Gómez-Peña

further argues, “[T]he raison d’être of indigenismo was to favor complete integration and

acculturation. The colonial distinction between Indians and non-Indians had to disappear.”41

Likewise, in his essay, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940,” historian

38 Analisa Taylor, “The Ends of Indigenismo in Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2005): 76.

39 Taylor, “The Ends of Indigenismo in Mexico,” 76.

40 Ageeth Sluis, Deco Body, Deco City: Female Spectacle and Modernity in Mexico City, 1900-1939 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 18.

41 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “The End of Revolutionary Anthropology? Notes on Indigenismo,” in Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968, eds. Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 286.

98 Alan Knight argues that indigenismo attempts to “whiten” 42 Indigenous peoples, thus creating an

“instrumental Indianness,”43 which could be contoured, staged, and confined to the past.

To promote the country’s fledgling tourism industry in the post-Revolutionary period,44

Mexico’s national press—and, specifically, El Universal—exploited and commoditized

Indigenous women in news reports, journalistic photography, and advertisements, imagining las mujeres indígenas as either “humble” 45 symbols of the nation who represented the triumph of

Revolutionary goals or as exotic and passive figures associated with food production and land. 46

Such an aesthetic “equated the exotic with the feminine…and often nude indigenous female

bodies with nostalgic longings for a lost, Mexican Eden: its roots and true nature.”47 As icons of the modern nation-state, “[t]he glory of indigenous women resided in an idealized past and a mythical space, rooted in conquest narratives.”48 However, as Ageeth notes, Indigenous women frustrated both the state’s and the press’ attempts to curate such passivity.49 Rather, as the primary street vendors in Mexico City’s markets during the 1920s and 1930s, Indigenous women staged protests against state regulation and corruption, which threatened their ability to sell their

42 Alan Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940,” in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940 eds, Richard Graham, Thomas E. Skidmore, and Aline Helg (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 100.

43 Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940,” 100.

44 Sluis, Deco Body, Deco City: Female Spectacle and Modernity in Mexico City, 1900-1939, 216.

45 Ibid., 99.

46 Ibid., 62-93.

47 Ibid., 102.

48 Ibid., 113.

49 Ibid., 223

99 goods, and formed unions, including Union Feminina de Comerciantes y Madres de la Familia

and Feminista de Mercados, to protect themselves from government interference.50 In response:

Male revolutionaries, journalists, and union leaders condemned these protests as anarchistic and even anti-revolutionary, although rioting women justified their actions as mothers. Conservative politicians questioned these women’s morals, referring to them as mujerzuelas (loose women) and populacho (rabble), and positioned the virtues of señoras decentes (respectable upper-class women) against female rioters, who (like prostitutes) were seen as lazy and promiscuous women who transgressed traditional gender.51

The state further limited press coverage of the protests, arrested the dissidents, and attempted to

control tourists from photographing the events.52

César Rivas, an economist who employs a mediated analysis of Mexico’s imagining in

five international newspapers, asserts that the contemporary state continues to depend upon the

root paradigm of indigenismo to maintain foreign business investment and its tourist industry. 53

In “The Rise and Fall of Mexico's International Image: Stereotypical Identities, Media Strategies

and Diplomacy Dilemmas,” he argues that “[v]ery few nations enjoy the global recognition for a

vast natural and cultural heritage, its long-standing traditions and the vibrant and original social

life in cities that are for the most part modern, warm and hospitable.”54 During the 1990s, however, Rivas notes that this dominant imagining shifted to one of instability and chaos, due to the Zapatista insurrection and the rise of narco-trafficking.55 This rupture had far-reaching

50 Ibid., 234.

51 Ibid., 7.

52 Ibid., 221-256.

53 Rivas, “The Rise and Fall of Mexico's International Image: Stereotypical Identities, Media Strategies and Diplomacy Dilemmas,” 23-31.

54 Ibid., 29.

55 Ibid., 23.

100 consequences: “a lack of trust from counterparts, an inability to attract people, resources and

opportunities, implying a harsh stigmatization that becomes a negative point of departure for any

individual or company to carry out any business abroad.”56 As Taylor confirms, “the EZLN and other indigenous groups propose a radical break with the ways in which Indian peoples have been represented, in a political as well as a cultural sense. Buoyed by the high-tech, evocative pageantry of its facetiously self-deprecatory aesthetic,”57 this uprising used subversive imaging to invert such romanticized constructs and to call out Indigenous struggles and disparities in the nation state.

CDA and Resistance

While I examine how power and language ascribe and negotiate identity, I also use CDA

to examine how Ramona demonstrates agency in mediated narratives, thereby countering

representational imposition. As van Dijk insists, CDA studies the workings and ideologies of

power in text—along with resistance to mechanisms of power.58 Resistance encompasses a myriad of forms and complexities, along with nuances: it is subversive, often playful, and employs, at times, tenebrous tactics that draw upon, for instance, cultural performance, iconography, and mythologies to communicate emic narratives and subtexts, which are imperceptible to the dominant culture.

56 Ibid.

57 Taylor, “The Ends of Indigenismo in Mexico,” 81.

58 van Dijk, “Aims of Critical Discourse Analysis,” 18.

101 As a case in point, David A. Sánchez’s article, “Re-Contextualizing Resistance: From the

Shores of Patmos to the Barrios of East Los Angeles,” explores how marginalized and colonized

groups reclaim the myths and images appropriated by the colonizer as a means of resistance, and

decolonization in Chicano murals. Sánchez, a visual theorist, asserts that such narratives present

veiled references that purposefully confuse and conceal. Such performances are, according to

Sánchez, “an off-stage performance…serving as a subliminal strategy of survival and

renegotiation.”59 He further states that “the powerful are not in the interpretive position to

decipher the meanings and strategies conjured by those living on the margins of society. And this

fact is the beauty of the whole nature of the appropriation and subversion of dominant

worldviews.” 60 These enactments of resistance—whether coded or explicit—disrupt and disillusion textual imaginings, thus unsettling hegemonic discourse. In the context of my research, resistant performances decolonize historical ideologies and subvert relationships of power, which haunt contemporary society.

CDA further interrogates the interplay between aesthetics and politics within the context of strategic visual communications and, as such, I identify articulations of resistance in the course of my study, noting that displays and performances of the body unsettle mechanisms of

power. I use, in particular, the work of Chicana scholar Emma Pérez, who argues that

decolonizing investigations demand analysis of coded cultural metaphors and visual language,

59 David. A. Sanchez, “Re-Contextualizing Resistance: From the Shores of Patmos to the Barrios of East Los Angeles,” Reflections accessed February 15, 2018, https://reflections.yale.edu/article/end-times-and-end- gamesis-scripture-being-left-behind/re-contextualizing-resitance-shores

60 Sanchez, “Re-Contextualizing Resistance: From the Shores of Patmos to the Barrios of East Los Angeles.”

102 including the use of images, myth, and clothing as a means to locate agency.61 Drawing upon

Pérez’s research, historian Ellie D. Hernández asserts that clothing presents subversive

messaging.62 I further consult the work of María Fernández, a feminist art historian, who uses

Serge Gruzinski’s notion of “mélanges,” 63 or mixtures, as a means to identify the multiple forces informing visuality in the national press.64 According to Fernández, any study related to Mexican visual culture must “contend with the dead.” 65 In the scope of my research, then, it is necessary to excavate layers of visual meaning imprinted within contemporary images of Ramona, analyzing how historical intertexts, such as syncretism, indigenismo, and mythologies, inform and shape or, conversely, repel journalistic imaginings.

Seeing Ramona:

A Framework for Visual Analysis

Similar to language, images serve as a primary source of data in my study. Because news

sources traditionally carry the weight of presumed authority, journalistic photographic works are

taken as truthful and objective, carrying encoded narratives and ideologies that inform

understanding. At the same time, these images reveal counter-narratives that disrupt dominant

61 Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanos into History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 123.

62 Ellie D. Hernandez, Postnationalism in Chicana(o) Literature and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 109-115.

63 Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2012), 181.

64 María Fernández, Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 15.

65 Fernández, Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture, 143.

103 discourses, rupturing and contesting fixed—or stable—meanings. Here, subtexts unsettle and disturb hegemonic imaginings, proffering eruptive declarations that assert autonomy and self- determination.

My analysis of Ramona’s imaging attempts to demystify how journalistic photographs construct Indigenous identity in the Mexican national press, investigating how cultural mythologies and broader historical and political contexts influence imaginings of the Zapatista fighter. Additionally, I explore how images align with each other or, conversely, create discontinuity, a break or rupture, from other images. This approach requires an examination of other images of Indigenous women that appear in newspapers from 1994-2006. This approach adheres to theorist and photographer Allan Sekula’s contention that “the photograph, as it stands alone, presents merely the possibility of meaning. Only by its embeddedness in a concrete discourse situation can the photograph yield a clear semantic outcome.”66 As my research will show, in some cases, images of Indigenous women markedly diverge from that of Ramona’s resistance, serving as a form of visual pushback.

For the investigation of images in this work, I draw upon Gillian Rose’s methodologies, which identify three primary sites for the interrogation of visual texts: the production of the image, the site of the image itself, and the site where various audiences engage with the visual work.67 My research specifically focuses on the latter two sites, as a means to analyze how images both convey dominant ideology and resist dominant discursive representations. Rose encourages researchers to study power relations associated with visual works, the construction of

66 Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” in Thinking Photography ed. Victor Burgin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982), 91.

67 Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (London: Sage, 2007), 16-17.

104 social difference in such works, the demonstration of agency in the image, and how visual

images exist within a greater socio-cultural context. I thus use critical discourse methodologies

that employ an anticolonial feminist analysis to interrogate the workings of power and to

examine how power informs Ramona’s visuality. As Rose suggests, visuality presents “a type of

discourse” that makes things, whether individuals or objects, visible or unseeable and, therefore,

attempts to demystify hegemonic ideologies.68

Rose’s work identifies two types of discourse: 1) discourse analysis I, which examines

discourse, discursive formations, and their productivity; and, 2) discourse analysis II, which

explores issues of power, regimes of truth, institutions, and technologies.69 My visual methodology draws upon a combination of both approaches. My reasoning for melding the two practices is that discourse analysis I primarily “works with visual images and written or spoken texts.” 70 Further, the first method explores intertextuality—images within images, which asserts

that visual works present layered narratives that carry or, rather, imprint historical significance.

This approach constitutes a vital component of my research: histories of dominance and

resistance inform Ramona’s imagining. The second methodological approach explores the

institutional production of subjects in visual works. 71

68 Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, 137.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid., 164.

71 Ibid.

105 Indigenismo in Press Photographs:

Persistence and Discontinuance

Rose maintains that any visual work is culturally constructed.72 In light of this argument,

I analyze imaginings of Ramona within greater socio-cultural, historical, and political contexts, including pre-Hispanic performances and rituals of resistance; Spanish colonial conquest and historical campaigns of extirpation; ecclesiastical strategies of syncretism; and, the state-sired dissemination of indigenismo in national culture and its narrativization of Indigenous history and people in the modern nation state. Again, indigenismo serves as a predominant motif in my research.

Figure 1: Julio de la Fuente, 1940, Yalálag, Oaxaca. Digital Image. Available from Scielo. http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2007-81102008000200006 (accessed October 27, 2019).

Using John Mraz’s visual analysis as a model for my research, I use a genealogical

method of inquiry to investigate photographic representations of Ramona that both contravene

and perpetuate the myth of indigenismo. In Nacho López, Mexican Photographer, Mraz traces

72 Ibid.

106 indigenismo’s imprinting across genres and epochs, not only analyzing its obstinate haunting of

Mexican visual culture, but also identifying moments of rupture and resistance that obstruct continuity. As a point of entry, Mraz argues that photographic research requires a discursive investigation of power, insisting that “Indianist photographers are…hunters involved in a sublimated, predatory, and intrusive pillage of people.73 However, he identifies Julio de la

Fuente’s photographic representations of Indigenous women, which appeared in Mexican newspapers and magazines during the 1950s, as diverging from exoticized depictions featuring

“bare-breasted indígenas.”74 Rather than reiterate these visual conventions, López’s corpus rejected romanticized and exoticized representations, revealing the “hidden underside of the country’s ‘miraculous’ modernization,” 75 thereby disillusioning notions of Mexicanidad

(Mexicanness) (Figure 1).76

In the same vein, Ageeth Sluis posits that Indigenous women’s dissidence served as a

powerful counter-narrative to romanticized and exoticized imaginings in Mexico’s national press

during the reconstructionist period. Employing a mediated analysis that interrogates spectacle

and performativity, Sluis’ research asserts that Indigenous women exploited journalistic

imaginings to wage countervailing actions, using the “power of seeing and being seen and its

attended media.”77 Specifically, while the national press interpreted rebellious women as threats

73 John Mraz, Nacho López, Mexican Photographer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 66.

74 Ibid., 54.

75 Mraz, Nacho López, Mexican Photographer, 1.

76 Ibid., 69.

77 Sluis, 16.

107 to social well-being, associating them with filth, danger, and the sex trade, Indigenous women leveraged these ideological campaigns to demonstrate agency, to undermine patriarchal authority, and to continue the unfinished work of revolution.78

CDA, Power, and Mexico’s National Press:

A Genealogical History

CDA asserts that language and images not only negotiate identity, but also produce it, suggesting that dominant groups and institutions, such as the press, can impose fraught and arbitrary representations that marginalize certain groups while protecting the political elite.79 In

Analysing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis, John E. Richardson, a professor of linguistics, asserts that social power embeds language. According to Richardson, it is “intimately linked with the actions and opinions of (usually powerful) social groups.”80 This author, who draws upon the formative works of Fairclough and van Dijk, maintains that language use in news text is, in itself, a power.

As a case in point, Mexico’s elite repressed political dissent and buttressed authoritarian rule vis-à-vis the control of media structures and the dissemination of information in the national press. Such penetration originates in the reconstruction period when the Party of the Mexican

Revolution (PRM), which, as I mentioned in chapter one, became the Institutional Revolution

Party (PRI) in 1946, intentionally thwarted the development of a free press to protect the party’s

78 Ibid., 2.

79 Richardson, Analyzing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis, 13.

80 Ibid., 1.

108 reign of power.81 In her study of Mexican newspapers, communications theorist Sallie Hughes comments that print media functioned as an appendage of the regime, “reproduce[ing] messages and symbols from the political elite in a one-way channel from rulers to subjects.” 82 According

to Felipe Betancourt Higareda, whose work examines the historical relationship between the

party and the press, technocrats monitored news stories to ensure that their content not only

complied with official party lines, but also eliminated orienting contexts,83 which would restrict

readers from gaining greater discursive understanding of political events. Likewise, Darren

Wallis’ investigation of the Mexican press argues that corrupt and compliant editors and

reporters developed “subservient, biased, [and] self-censoring”84 practices that, aside from sanitizing stories, prevented them from appearing in the pages of the nation’s newspapers. In light of this historical context and my use of CDA, it is not only the content of news stories that requires analysis, but also the absence of information that demands critical inquiry.

81 Felipe Carlos Betancourt Higareda, “The Development of the Media and the Public Sphere in Mexico,” Mexican Law Review 5, no. 2 (2013): 319.

82 Sallie Hughes, “From the Inside Out: How Institutional Entrepreneurs Transformed Mexican Journalism,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 8, no. 3 (2003): 94.

83 Higareda, “The Development of the Media and the Public Sphere in Mexico,” 320.

84 Darren Wallis, “The Media and Democratic Change in Mexico,” Parliamentary Affairs 57, no. 1 (2004): 118.

109 Gacetilla, the “Mexican Miracle,” and the Making of Mexico’s

Authoritarian Media System

Figure 2: No More Marginalization, Gacetilla featuring Donaldo Colosio. Insert in national press publications. Special Collectable Edition for Presidential Candidates, February 1994. With a fragmented market, low readership, and lack of private advertising,85 Mexico’s national press has relied upon official advertising, known as gacetillas, for survival (Figure 2),86

a quid pro quo exchange that impairs journalistic integrity and infringes upon press freedoms

enshrined in the 1917 Constitution.87 Because the state distributes advertising based on political affiliation and endorsement, this system not only nurtures compliance and submission, but also operates as disciplinary form of control and regulation. In his study of gacetillas and the

85 Media Landscapes, “Mexico,” accessed October 29, 2019, https://medialandscapes.org/country/mexico.

86 Mexico’s National Registry of Print Media (PNMI), “Mapping Digital Media,” accessed October 29, 2019, https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/mapping-digital-media-mexico-20130605_0.pdf.

87 Mexico’s National Registry of Print Media (PNMI), “Mapping Digital Media.”

110 country’s national press, José Luis Benavides provides evidence that, from 1925-1982, the state

orchestrated six boycotts of national newspapers for publishing dissenting commentaries,

damaging news stories, or uncomplimentary images of the ruling regime.

In 1928, for example, the ruling party withdrew advertising from Excélsior, resulting in

the newspaper’s financial ruin and its eventual sell to new owner.88 Established in 1917 by

Rafael Alducin, Excélsior served as a predominant force in Mexico’s media landscape and was considered one of its most prestigious national dailies.89 After Querido Moheno, a conservative

editor, wrote an unfavorable commentary about the Calles administration,90 the paper stopped receiving government gacetillas and, later, private advertising. It was only after Excélsior published a state press release on its front page at the end of November that the regime lifted its boycott.91

This codependence deeply imprints the history of Mexico’s press, emanating in the

period of consolidation and the “Mexican Miracle,” which, beginning in the 1940s, marked a

period of tremendous economic growth and political stability in the modern nation-state.92 In

“The Media in Mexico: From Authoritarian Institution to Hybrid System,” Hughes argues that the press and its fleet of journalists upheld this national imagining, depicting the country as an

88 Benavides, “Gacetilla: A Keyword for a Revisionist Approach to the Political Economy of Mexico's Print News Media,” 89.

89 Tim L. Merrill and Ramón Miró, Mexico: A Country Study (Washington: Library of Congress, 1997), 261.

90 Benavides, 89.

91 Ibid.

92 Sallie Hughes, “The Media in Mexico: From Authoritarian Institution to Hybrid System,” in Media In Latin America ed. Jairo Lugo-Ocando (McGraw-Hill Education, 2008), Accessed October 30, 2019 http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uregina/detail.action?docID=345138, 132.

111 exemplar of political stability and as a model of modernization in contrast to other Latin America

nations.93 During this period, elite families allied with the ruling party also took control of the national press, using it as a mechanism to support dominant interests and to protect authoritarian rule. 94

For instance, the “Monterrey Group,” a powerful political faction comprised of wealthy oligarchs, purchased Excélsior (est. 1917) during this period, which served as one of the leading newspapers in Mexico City in terms of readership and circulation.95 Under the editorial power of

Rodrigo de Llano, its opinion page endorsed and supported PRI.96 Additionally, El Universal, founded in 1916, dominated Mexico’s journalistic landscape.97 Through its alliance with PRI, state sponsorship provided 80 percent of El Universal’s press advertising by the 1970s.98

In addition to partisanship and patronage, the one-party regime controlled the production

of newspapers through the Productora e Importadora de Papel, S.A. (PIPSA).99 This state- owned enterprise sold paper stock to newspapers that portrayed the party in a glowing light and cut off supplies when editors and journalists wavered in their support. Indeed, from 1940–1976, no publication independent from PIPSA lasted more than a year.100 As historian Eric Zolov

93 Hughes, “The Media in Mexico: From Authoritarian Institution to Hybrid System,” 132.

94 Ibid.

95 Eileen Ford, “Childhood and Modernity in Mexico City: Print Media and State Power during the “Mexican Miracle” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 9, no. 1 (2016): 118-139. doi:10.1353/hcy.2016.0008.

96 Ford, “Childhood and Modernity in Mexico City: Print Media and State Power during the “Mexican Miracle.”

97 Ibid.

98 Hughes, 140-141.

99 Ibid.

100 Ibid.

112 comments in “Jorge Carreño's Graphic Satire and the Politics of ‘Presidentialism’ in Mexico

during the 1960s,” Siempre!, one of the country’s most respected news magazines, printed

editorials praising PRI, which afforded the publication protection, along with a constant supply

of paper, that allowed it to have the largest circulation of any Mexican news journal to that point

in history. 101

Although Siempre! was surveilled by the Departamento Federal de Seguridad (DFS), the national intelligence agency, editor Páges Llergo’s weekly two-page editorials presented

“constructive yet laudatory” 102 commentaries “accompanied by the graphic of a man (never a woman) looking respectfully upwards toward the presumed ‘ultimate’ audience: the President, as always beyond reproach.”103 Llergo’s endorsements continued during the dictatorship of

Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1964-70), whose hardline approach muzzled the press and stymied dissent, as evidenced by his suppression of the 1968 protests and the military’s slaughter of students in the days prior to the Summer Olympics.

The Tlatelolco Turn:

A Coup at Excélsior and the Rebirth of the Press

In the aftermath of the Tlatelolco massacre, the editors of some national newspapers began moving away from authoritarian-style journalism, questioning and challenging the iron

101 Eric Zolov, “Jorge Carreño's Graphic Satire and the Politics of ‘Presidentialism’ in Mexico during the 1960s,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe 17, no. 1 (2006): 16.

102 Zolov, “Jorge Carreño's Graphic Satire and the Politics of ‘Presidentialism’ in Mexico during the 1960s,” 13-38.

103 Ibid., 13-38.

113 hand of the ruling regime. In Building the Fourth Estate: Democratization and the Rise of the

Free Press in Mexico, Chappell H. Lawson, a media theorist who studies the history of the

Mexican press, contends that this event “proved to be an important turning point for Mexico’s

media,” 104 which began taking a greater critical stance against the regime. This shift was evident in the nation’s flagship newspaper, Excélsior, following a raucous and violent 1976 coup, orchestrated by Mexican president Luis Echeverría.

In the wake of Tlatelolco, the newspaper—with editor Julio Scherer at the helm— published investigative news features—which the gacetilla system had discouraged—that challenged PRI’s omnipotence and questioned its administrative practices, creating pronounced hostilities between the state and Excélsior. Specifically, the paper’s apparent left-wing editorials

criticized Echeverría’s economic and foreign policies, along with the government’s repression of

trade unions, which embarrassed the ruling regime.105 In a country with a long tradition of authoritarian rule and a compliant press, these commentaries were treasonous. On July 8, 1976, pro-regime staff forced Scherer and his allies out of office. In their place, the state found a “more pliable, pro-government team.”106 Regino Díaz Redondo, for instance, took over as editor-in- chief and maintained a close relationship with PRI for the next 24 years of his tenure—including the period of the Zapatista uprising.107

In addition to Excélsior, El Universal, Mexico City’s oldest newspaper, reaffirmed its authoritarian stance and control over journalistic content and unabashedly supported PRI until

104 Lawson, Building the Fourth Estate: Democratization and the Rise of the Free Press in Mexico, 66.

105 Lawson, 66-68.

106 Lawson, 67.

107 Sallie Hughes, Newsrooms in Conflict: Journalism and the Democratization of Mexico (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 136-138.

114 the mid-1990s. After acquiring the newspaper in 1969—one year following the massacre—

publisher Juan Francisco Ealy Ortiz enfeebled its union and positioned himself as despotic

administrator of the newspaper, transforming its content to one dominated by advertisements.108

As Hughes notes, El Universal carried more classifieds than Reforma and Excelsior and, as such, it emerged “from the basement of Mexico City newspaper circulation and ad revenues in the late

1960s to the number one position in the early 1990s.”109

Rather than reigning control over other news organizations, however, the state-ordained coup at Excélsior roused—like that of a many-headed hydra—a rebirth of Mexico’s national print media. As Lawson argues, “The coup at Excélsior would later be recognized as a watershed in Mexican journalism. Those who were expelled from the paper subsequently helped found a series of publications that became the core of Mexico’s independent print media.”110 Scherer, for instance, went on to start the national news magazine, Proceso, that same year, which, by 1982, suffered financial hardship when President López Portillo withheld state advertisement after it published stories critical of his administration.111 Despite these sanctions, Proceso survived and, by the mid-1990s, was selling more than 30,000 copies per issue.112

Reforma and La Jornada further materialized in the wake of this event, unsettling the country’s authoritarian press.113 Founded in 1984, La Jornada, printed in tabloid format that

108 Hughes, Newsrooms in Conflict: Journalism and the Democratization of Mexico, 141-142.

109 Ibid..

110 Ibid., 67.

111 Benavides, 89.

112 Lawson, 62.

113 Gavin O'Toole, The Reinvention of Mexico National Ideology in a Neoliberal Era (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 133.

115 highlights visual content rather than text on its front-page, developed “a complex relationship with Mexico’s political establishment. Some of the paper’s contributors occupied high-level

posts in the regime; others were imprisoned by that same regime.” 114 In order to survive and

cover its operating costs, the paper had to ally itself with individuals in PRI, thus accessing

protection, along with the revenue of government advertising, while denouncing government

policies and invoking radical rhetoric.115 As Lawson states, “La Jornada is a quintessentially

Mexican phenomenon: it is dogmatically anti-government, and it lives off the government.”116

By the mid-1990s, the Zapatista uprising bestowed the floundering paper with a lifeline, which provided in-depth coverage of the insurrection and held almost exclusive access to its leaders in the early months of the revolt, resulting in its daily circulation doubling to 100,000 from January to March 1994.117

Likewise, Reforma’s coverage of the insurrection boosted the fledgling newspaper’s

standing in the national press. Launched in 1993, Reforma established an ambivalent approach to

covering political issues. The newspaper, in fact, declined from publishing an editorial page. Its

opinion pieces, according to Lawson, cover the political spectrum.118 Regardless, Reforma’s editorial direction was, in this period, embedded with the newspaper’s ownership, resulting in biased and business-friendly reportage.119 Opponents attacked the paper’s American-style

114 Lawson, 57.

115 Ibid.

116 Ibid.

117 Oliver Froebling “Internauts and Guerrilleros” in Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space and Relations eds. Mike Crang, Phil Crang, Jon May (New York: Routledge, 1999), 168.

118 Lawson, 78.

119 Ibid.

116 format, accusing it of being an arm for industries in the northern region of Mexico and charging

that it support the National Action Party (PAN).120 Although Lawson notes that the paper has

“excessively commercialized reporting,” 121 he argues that “Reforma’s arrival changed the rules of Mexican journalism. Previously touchy stories on government corruption and electoral fraud were spread across its front page.” 122 Media theorist Darren Wallis upholds this statement, stating that Reforma, in the 1990s, was at “forefront of the journalistic revolution.”123

Controlling Chaos in the Press:

From Salinas to Zedillo

During his sexenio, from 1988 to 1994, President Carlos Salinas, “Mexico’s undisputed master of image management,” 124 continued to exert power over the press and violate newspaper autonomy. In 1991 and 1994, for example, he boycotted La Jornada for publishing articles criticizing his administration’s neoliberal reforms.125 In response to news stories exposing corruption in his administration in 1992, Salinas halted payments to journalists, attempting to punish them for their dissent.126 Prior to NAFTA, Salinas also muzzled press opposition and

120 Ibid., 78-79.

121 Ibid.

122 Ibid., 79.

123 Wallis, “The Media and Democratic Change in Mexico,” 21.

124 Lawson 39.

125 Lawson 32.

126 Lawson, 39.

117 withheld information to get the agreement passed. 127 By blacklisting journalists and using strategic communications, such as press releases, the president “tied Mexico’s media to the regime.” 128 The administration also used PIPSA to control anti-government rhetoric and disseminate PRI propaganda. For instance, Salinas increased the cost of paper and withheld supplies to some publications, which threatened, in particular, La Jornada and Reforma, the latter refusing to accept gacetillas.129

Wracked with allegations of corruption, along with the assassination of two state

officials, a financial crisis due to the devaluation of the peso, and the Zapatista uprising, the

Salinas administration struggled, however, to control dissent in the press. Rather than adhering to an oficialist (official) stance, the national press harnessed the economic benefits of Salinas’ unravelling regime. La Jornada and Reforma, for instance, pursued more critical and aggressive investigative reporting during this period. Even El Universal—still under the directorship of

Ealy—broke ties with the ruling party in 1996.

With the financial protection of El Universal’s advertising base, which protected the newspaper in the case of a boycott, Ealy dissented from his previous support of PRI, waging an attack against President Ernest Zedillo in 1994. Using his newspaper to vent his anger, Ealy confronted Zedillo about the 1994 assassination of Ealy’s friend, PRI presidential candidate Luis

Donaldo Colosio, whom Zedillo had replaced. 130 In response, Zedillo launched a counter-attack

127 Joel Simon, “Breaking Away: Mexico’s Press Challenges the Status Quo,” Attacks in the Press in 1997, Accessed November 2, 2019, https://www.refworld.org/docid/47c567c123.html

128 Lawson 39.

129 Ibid., 34.

130 Hughes, Newsrooms in Conflict: Journalism and the Democratization of Mexico, 89.

118 against El Universal. Initially, Zedillo used conservative columnists at El Universal to ventriloquize his irritation with the non-compliant Ealy. At the president’s urging, El Universal conducted a hostile smear campaign, writing threatening messages about the paper’s critical stance against the regime.131 When this tactic did not stop Ealy from publishing critical editorials, Zedillo commanded that armed federal agents surround the newspaper and arrest Ealy, who was subjected to 96 audits. At one point, Ealy was jailed. 132

This mediated war boosted circulation and, by 1997, both El Universal and Reforma emerged as the leading newspapers in the national press, boasting the highest readership—

300,000 and 200,000, respectively—and advertising content among 45 dailies published in

Mexico City at the time.133 In the aftermath, El Universal transformed its journalistic practices, opening its pages to greater critical coverage of PRI. Hughes notes that, in 1999, El Universal, which had maintained a culture of submission during its 83-year tenure,134 transformed its “lap- dog approach” to one asserting greater analysis and critical confrontation of PRI. From “a publication that focused on stories and columns devoted to insider gossip for the political elite,”135 El Universal began printing investigative reports on political corruption, drug trafficking, and insurance fraud. Meanwhile, Excélsior continued to espouse support for the one- party regime throughout the 1990s, which led to financial instability and newsroom infighting. In

131 Hughes, 144.

132 Hughes, Newsrooms in Conflict: Journalism and the Democratization of Mexico, 127.

133 Hughes, “The Media in Mexico: From Authoritarian Institution to Hybrid System,” 133, 97.

134 Ibid., 109.

135 Ibid.

119 the wake of the 2000 election, Excélsior’s staff removed editor Diaz Redondo from office, after

he attempted to sell the paper to a wealthy ally of the PRI.136

Lawson posits that Ernesto Zedillo’s administration (1995-2000) cleared a path for

changes in the country’s journalistic terrain. During his presidency, Zedillo “reluctantly and

grudgingly”137 agreed to implement a number of reforms protecting the autonomy of the Federal

Electoral Institute (IFE), which, in 2000, resulted with the election of PAN leader Vicente Fox, thus breaking PRI’s longstanding reign of power. According to legal scholar Felipe Carlos

Betancourt Higareda, although the new regime has attempted to distance itself from the strategies of the former regime, “the post-revolutionary regime bequeathed to the new one a media set-up that still poses some challenges to Mexico’s democratization process.” 138 Such challenges include, for instance, gacetillas that continue to infringe upon journalistic integrity.

As Hughes’ research reveals, while other media organizations have managed, since 2000, to steer away from a reliance on official advertising and assert greater autonomy and democratic journalistic practices, the national press, in particular, remains dependent upon the state’s privilege and reward system.139 As a case in point, the federal government withheld advertising from Proceso after it published an article critical of President Felipe Calderon, the leader of PAN who held office from 2006-2012. Whereas the magazine had received 74 pages of gacetillas in

2006, that number dropped to seven in 2009 after it printed the disparaging news story.140

136 Ibid., 136

137 Lawson, 20.

138 Higareda, 321.

139 Hughes, “The Media in Mexico: From Authoritarian Institution to Hybrid System,” 132.

140 World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, “Buying Compliance: Governmental Advertising and Soft Censorship in Mexico,” Accessed November 2, 2019, https://www.cima.ned.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/02/WAN%20IFRA%20-%20Mexico.pdf

120 Despite shifts in Mexico’s political and media landscape, this example demonstrates the legacy

of authoritarianism in controlling the national press.

Research and Rationale

Taking these historical, political, and institutional contexts into account, my research

draws upon Excélsior, Reforma, El Universal, a bilingual publication, and La Jornada, along with its monthly supplements and investigative news magazine, Proceso. My rationale for selecting these newspapers is based on a number of factors. In addition to being published in the

Federal District—the locus of national political power—and presenting similar topical sections, these dailies are, according to Higareda, all major players influencing Mexico’s public sphere.141

Together, these publications capture 65 percent of newspaper readership in Mexico City, the heart of the nation’s media market, and provide a range of ideological perspectives.142 Hence, I consider the political affiliation of each newspaper, its target audience and its journalistic style. I further note the author of news stories, along with its editorial staff, as a framework for interpreting discursive representations of Ramona in Mexico’s national press. As a note, although studies that inform my work attempt to gauge political affiliation, they do not measure or address the more elusive, but potent authoritarian-rooted ideology of indigenismo, which continues to infiltrate textual and visual understandings in the press, regardless of institutional or political changes.

141 Higareda, 321.

142 Hughes, Newsrooms in Conflict: Journalism and the Democratization of Mexico (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 13, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uregina/detail.action?docID=2038854

121

Figure 3. Independence, Ideology, and Circulation of Mexico City’s Newspapers (1995-1996). Graph. From Chappell Lawson, Building the Fourth Estate: Democratization and the Rise of the Free Press in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 63. Lawson’s graph provides one model for assessing ideology, independence, and

circulation in Mexico’s national press from 1995- 1996 (Figure 3).143 Here, the size of each circle represents the average daily circulation; the horizontal axis measures left to right leaning ideology; and, the vertical axis measures independence, which is based on nine factors, such as the percentage of front-page sources dedicated to government officials and the percentage of

news section photographs that depicted government officials. 144 As Lawson’s graph indicates,

Mexico’s print media spans an ideological spectrum in this particular period. Hughes’ study, which examines news stories in the same publications from the late 1990s-2000, classifies the national press’ ideological positionings as the following:

143 Lawson, 63.

144 Ibid.

122 Excelsior represents the authoritarian approach. Following government intervention in newsroom leadership in the 1970s, Excelsior was known for stenographic coverage, support of the PRI regime, and myriad relations compromising autonomy. El Universal represents a transitional case. In the late 1990s, the newspaper underwent a directed change project guided by outside consultants and a reformist editor. Finally, Reforma and La Jornada represent civic-oriented newsrooms.145

These determinations do not, however, go unchallenged. Other scholars, including Arno

Burkholder De La Rosa, argue that institutional ideology is neither fixed nor stable.146

As a case in point, acclaimed journalist and columnist Jaime Avilés complicates Hughes’

findings and unhinges her argument that La Jornada asserts a left-leaning, civic-oriented style of

journalism. Avilés maintains, instead, that La Jornada cleverly disguised its political affiliation

with Salinas through its extensive—and shifting—coverage of dissenting social movements,

including Zapatismo, during the 1990s.147 From 1988-1990, he contends, “La Jornada knew how to combine its magnificent alliance with Salinas and its excellent coverage of social movements.”148 Evidence of this affiliation is further demonstrated in La Jornada’s censorship of Elsa Medina’s 1991 photograph of Salinas.

145 Hughes, 13.

146 Arno Burkholder De La Rosa, “El Olimpo Fracturado: Le Direccion de Julio Scherer Garcia en Excélsior (1968-1976),” Historia Mexicana 59, no. 4 (2010): 1339-1399.

147 Gloria María Guadalupe Serrato Sánchez, “La Construcción de Personajes: El Subcomandante Marcos y la Prensa en México 1994 a 1995,” PhD diss., Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 263.

148 Serrato Sánchez, "La Construcción de Personajes: El Subcomandante Marcos y la Prensa en México 1994 a 1995," 263.

123

Figure 4: Elsa Medina, 1991. Digital Image. 149 In this work, Salinas poses in front of an immense painting of Emiliano Zapata, which

hangs in Los Pinos, the official residence and office of the president (Figure 4).150 In a roguish stance, Salinas sticks his tongue out while closing one eye, winking at the photographer.151

Although Medina staged a journalistic coup in capturing this rare and candid photograph of

Salinas, a president preoccupied with maintaining and curating his image in the press, La

Jornada refused to publish the portrait, arguing it conveyed a hostile and critical view of his

administration.152 As Mraz comments, the image critiqued Salinas’ unabashed appropriation of

149 John Mraz, “Zapata and Salinas, Mexico, 1911 and 1991” in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News ed. Jason Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 38.

150 Mraz, “Zapata and Salinas, Mexico, 1911 and 1991,” 38-39.

151 Ibid.

152 Ibid., 38.

124 revolutionary imagery, while executing neoliberal reforms antithetical to Revolutionary aims in

the period leading up to NAFTA.153 By refusing to print Medina’s photograph, La Jornada not only adhered to traditional practices of compliance that protected the one-party regime, but also overturned understandings and perceptions that it demonstrates counter-hegemonic journalism.

Of all national press publications in this research, La Jornada proffers a significant resource for my analysis. Various media theorists studying the Zapatista campaign in the

Mexican press have long noted the close relationship between the movement and the publication. 154 For example, Pedro Pitarch, a scholar of contemporary Zapatismo, argues that—

from the inception of the uprising—La Jornada and Proceso embedded journalists in Zapatista

territory.155 He states, “La Jornada…not only reported the news, but intervened decisively in the rapid reconstruction of the EZLN’s public image.”156 In turn, the EZLN granted these publications exclusive access to its leaders and communities.157 As discussed in chapter seven, the Zapatistas granted the newspaper private access to Ramona’s memorial, which produced extensive coverage of the leader in the days following her death in January 2006.

Other researchers, including Lynn Stephen, a Latin American scholar, and Judith Adler

Hellman, a political scientist, echo this sentiment. In “Real and Virtual Chiapas: Magic Realism and the Left,” Hellman maintains that La Jornada serves as a clandestine communications arm

153 Ibid.

154 Judith Adler Hellman, “Real and Virtual Chiapas: Magic Realism and the Left,” in Socialist Register, 2000, eds. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (London: Merlin Press, 1999), 174-175.

155 Pedro Pitarch, “The Zapatistas and the Art of Ventriloquism,” Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 3 (2004): 293.

156 Pitarch, "The Zapatistas and the Art of Ventriloquism," 293.

157 Ibid.

125 for the EZLN and that “the Zapatistas count on La Jornada to transmit their messages to the

world…a particular relationship to the Zapatistas that some argue effects its coverage of the

news.”158 This is, perhaps, most evident in 2006, when the ELZN granted La Jornada journalists

exclusive interviews in the immediate days following Ramona’s death. Still, there is debate over

the nature of this association between the Zapatistas and the paper. In the 2001 Socialist

Register, an annual survey of international movements, social scientists Colin Leys, Leo Panitch, and Ralph Miliband accuse Hellman of failing to examine the nuanced complexities of La

Jornada’s coverage of the Zapatista movement. They observe, for example, that not one editorial or commentary from 1994-2001 directly supported or defended the uprising.159

In his work on mediated coverage of Indigenous uprisings in Mexico, Guillermo Trejo argues that La Jornada provides the best coverage of rural Indigenous affairs of all newspapers located in Mexico’s capital. 160 La Jornada is also noted for its visual content and has been described as a “graphic medium,” 161 with images, cartoons, or drawings appearing on most pages. Considering this paper’s significant coverage of Indigenous issues and its commitment to documentary reporting, La Jornada provides a vital resource in which to examine how the uprising is translated to Mexican readers.

Considering claims that Reforma serves as an arm of northern industry, which is tied with corporate business, state deregulation, and privatization, I use this newspaper to gauge whether

158 Adler Hellman, “Real and Virtual Chiapas: Magic Realism and the Left,” 174-175.

159 Justin Paulson, “Peasant Struggles and International Solidarity: The Case of Chiapas,” in The Socialist Register, eds. Colin Leys et al. (London: Merlin Press, 2001), 283-284.

160 Guillermo Trejo, Popular Movements in Autocracies: Religion, Repression, and Indigenous Collective Action in Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 276.

161 John Mraz, “Photography in Mexico,” in Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Photography, ed. Lynne Warren (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1037.

126 this affiliation affects journalistic coverage of Zapatismo. In light of the contentious history between El Universal and the government, along with what is, ostensibly, internal factionalism in the newsroom, I draw upon this paper to assess whether these contexts influence textual and visual representations of La Comandanta.

Analyzing Ramona:

Timelines and Procedures

In order to develop my methodology for this qualitative study, I initially mapped out a timeline of Zapatista events from January 1, 1994 to January 2006, identifying moments in which Ramona emerges as a central figure during the campaign. This timeframe allowed me to create a narrative arc plotting La Comandanta’s insurrectionary work on distinct occasions, including: 1) Ramona’s participation at the initial peace negotiations in February 1994; 2)

Ramona’s attendance at National Indigenous Forum in Mexico City in October 1996; 3)

Ramona’s 1997 speech to students in Mexico City for International Women’s Day; 4) Ramona’s

September 2005 speech in La Garrucha, a village located in the municipality of Ocosingo in

Chiapas, during the inception of La otra campaña (the other campaign); and, finally, 5)

Ramona’s death in 2006. Rather than focus on one particular time period, this approach allows me to assess whether certain themes, discursive patterns, or representational departures appear in the national press. It is important to note that this study does not take a comparative approach nor does it employ content analysis, which uses quantitative methods, gauging, for example, length of article and word count.

In terms of the collection of my data, I examine news stories and journalistic images,

127 along with relevant illustrations in the press, over a six-week period. For each news cycle, I

analyze news coverage three-weeks prior to the event and continue following news content for

an additional three week period. This timeframe allows me to assess greater contextual

framework to develop my analysis. Further, while my work focuses on representations of

Ramona, I also gather news stories, features, commentaries, and images that fall under the

following themes or topics: 1) the Zapatista resistance; 2) Chiapas; and, 3) Indigenous peoples.

This wider lens also allows me to locate La Comandanta within greater social, historical,

cultural, and political processes.

As part of my approach, I pay attention to the form and manner in which these discursive

representations appear in news. Specifically, I note that news genres and their conventions

provide a framework for interpretation. For instance, an opinion piece presents a subjective

viewpoint. Hence, the veil or myth of objectivity does not apply to this particular genre: readers

understand that commentaries reflect personal perspective. Moreover, editorials, in many cases,

reflect the tone and political stance of print media. This genre thus provides significant evidence

for this study. In addition to opinion pieces and editorials, I draw upon other primary resources

from print media, including news stories, investigative and feature articles, photographs, along

with their captions, and illustrations. In cases when the national press publishes similar images from news events, such as press conferences, I choose photographs based on resolution and clarity. I struggled, in particular, with the poor quality of Excelsior’s visual texts, as the paper’s

uncoated, low-grade stock produces blurry and pixelated photographs, contrasting the crisp, clean, and vibrant depictions of Ramona published in Reforma.

128 I deconstruct both textual and visual documents by analyzing form, content, and discourse.

I examine headlines, which summarize news reports and assert a central idea or focus of the news story; specific linguistic selections and signs, such as descriptors; contrastive strategies; grammar; repetition of words and thematic assertions that establish textual patterns; disjunctions that break or disrupt representational patterns; and, intertextuality, which invokes larger socio- cultural and political frameworks and discourses. I further consider how layout features guide or privilege certain textual and visual ideas. I further consider what is absent from news coverage.

For example, while Ramona has a significant role during the first peace negotiations in San

Cristóbal de las Casas in February 1994, several newspapers chose to relegate her to the sidelines of the negotiations, focusing, instead, on Marcos. Such an absence produces a lacuna in the narrative arc of Ramona’s work—not to mention her representation—in Zapatismo.

Conclusion

This qualitative study employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) to investigate textual and visual imaginings of Comandanta Ramona over a twelve-year period from 1994 to 2006. As a qualitative research method, CDA asserts that language and visual texts can become the weaponry of elite groups and institutions that seek to maintain power and control. CDA thus examines the ideological underpinnings of representation as a means to interrogate and to dismantle such power relations. Recognizing that, CDA also seeks to examine resistant responses that unsettle and disrupt impositions of representational power. Foucauldian theory compliments this methodological framework by proposing that, despite being implicated within networks of power and dominance, individuals enact countervailing performances that demonstrate resistance

129 and agency. Additionally, I locate my study within an anticolonial feminist framework that considers intersections of gender, nation, and race in mediated expressions.

130

Chapter Four

Scripting Ramona

Figure 6: Victor Mendiola, La Jornada, February 23, 1994, 5. Chapter four investigates the complexities of evolving and shifting representations of

Comandanta Ramona in the national press from early period of uprising in January 1994 to the

first round of peace negotiations in February 1994 (Figure 1).1 I argue that the Zapatistas

“imagineer”2 visual resistance, staging dramatic performances in which Ramona’s appearances

serve as a defiant leitmotif in the theatre of insurgency. In this particular news cycle, Ramona both performs and resists a multiplicity of real and imagined historical mythic beings inscribed in

Mexican cultural narratives. These references include Indigenous mythologies, religious iconography, and racialized visual constructs that espouse indigenismo, thus presenting a continuum—a similitude—that conjoins Ramona with women from the pre-Hispanic past to the

1 Victor Mendiola, La Jornada, February 23, 1994, 5.

2 Gearóid Ó Tuathail, “Emerging Markets and Other Simulations: Mexico, the Chiapas Revolt and the Geofinancial Panopticon,” Ecumene, 4, No. 3 (July 1997): 313.

131 present. While these mediated imaginings reproduce dominant ideologies and attempt to corral

Ramona to archetypal confinements, she wrests herself, however, from the constrictive

stranglehold of such determinations. By countering the imposition of imaginary trappings,

Ramona, instead, asserts herself as a dissident agent of insurgency.

February 1994:

Packing Heat and Pulling no Punches

Figure 7: Antonio Turok, La Jornada, February 4, 1994, 7. Comandanta Ramona’s first interview and imaging in Mexico’s national press discloses

significant discursive tensions that reify and disrupt cultural narratives pertaining to aberrant

femininity, abortive motherhood, and Indigenous defiance, which not only reify, but also dispute the schema of indigenismo. In La Jornada’s “The People Ordered Us To Begin,” published on

February 4, 1994, Blanche Petrich and Elio Henríquez conduct the first national interview with the Zapatista leaders, along with other members of the Comité Clandestino Revolucionario

132 Indígena-Comandancia (CCRI-CG).3 This article, which features a number of photographs, invokes a number of nuanced intertextual mythologies associated with dissident women from

Mexico’s historical archive.4 Petrich, a journalist based in Mexico City who had previously covered insurgency campaigns in Central America, and Henríquez, the paper’s main correspondent in Chiapas, journeyed on horseback through the Lacandón jungle for two days to reach the CCRI’s military and civilian base in Guadalupe Tepeyac, a Zapatista autonomous community named for the Virgin Mary. 5 Antonio Turok, an acclaimed photographer, also based in Mexico City, accompanied the journalists, visually documenting the trip, and photographing

Comandanta Ramona for the first time.

Turok’s first image casts Ramona as an agent of insurrection, who threatens to overthrow those with power and privilege, which functions as a metaphor for on-going tensions between

Indigenous peoples and the Mexican government (Figure 2).6 Tightly framed without a discernable background, the photographer depicts a hostile stand-off between armed women that imagines violent usurpation: Ramona “cradles” her automatic rifle, its barrel lifted slightly towards Petrich, a journalist armed—perhaps ineffectively—with a pen and notebook.7 By portraying an Indigenous leader—a woman—brandishing a gun in in the face of a journalist, the image imagines Indigenous defiance, inflaming elite anxieties about the other’s capacity to

3 Blanche Petrich and Elio Henríquez, “El pueblo nos ordenó empezar,” (“The People Ordered us to Begin”) La Jornada, February 4, 1994, 1, 6-7.

4 Petrich and Henríquez, “El pueblo nos ordenó empezar,” 7.

5 Ibid.

6 Adriana Zavala, Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender, and Representation in Mexican Art and Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 20.

7 Petrich and Henríquez, 7.

133 provoke hostility in the nation-state. When analyzed in this context, Ramona plays with and

exploits fears associated with Indigenous uprising, scripting herself as dissident subject and

asserting agency over her own imaging, which manipulates or usurps mediated determinations.

In the same vein, Turok’s image vilifies Ramona, illustrating that she is both a real and

imagined threat, a traitor to the nation state who demands violent suppression. By brandishing

her rifle, the Comandanta takes on a positioning of masculine sexuality and power that

emasculates the Mexican state. Coded as phallic, the gun challenges patriarchal rule, inferring

castration, which will, ultimately, emancipate women from oppressive state control. Likewise,

Petrich and Henríquez’s accompanying article depicts Ramona as a rebellious agitator,

emphasizing that she implores other women to take up arms.8 According to the journalists,

Ramona declares: “And my message, that we, as the women, the compañeras, are exploited.

They feel like they are not taken into account, as they feel that they are very exploited, that they already decide to raise their arms, as a Zapatista.”9 Ramona’s charge invites mobilized disorder and chaos, continuing the unfinished work of insurgent women from Mexico’s past. Her cry summons dissident specters—non-compliant women deemed enemies of the state, silenced and discarded, who disquiet archetypal visions of Indigenous femininity and reify anxieties about race and gender. The Comandanta thus embodies the historical present: she threatens because she represents traces of a former presence—those negated from the archive—that imprint the present.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

134 In a Derridean reading, Ramona constitutes the arche-trace, invoking the “unity of

experience,” “always-already-there,” a past “lived appearing.”10 As a signifier of the absent present, she stands for the unrepentant “bad woman,” emulating those who have resisted and challenged matrices of domination and political regimes in other temporal periods and social and cultural contexts. Unbridled and long-storied, traitorous women in Mexican history refuse to be bound and corseted within the suffocating confines of cultural narratives.

Honour among Traitors:

Restorying Ramona, Recovering Coyolxauhqui

In Unframing the “Bad Woman”: Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, and Other Rebels with a Cause, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, a Chicana scholar, argues that the “bad woman” narrative recurs in Mexican culture as a cautionary tale serving to restrain and to punish unwieldy outliers who transgress thresholds of containment.11 Whether it is their failure to adhere to normative constructions of femininity or their defiance of patriarchal structures, non-compliant women are

“dangerous, contagious, viral”12 and deserve, therefore, confinement or eradication to protect the

social body from contamination. Predictably, such mythologies destine the “bad woman” to a

violent fate: abduction, sexual violence, incarceration, decapitation, and, most often, death.13

10 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016), 72, 71.

11 Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Unframing the “Bad Woman”: Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, and Other Rebels with a Cause (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 190-201.

12 Gaspar de Alba, Unframing the “Bad Woman”: Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, and Other Rebels with a Cause, 8.

13 Ibid., 7-9.

135 Like a many-headed hydra, these cautionary tales resist and persist, providing insight into the

violent negation of women’s power as a means to reify patriarchal rule, along with the desire to

control feminine chaos; yet, the regenerative power these myths expose a vulnerability—the

possibility of new imaginings that spar, in representational terms, with dominant readings that

deny women’s agency. Gaspar de Alba points to, for example, the story of Coyolxauhqui, a pre-

Hispanic deity associated with treason, as one example of a female rebel who perturbs Mexico’s mythological corpus. 14

Figure 3: The Coyolxauhqui Stone, c. 1500. Volcanic stone, found at the Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan, Museo del Templo Mayor, Mexico City. Available From Wiki Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coyolxauhqui_stone.jpg (accessed October 3, 2018).

According to the Coyolxauhqui mythology, which appears in Fray Bernardino de

Sahagún’s General History of the Things of New Spain (1569), also known as the Florentine

Codex, Coyolxauhqui conspires with her 400 brothers to kill Coatlicue, her mother, after discovering Coatlicue has been impregnated by Huitzilopochitli, the god of war.15 The brothers

14 Ibid., 192.

15 Ibid., 193.

136 foil the plot, however, and betray Coyolxauhqui, killing her and dismembering her body, which

is then displayed in public as a warning for others.16 According to Cherríe Moraga, a professor of

English, Coyolxauhqui’s campaign against her mother reveals the necessary use of violence to prevent greater suffering: “Coyolxauhqui hopes to halt the birth of the War God…[and] birth of slavery, human sacrifice and imperialism (in short, patriarchy).” 17 In this reading, Moraga casts the deity as a courageous crusader whose failed uprising attempts to abort future bloodshed.

Likewise, Ramona participates in insurrection to force the miscarriage of NAFTA, as its birth induces death for campesinos in the Mexican state. Ramona thus transmutes from traitor to warrior, who, like Coyolxauhqui, has been negated from the annals of Mexican history for her failure to fit comfortably into heroic narratives. As feminist scholar Kelly Medina-López claims,

“Coyolxauhqui is not nice and neat; she is broken, complex, disruptive, and calls into relief the sticky web of identity politics.”18 Such defiance is precisely the reason why Coyolxauhqui rails against disappearance and resists interment.

As a case in point, researchers unearthed her stone relief during a 1978 excavation of the

Catedral Metropolitana in Mexico City, thwarting historical attempts to lock her beneath its foundation, amidst Tenochtitlan’s ruins (Figure 3).19 Measuring nearly 11 meters in diameter and weighing 8.5 metric tons, the circular monolith not only portrays Coyolxauhqui’s horrific

16 Ibid.

17 Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios (Boston: Southend Press, 1983), 147.

18 Kelly Medina-López, "Coyolxauhqui is How I Know: Myth as a Methodological Framework for Knowing in the Flesh" (Las Cruces: New Mexico State University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2017): 163.

19 Joseph Kroger and Patrizia Granziera, Aztec Goddesses and Christian Madonnas: Images of the Divine Feminine in Mexico (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 185.

137 dismemberment, but also attests to her considerable status.20 In The Return to Coatlicue:

Goddesses and Warladies in Mexican Folklore, Grisel Gómez-Cano asserts, “[the deity] wear[s]

a loin cloth typical of those worn by male soldiers, which identifies her as a warrior.”21

Coyolxauhqui’s story reveals the literal and metaphor battle to inter dissident women—and the inability to do so: the deity obstinately resurfaces, rising from the strata beneath Mexico City and restorying the archive. Exhibited at the city’s Museo del Templo Mayor, she reminds viewers of women’s long insurrectionary history—along with its brutality, countering images prevalent in

Mexican popular culture that soften, sexualize, and whiten revolutionary women.22

Similarly, Ramona’s appearance in Turok’s photograph imprints and, thereby, recovers

revolutionary women disappeared in official culture (Figure 2),23 contesting indigenismo’s

iconographic traditions that portray Indigenous women as submissive figures. 24 Her decision to embrace her rifle, for example, counters a vast visual archive that depicts romanticized, folklorized, and sexualized Indigenous women, who are, moreover, muted and ossified.25

Ramona summons, instead, those who unsettle—women codified as the abject and the unusual, the disremembered and the disregarded. As Mexican historian and writer Carlos Monsiváis argues, the state disposed of this history and these women because, like Ramona, they “came from poverty and misery and lived with discrimination and without rights. There were

20 Grisel Gómez-Cano, The Return to Coatlicue: Goddesses and Warladies in Mexican Folklore (Xlibris Books, 2010), 14.

21 Gómez-Cano, The Return to Coatlicue: Goddesses and Warladies in Mexican Folklore, 14.

22 Carlos Monsiváis, “Forward” in Sex and Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Mexico, eds. Mary Kay Vaughan, Gabriela Cano, Jocelyn H. Olcott (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 8-9.

23 Antonio Turok, La Jornada, February 4, 1994, 7.

24 Zavala, 20.

25 Ibid., 13.

138 indigenous and mestizo, born in villages and towns….They were the force that the makers of

History [sic] ignore in order to avoid complications.”26 The latent power of Ramona’s image, then, is that she reminds and recalls, forcing, like shrapnel, sharp fragments of the past to the surface, which pierce the national body and create an “antagonistic fissure” 27 in the

revolutionary canon.

The Language of Resistance:

Disquieting Indigenismo

In “The People Ordered Us To Begin,” 28 Ramona asserts agency and voice, countering conventions in indigenismo that imagine Indigenous women as mute vitalizers of the nation.29

According to Petrich and Henríquez, Ramona is “la única monolingüe (tzotzil) del grupo,”30 the

“only unilingual” member of the group and, as such, speaks her Indigenous language during this interview, which requires a male commander to interpret her words from Tzotzil to Spanish.

Examined within the greater historical framework of indigenismo, a policy predicated upon biological racism, this descriptor summons, however, ideological notions assigning ignorance, along with primitivism, to Ramona.31

26 Monsivais, “Forward,” 8-9.

27 Slavoj Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 126.

28 Petrich and Henríquez, “El pueblo nos ordenó empezar,” (“The People Ordered us to Begin,”), 6-7.

29 Julia Tuñon, “Femininity, Indigenismo, and Nation: Film Representation by Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernández,” in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico eds. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 84.

30 Petrich and Henríquez, 7.

31 Alan Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940,” in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940, ed. Richard Graham (Austin: University of Texas), 100.

139 In “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940,” Alan Knight notes that the official policy of indigenismo attempted to “whiten”32 Indigenous peoples and to eradicate

Indigenous languages, while claiming to valorize Indigenous cultures as roots of the “cosmic nation.”33 As evidence, he asserts that, while this policy officially endorsed Indigenous languages, it “unofficially frowned” 34 upon them. Rather than preserve Indigenous languages,

the state desired to create an “instrumental Indianness”35 that could be staged, muted and framed in accordance with the designs of the elite. By speaking Tzotzil language during the interview with Petrich and Henríquez, Ramona defies this ordering, proclaiming the futility of attempts to silence her tongue.

In addition to demonstrating resistance, La Comandanta’s use of language functions as a shield, which obstructs the journalistic gaze and subverts the asymmetrical power relationship between the journalists, the knowers, and the Indigenous other, the known. Specifically, the journalists’ failure to understand Tzotzil decenters their position of power and authority—and their capacity to imagine Ramona. As language is considered, for Maya peoples, “a principle symbol of identity” 36 and “as the principal means through which identity is transmitted,”37

Ramona cannot be known or made apparent through journalistic representation. In this

32 Knight “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940,” 100.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Nora C. England, “Maya Linguists, Linguistics, and the Politics of Identity,” Texas Linguistic Forum 45 (Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Symposium about Language and Society, Austin, 2002): 43.

37 England, “Maya Linguists, Linguistics, and the Politics of Identity,” 43.

140 encounter—between the journalists and Indigenous other—language thus becomes a tactic of

counter-discursivity.

In response, Petrich and Henríquez draw upon deterministic journalistic configurations, waging a discursive battle that attempts to reestablish order by mythologizing dissident women as exceptional and preternatural—be it apotheosized ascetics or demonized Mexican Eves who perform prodigious feats outside of the realm of the ordinary. Petrich and Henríquez note, for example, that Ramona is “the only woman” 38 in the command and “one of the oldest leaders of the guerrilla group.” 39 As the only woman, she is, indeed, an anomaly, but also an exception, thus easing imagined fears of Indigenous women’s mobilization and alleviating socio-cultural anxieties concerning feminine deviance. Moreover, the article mentions that Ramona represents

Indigenous women.40 In this characterization, Ramona neither speaks for male counter-parts, nor does she represent them, a silencing that, again, limits agency and invalidates her rank, thereby protecting a hierarchy that privileges male authority. Petrich and Henríquez thus disarm Ramona as either an imagined or real threat to the Mexican state and patriarchal social order, reifying the aggressive culture of machismo that demands women’s obedience.

Despite this mediated framing, when Petrich asks the commanders why men, women, and children have decided to participate in the revolutionary organization, Ramona’s male counterparts defer to her.41 La Comandanta, in turn, responds, unsettling Petrich from her position as an omniscient narrator:

38 Petrich and Henríquez, 8.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

141 Why? Because women are also living in a more difficult situation, because women, women are more exploited, still strongly oppressed. Why? Because women for many years, since 500 years ago, do not have their rights to speak, to participate in an assembly.

They have no right to education or speak to the public or have any office in their town. No. Women are totally oppressed and exploited.

We rise at three in the morning to prepare corn and from there we have no rest until everyone has already slept. And if there is not enough food, we give our tortilla to the children, to the husband.42

By reiterating Petrich’s question and then restating a succession of phrases in her riposte,

Ramona uses anaphora as a rhetorical device to emphasize her claims, which further establishes a tone of mockery that derides Petrich for asking the question. In doing so, Ramona, once again, destabilizes the journalist’s power and pronounces the profound social and cultural divide that segregates herself—an Indigenous woman—from Petrich, a woman of privilege. Moreover, although Ramona claims that she, as an Indigenous woman, does not have the right to express herself publicly,43 she does, indeed, use La Jornada as a conduit to voice Indigenous grievances in the national press, contesting political exclusion and social expulsion from the nation-state.

Here, Ramona also references the Women’s Revolutionary Law, which she developed along with other Zapatista women in March 1993.44 During this period, the Zapatista leader travelled throughout the Chiapas countryside and consulted Indigenous women to gauge social, political, and economic barriers of campesinas.45 Based on these discussions, Ramona, and her compañeras (female comrades) authored the Women’s Revolutionary Law.46 This document

42 Ibid.

43 Petrich and Henríquez, 8.

44 Karen Kampwirth, Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 115.

45 Kampwirth, Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, 115.

46 Ibid.

142 outlines ten articles enshrining the rights of Zapatista women, including, for example, the right to

work and to receive a fair salary; the right of reproductive autonomy; the right to healthcare and

nutrition; and freedom from sexual violence, along with other forms of abuse.47 The list also includes the right to participate in revolutionary campaigns, thus proclaiming that a woman’s rightful place is in the struggle.

Figure 4: Antonio Turok, La Jornada del Campo, January 25, 1994, 3. Turok’s photograph of armed and unmasked EZLN soldadas (female soldiers) in fatigues

reinforces Ramona’s declaration, thus contesting official constructs romanticizing Indigenous

women as passive campesinas confined to the domestic sphere (Figure 4).48 Published in La

Jornada del Campo on January 25, 1994—less than two weeks before Ramona’s first photograph in the national press—Turok’s image depicts three members of the Zapatista army brandishing bayonets on a sidewalk following the siege of San Cristóbal de las Casas. Framed against one of the city’s quaint colonial buildings that now displays EZLN graffiti—a mark of

47 Ibid.

48 Antonio Turok, La Jornada del Campo, January 25, 1994, 3.

143 the rebels’ incursion and claim—one woman smiles, while her counter-parts appear with their backs turned to the camera, revealing long braids that fall along their uniforms. In addition to the bayonets, machetes hang in embroidered sheaths from their belts, a juxtaposition that retaliates against indigenist framings. Rather than using their artisanal skills to weave traditional huipiles

(blouses) or fajas (belts), articles most often displayed in folklorized photographs of Indigenous

women, these insurgents create textiles to support tools of insurgency.

A threatening departure from official cultural conventions, Turok’s photographs bare

indigenismo’s vacuity and expose its slippery machinations.49 Ramona and her female comrades thus become enemies of ideological order, “outside disorders” 50 who wage “decomposition,” 51 disturbing, according to Slavoj Žižek, the power of the sublime object. According to Žižek, this sublime object promotes fantasy as reality:52 it grasps and concretizes elusive and fragile notions, masking and protecting the ideological core of power. At the same time, however, this object

“dissipates itself, precisely because in itself it is nothing at all.” 53 He argues, “The notion of

social fantasy is…a necessary counterpart to the concept of antagonism: fantasy is precisely the

way the antagonistic fissure is masked. In other words, fantasy is a means for an ideology to take

its own failure into account in advance.” 54 By disfiguring indigenismo’s cultural imaginary,

Ramona miscarries symbolic order and splinters social fantasy, disclosing the frailty of state

49 Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 118-124.

50 Ibid., 143.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid., 118-124.

53 Ibid.,192.

54 Ibid., 126.

144 ideologies. Regardless, in Mexico’s print media, Indigenismo’s mythic women reappear, waging a discursive battle against Ramona’s incursion.

Menchú/Malinche’s Strategic Ambivalence:

Nobel Prize Winner, Nobel Savage, and Nobel Traitor?

Figure 5: Excelsior, February 4, 1994, A.40. A photograph published in Excelsior and La Jornada on February 4, 1994—the same day Ramona first appears in national news coverage—portrays Maya Nobel Prize recipient

Rigoberta Menchú with President Salinas, attempting, perhaps, to position the human rights activist as the “Noble Savage,” a figure who facilitates Indigenous conquest and subjugation

(Figure 5).55 Framed by a sweeping staircase in the reception area of Los Pinos, the official

residence and office of the president, the image captures an intimate moment between Menchú

55 Excelsior, February 4, 1994, A. 40.

145 and Salinas. Gazing intensely into one another’s eyes, they clasp each other’s arms, suggesting

that Menchú’s supports the president. The photograph’s caption further states that Menchú

“expressed to President Salinas de Gortari her approval of the Mexican government’s actions to

resolve the conflict in Chiapas.”56 By portraying Menchú as an ally of the oppressor, Excelsior’s image suggests that the Indigenous activist genuflects to the authority of the Mexican government; whereas, Ramona, in contrast, provokes and agitates the state.

Figure 6: Diego Rivera, The Grand Tenochitlan, 1945, (La Malinche, detail of mural). Available from Wiki Tree. https://www.wikitree.com/photo/jpg/Tenepatl-1-3 (accessed October 18, 2019).

Menchú’s supposed support for Salinas reveals the complicated and strained

configuration of Indigenous women in Mexico’s history, highlighting representational tropes

associated, in particular, with the Virgin/Whore. While the elite might imagine Menchú’s

decency, civility, and respectability, Indigenous supporters of the uprising possibly view her as a

traitor. The press’ imagining of Menchú as Indigenous mediator conjures, in particular, La

Malinche from Mexico’s mythological archive, a cultural root paradigm from the sixteenth-

56 Excelsior, A. 40.

146 century that recurs in contemporary visual, literary, and popular expressions.57 Considered a

mediator and facilitator of conquest, La Malinche, who is also referred to as Doña Marina or

Malintzin, was a Maya woman who served as translator and concubine for Hernan Cortés, the

conquistador who led Spanish Conquest in Mexico.

According to the mythology, La Malinche was given as a slave to Cortés and, later, bore

him a child, betraying Indigenous peoples by birthing mestizo culture and the hybrid nation. 58

She is also known, therefore, as La Chingada, meaning “the fucked woman,” since, through her

body and her voice, she enables Spanish domination. 59 Excelsior’s depiction thus imagines the

Nobel Prize winner as the infamous Indigenous whore, which invokes, for example, an illustration of La Malinche in Diego Rivera’s 1945 mural, The Grand Tenochitlan, located in the heart of the federal government—Mexico City’s National Palace (Figure 6). Rivera, whose iconic works reproduce official state narratives in dramatic visual form, reifies indigenismo’s injurious ideologies, espousing bifurcated archetypes that attempt to limit Indigenous women’s agency.60

Excelsior’s photograph also discloses, however, a nuanced counter-narrative that ruptures this interpretation. Rather than political prop, Menchú’s performativity of the body asserts autonomy and agency, using cultural semiotics—such as dress, ritual, and posture—to

57 See, for example, Domino Renee Perez, There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008).

58 Octavio Paz, “The Sons of the La Malinche,” in The Labyrinth of Solitude and The Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States: The Philanthropic Ogre, trans. Lysander Kemp, Yaro Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 20-21.

59 Paz, “The Sons of La Malinche,” 20-21.

60 Jeffrey Belnap, “Diego Rivera's Greater America Pan-American Patronage, Indigenism, and H.P.” Cultural Critique 63 (Spring, 2006): 61.

147 discursively produce political resistance, which, according to feminist author Sylvia Marcos,

upends dominant constructs of Indigeneity in Mexican culture.61 While Marcos argues that

Menchú’s tactics often confound and trouble, she contends that the icon’s subversive political enactments empower. The author asserts:

Although Rigoberta Menchú is a controversial figure within the pan-Mayan movement, her initiatives on behalf of indigenous struggles in the Americas are significant. Her strategies are sometimes questionable, but she has undoubtedly become an icon of the capacities of indigenous women to transcend the suffering, limitation, and discrimination that result from not only their gender but also their class and ethnicity.62

For example, in the photo-op, Menchú raises her head so that she can look Salinas directly in the eyes and she does not smile, contesting indigenismo’s prescribed passivity and abnegation, which shifts imaginings of Maya women in the nation-state.

Moreover, by wearing her traje (traditional dress) in the presidential office, she intervenes in a space designated for the political elite—not Maya women—her traje a potent marker of resistance that destabilizes order and conservative uniformity. As professor of Latin

American literature Alicia Borinsky affirms, “Embroidery, fine textiles, and color combinations embody [Menchú’s] stand against dominant cultures.” 63 Maya scholar Victor D. Montejo argues that, in this particular context, such performativity disrupts subjugation and stereotype, unsettling notions of Indigenous inferiority and ignorance.64 In Maya Intellectual Renaissance: Identity,

61 Sylvia Marcos, “Mesoamerican Women's Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Beliefs,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 25, no. 2 (2009): 26.

62 Marcos, “Mesoamerican Women's Indigenous Spirituality: Decolonizing Religious Beliefs,” 26.

63 Alicia Borinsky, “In Barbieland: The Triumph of Wardrobes,” Hopscotch: A Cultural Review 2, no. 2 (2001): 60-63, https://muse.jhu.edu/

64 Victor D. Montejo, Maya Intellectual Renaissance: Identity, Representation, and Leadership (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 162.

148 Representation, and Leadership, Montejo maintains that the traje intercedes, contests, and subverts racialized constructs. She confirms:

This is especially true for women who wear traditional dress…. But if Mayas, even those with doctorates, show up in traditional dress, the clothing they normally use, they are not considered intellectuals but rather Indians or campesinos. This artificial perception accords intellectuality only to those who are dressed according to the stereotype. 65

When considered in this light, Menchú’s decision to wear a traditional dress for her meeting with

Salinas presents a countervailing performance that asserts self-determination, which demonstrates a conscious decision to rupture this monolithic imaginary.

Monstrous Motherhood:

Nurturing the Seeds of Rebellion

Figure 7 (left): Eugenio Bermejillo, Indianismo Indio, La Jornada del Campo, January 25, 1994, 9; Figure 8 (right): Boris Viskin, Madre Patria, La Jornada del Campo, January 25, 1994, 9.

65 Montejo, Maya Intellectual Renaissance: Identity, Representation, and Leadership, 162.

149 In “The People Ordered Us To Begin,” Petrich and Henríquez script Ramona as a traitor of the maternal, an aberrant figure who deviates from essentialized understandings of natural or normative femaleness, thus codifying abortive mothering, violent femininity, and wayward womanhood.66 They note, “[Ramona] has no children, having chosen long ago between maternity and an old carbine she now embraces.”67 By “choos[ing]” 68 to “embrac[e]”69 insurgency and dissidence, Ramona fosters the seeds of rebellion and chaos: her body does not conceive, therefore, life, but violence. A similar imagining appears in La Jornada del Campo on

January 25, 1994, one week prior to Petrich and Henríquez’s feature.

Published in the body of journalist Eugenio Bermejillo’s article, “Indianismo Indio,”

which examines the roots of the Zapatista uprising and debates the implications of insurrection,70

Boris Viskin’s illustration, “Madre Patria,” or Motherland, codes Mexico as a pregnant

Indigenous woman whose womb carries not a child, but a grenade (Figures 7 and 8).71 A crude and grotesque rendering, Viskin’s drawing portrays a naked woman, her swollen belly gestating a bomb, which, ostensibly, she will deploy after birth. While this figure lacks facial features,

Viskin highlights her sexuality, presenting nipples and public hair, depicted as a dark, inverted triangle between her legs.

When analyzed together, both Viskin’s illustration and Petrich and Henríquez’s textual

66 Petrich and Henríquez, “El pueblo nos ordenó empezar,” (“The People Ordered us to Begin”), 7.

67 Ibid., 7.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid.

70 Margaret McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 86.

71 Boris Viskin, “Indianismo Indio,” La Jornada, January 25, 1994, 9.

150 description imply that, while the state creates the conditions for Indigenous revolt, it is

Indigenous women who carry future reprisal. Such malignant imaginings point to greater

ideological underpinnings, which weaponize Indigenous women’s bodies and associate their

reproduction with destruction and disorder. These understandings not only encourage cleansing

and sterilization, but also justify the state’s use of violent measures to quash insurgency, which

include the killing of women to prevent social upheaval.

Figure 9: Antonio Turok, La Jornada, February 6, 1994, 8.

In addition to this text, Turok’s second image of Ramona, published in La Jornada on

February 6, 1994, espouses notions of deviant femininity and maternal disorder (Figure 9). 72

Framed in the dense Lacandón rainforest, this furtive snapshot depicts Ramona cradling her semi-automatic weapon as she walks behind a male insurgent, who lurches—gun in hand— precariously close to the viewer. Although partially obscured, La Comandanta invades and, thereby, disturbs the male-terrain of insurgency, lurking as a threat in the background. The

72 Antonio Turok, La Jornada, February 6, 1994, 8.

151 photograph’s deep black tones and dramatic lighting further heighten visual tension, evoking a

sense of fear and anxiety that metaphorizes Ramona’s feral femininity with this savage natural

environment, an imagined heart of darkness from which she emerges. An extension of a

dangerous and disordered landscape, Ramona embodies its volatilities and hostilities, an

imagining that pronounces her deviant nature. As Petrich and Henríquez comment, “[Ramona] is

small, with military boots covered in mud beneath her traditional skirt.”73 Such a description suggests that Ramona is, indeed, sullied and tainted, outside of the contained and ordered space of domesticity and the parameters of femininity. The juxtaposed image of combat boots beneath a “traditional skirt” 74 further articulates the notion of dissident and unruly femininity that aggressively divests from official imaginings of maternal passivity.75

Predicated upon potent mythologies and ubiquitous iconography, Mexico’s cult of

motherhood serves as a dominant ideological force that carries tremendous weight and

authority.76 The coercive strength of maternalism derives, in part, from the induction of Marian

devotion in colonial New Spain and mendicant orders’ attempts to eradicate the worship of

Indigenous deities.77 The Franciscans, in particular, led this campaign, substituting, for instance, the Maya goddess Ix Chel and the Aztec goddess Tonantzin—both maternal warriors—with a docile Virgin Mary, who symbolized a new standard of feminine virtues and ideals.78 Forged and

73 Petrich and Henríquez, 7.

74 Ibid.

75 Evelyn P. Stevens, “Machismo and Marianismo,” Society, 10, no. 6 (September 1973): 55-63, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02695282

76 Kroger and Granziera, Aztec Goddesses and Christian Madonnas: Images of the Divine Feminine in Mexico, 3.

77 Ibid.

78 Amara Solani, Maya Ideologies of the Sacred: The Transfiguration of Space in Colonial Yucatan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 7.

152 wrought in this historical context, marianismo and the madre abnegada emerged as national root paradigms that continue to map elusive gendered constructs in contemporary Mexican culture.

In “Machismo and Marianismo,” political scientist Evelyn P. Stevens locates marianismo within the parameters of cultural feminism, which essentializes women as morally and spiritually superior to men.79 As part of this ideology, the pain of childbirth promises “sainthood.” 80

Importantly, rules governing supreme motherhood require self-negation: “abnegación—

selflessness, martyrdom, self-sacrifice, an erasure of self and the negation of one’s outward

existence,” 81 along with the tenets of piety, self-sacrifice, and asexual mothering. Without children or a husband, however, Ramona defies this pattern of femininity, which relegates her to the profane, an apostate who rejects the tenets of marianismo. Her decision to participate in insurrection further signifies her proclivity for violence, a selfish act that rebuffs the possibility of sainthood.

79 Stevens, “Machismo and Marianismo,” 63.

80 Ibid.

81 Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano. eds., Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 15-16.

153

Figure 10: La Jornada, February 6, 1994, 10. Published on the same day as Turok’s photograph, La Jornada’s evocative image of an

anguished campesina attempts to disarm Ramona’s dissidence, reencoding idealized

constructions of Indigenous femininity with submission and passivity, which serve as a visual

counter-narrative that quells La Comandanta’s potency and, by extension, attacks Zapatismo

(Figure 10).82 Imbued with Christian iconography, the photograph incarnates a weeping campesina as the iconic Mater Dolorosa, which portrays a grieving Virgin Mary with swords impaling her heart following Jesus’ crucifixion. La Jornada’s revisioning, however, depicts a distressed Indian mother who weeps in front of a flag bearing the image of Emiliano Zapata.83

Here, an Indigenized Mary grieves Zapata, a martyr who fought for land reform, mourning not only her ancestral son, but also the loss of Revolutionary ideals. For a nation that sustains

Zapata’s life and that claims se queda (he remains), La Jornada’s photograph pronounces him

82 La Jornada, February 6, 1994, 10.

83 Ibid.

154 dead, waging visual warfare that critiques the contemporary Zapatista uprising as futile and

ineffective: neither Zapata nor the revolution can be revived.

Although the photograph’s close cropping limits contextual details, which impedes visual

meaning, its placement in the layout of the page provides a framework for understanding the

ideological weight and potency of this image. Located next to a news story about a march for

peace in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the reader learns that the sorrowing campesina is a

participant in the event. When examined in this context and when analyzed in relation to Turok’s

photograph of Ramona, this image becomes a formidable tool of revisionism, deflection and

refraction. Specifically, this imagining diminishes the state’s role in perpetuating suffering,

blaming, instead, Ramona and Indigenous-led intercommunal violence for initiating violent

rebellion that wreaks brutality upon its own people. The image thus weaponizes the Indian Mater

Dolorosa, her suffering a ruse in a campaign of counter-insurgency that assigns the uprising with

hypocrisy and stories Ramona as La Malinche.84

Like the vilified mother of the nation, Ramona becomes both traitor and tormentor, which

absolves the sins of the Mexican father and delivers the nation-state from its role as oppressor. In

Indigeneity in the Mexican Cultural Imagination: Thresholds of Belonging, Analisa Taylor

asserts that La Malinche serves as a convenient culprit and a vexed mother responsible for the

defeat of Indigenous peoples and the downfall of the entire Aztec Empire.85 Taylor states, “Like

84 Jacqueline Gerson, “Malinchismo: Betraying One’s Own” in The Cultural Complex: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society eds. Thomas Singer, Samuel L. Kimbles (New York: Brunner- Routledge, 2004): 40-41.

85 Rebecca Overmyer-Velazquez, "Christian Morality in New Spain: The Nahua Woman in the Franciscan Imaginary" in Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, eds. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 72.

155 the biblical Eve, Malinche is the scapegoat, the ambivalent accomplice.”86 This reading further accords Ramona the de facto—and much maligned—role of La Llorona, who, as a conflation of

La Malinche in contemporary Mexican culture, executes the ultimate act of betrayal, filicide.

Figure 11: La Llorona (Cihuacóatl) depicted as a flying snake, Florentine Codex (C. 1575). Illustration. Available from Revolvy. https://www.revolvy.com/page/Cihuac%C5%8D%C4%81tl (accessed July 15, 2018).

Referred to as Xpuch, which translates to Wailing Woman, along with Lust Woman and

Cihuacóatl, the story of La Llorona first appears in the Popol Vuh (300 BCE), one of the few

texts to survive sixteenth-century extirpation.87 In this account, enemy lords send Xpuch to defeat rival K’iché gods.88 When Xpuch refuses to follow the gods’ commands, they punish her, turning her into the first prostitute.89 Following Spanish Conquest, around 1590, Xpuch

86 Analisa Taylor, Indigeneity in the Mexican Cultural Imagination: Thresholds of Belonging (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 85.

87 Dennis Tedlock, Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 15.

88 Tedlock, Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings, 15.

89 Ibid., 49.

156 transforms into the Hispanicized La Llorona (Figure 11), who drowns her children in a river after

her lover, Cortés, the Spanish conquistador, threatens to leave her and take their children.90

According to mythology, she continues to wander near lakes and rivers at night, wailing and crying, searching for her children.

In the end, these cultural narratives condemn Indigenous women to the same fate: the

virgin becomes the whore and the whore attains sainthood, only to be, in a predictable sequence,

de-canonized. Alternative readings of these images, however, intervene in these limiting patterns, identifying “antagonistic fissures”91 that disclose deeper ideological undercurrents. A

Žižekian approach, for instance, suggests that photographs of the Indigenous Mater Dolorosa and La Comandanta disguise their own ideological defects and inconsistencies.92 Hence, these images reveal the futility of attempts to impose abnegación upon the campesina and treachery upon Ramona. Additionally, feminist theorists, such as Cherríe Moraga, Renee Perez, and Mary

Louise Pratt argue that substantial fault lines lurk below the foundations of cultural mythologies. 93 Moraga contends that La Malinche asserts agency and bodily autonomy,

“represent[ing] affirmation: of a woman’s freedom to use her mind, her tongue, and her body in the way that she chooses and to cultivate her intellectual skills for her own survival and empowerment.” 94 Similarly, Renee Perez maintains that La Llorona’s desperate actions

90 Renee Domino Perez, There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 2-3, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uregina/detail.action?docID=3443351

91 Žižek, 126.

92 Ibid., 49.

93 Mary Louise Pratt, “Yo Soy La Malinche": Chicana Writers and the Poetics of Ethnonationalism” Callaloo, 16, No. 4, (Autumn 1993): 860. Alicia Gaspar de Alba, “Malinche’s Revenge” in Feminism, Nation and Myth: La Malinche, eds. Rolando Romero and Amanda Nolacea Harris (Arte Público Press, 2005), 55, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uregina/detail.action?docID=3115151

94Gaspar de Alba, “Malinche’s Revenge,” 55.

157 demonstrate a desire to protect her children from the loss of their mother. 95 She notes, “Within

this context, the woman’s actions are a direct response to Spanish cultural, economic, or social

oppression. As such, she emerges as a figure of resistance rather than a complete cultural

villain.” 96 A spectral figure, La Llorona continues to haunt those she encounters, wailing in grief for her children and rupturing the canonical silence.97 Likewise, by rejecting motherhood and taking up arms to resist mechanisms of state power that promote Indigenous genocide, Ramona gives life to future generations.

Much Ado About Marcos

Figure 12 (left): Proceso, January 10, 1994; Figure 13 (right): Proceso, February 21, 1994.

. 95 Perez, There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture, 55.

96 Renee Domino Perez, “The Politics of Taking: La Llorona in the Cultural Mainstream,” Journal of Popular Culture 45, no. 1 (2012): 155.

97 Perez, There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture, 2.

158 In this specific news cycle, few images of Ramona appear in the national press. While the

EZLN restricted journalists from accessing Zapatista communities and, in particular, members of

the General Command,98 there is another reason for this lacuna. Specifically, Mexico’s national print media exalted the enigmatic Subcomandante Marcos as the leader and mastermind of resistance, and, as such, he became a wanted man on the pages of broadsheets and investigative magazines. Deemed “Marcos Mania,”99 in the national press, by the end of March in 1994 “the subcomandante stared out from every magazine cover and daily paper in Mexico.” 100 As evidenced on the covers of Proceso’s January 10, 1994 (Figure 12)101 and February 21, 1994

(Figure 13)102 editions, the masked spokesperson transformed into Zapatismo’s central protagonist, obscuring and overshadowing Ramona—along with other members of the EZLN— from the spectacle of uprising. Under editor Julio Scherer, both Proceso and La Jornada, for instance, dedicated significant coverage to the Zapatista campaign, publishing—in their entirety—Marcos’s lengthy communiqués, which resulted in increased sales.103 La Jornada, in particular, doubled its daily circulation to 100,000 during the first three months of the Zapatista

98 Pedro Pitarch, "The Zapatistas and the Art of Ventriloquism," Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 3 (2004): 293.

99 John Ross, The War Against Oblivion: The Zapatista Chronicles (Monroe: Common Courage Press, 2000), 53.

100 Ross, The War Against Oblivion: The Zapatista Chronicles, 53.

101 Proceso, January 10, 1994.

102 Proceso, February 21, 1994.

103 John Ross, El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City (New York: Nation Books, 2009), 350.

159 campaign.104 For these publications, access to Marcos and his image was key to a swell in readership.

Figure 14 (left): Tataranieto del Ahuizote, a supplementary feature in La Jornada, February 2, 1994, 8; Figure 15 (right): Tataranieto del Ahuizote, February 24, 1994, 8. Moreover, Mexico’s national press shaped Marcos’ mythic persona, casting the figure as

a conflation of Emiliano Zapata, revolutionary leader Che Guevara, and American action hero

Rambo (Figures 14 and 15).105 In his 1995 examination of Marcos, Chicano performance artist

Guillermo Gómez-Peña refers to the spokesperson as the “subcomandante of performance.” 106

He asserts:

[Marcos became a] collage of 20th-century revolutionary symbols, costumes and props borrowed from Zapata, Sandino, Che, and Arafat…the latest popular hero in a noble

104 Oliver Froebling “Internauts and Guerrilleros” in Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space and Relations eds. Mike Crang, Phil Crang, Jon May (New York: Routledge, 1999), 168.

105 Tataranieto del Ahuizote, La Jornada, February 2, 1994, 8; Tataranieto del Ahuizote, La Jornada, February 24, 1994, 8.

106 Guillermo Gómez-Peña “The Subcomandante of Performance,” in First World, Ha Ha Ha! The Zapatista Challenge, ed. Elaine Katzenberger (San Francisco: City Lights 1995), 90.

160 tradition of activists [...] who have utilized performance and media strategies to enter in the political wrestling arena of contemporary Mexico.107

As a case in point, Tataranieto del Ahuizote, a supplement of La Jornada, depicts a near-naked

Marcos draped in ammunition belts with scantily-clad and seemingly distressed women hanging

onto the subcomandante’s muscular body.108 Here, graphic artists configure the spokesperson as a “page 3” sex-symbol, a tradition rooted in tabloid journalism that, generally, features a topless model. Such an illustration can be viewed, however, as a parodic representation. Tataranieto del

Ahuizote, which translates to “The Great, Great Grandson of Ahuizote,” employs the satirical conventions of the 1885 newspaper, El hijo del Ahuizote (The Son of Ahuizote), a publication that used caricatures to attack Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship (1884-1911).109

107 Gómez-Peña “The Subcomandante of Performance,” 90-91.

108 Tataranieto del Ahuizote, La Jornada, February 2, 1994, 8; Tataranieto del Ahuizote, La Jornada, February 24, 1994, 8.

109 Tomás Pérez Vejo, “La Conspiración Gachupina en El Hijo del Ahuizote” Historia Mexicana (2005): 1105-1153.

161 Negotiating Ramona

Figure 16: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 23, 1994, 13. In February 1994, Archbishop Samuel Ruiz, an early advocate of liberation theology in

Southern Mexico, mediated the first round of negotiations between the state and the Zapatistas.

Referred to as “Peace and Reconciliation” discussions, Mexican and foreign journalists covered

the three-day event, which was held in San Cristóbal de las Casas’ Cathedral. The sole woman among men—on both sides of the table—Ramona used this platform to voice Indigenous women’s grievances (Figure 16),110 calling for the improvement of education in Indigenous communities, along with greater access to healthcare, childcare facilities, and labor-saving technology for women.111 Despite the serious nature of the talks, the national press regarded the event as spectacle—a performance of masked Indians adorned in fatigues, combat boots, and traditional clothing. Excelsior and La Jornada, in particular, portrayed Ramona as an ambivalent figure—both eclipsing and highlighting her presence at the negotiation table. In spite of this

110 Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 23, 1994, 13.

111 EZLN-GC, “Demands Submitted by the Zapatistas during the Feb. '94 dialogue.”

162 tension, photographic narratives reveal traces of discordancy and refraction, failing, therefore, to

fully diminish Ramona’s political relevance.

Figure 17 (left): Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 21, 1994, 38; Figure 18 (right): La Jornada, February 21, 1994, 38.

Photographed for the first time in her vibrant red huipil and faja, Ramona must have

stood out among the monochromatic Zapatista syndicate, and, yet Raúl Ortega’s distant shot of

La Comandanta, which appears on the final page of La Jornada’s February 21, 1994 edition, casts her as an insignificant part of the General Command, a figure trapped within a labyrinth of vans and vehicles (Figure 17).112 While obscuring Ramona, the photograph reveals the metaphoric significance of Indigenous women in the nation-state. Here, a maze of modernization ensnares and entangles Ramona, who becomes a discursive signifier of monolithic primitivism, a relic of the Mexico’s past and a victim who must contend with the perils of national progress. By imprisoning Ramona, Ortega’s work reminds the viewer of the state’s ongoing oppression of

Indigenous women who exist at the precarious margins of a nation that constrains Indigenous citizenship and rights. The contrast between photographs of Ramona and other members of the

112 La Jornada, February 21, 1994, 38.

163 Zapatista command further highlight this marginalized positioning. Once again, the newspaper

sidelines Ramona in relation to Marcos, who is photographed entering the Cathedral, speaking at

the negotiating table (Figure 18),113 or shaking the hand of Manual Camacho Solis, the state’s chief negotiator.

By referring to La Comandanta as a “delegada,” or delegate, in the image’s subtext, La

Jornada further disregards and undermines Ramona’s significance during these negotiations.114

The image also infantilizes La Comandanta. Like a schoolgirl, Ramona carries a backpack to

negotiations with the Mexican government, suggesting that such talks are farcical, a staged

performance between an ill-equipped Indian woman and an omnipotent Goliath. It is crucial to

note that Ramona appears to have emerged from a Red Cross vehicle, its door still open, which

articulates the idea that she requires the agency’s services and must be, therefore, frail and in

poor-health. It is here, however, that viewers glimpse her courage and bravery—that she dares to

defy an omnipotent giant, despite her suffering and entrapment—and arrives prepared to

negotiate with the state.

113 La Jornada, February 21, 1994, 1.

114 Ibid.

164

Figure 19: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 22, 1994, 1.

On the front page of La Jornada’s February 22, 1994 edition, Ortega depicts Camacho

Solis unveiling a Mexican flag, which slightly obscures Ramona, who is held hostage beneath the government representative’s arm (Figure 19).115 While her comrades stand, she sits at the negotiation table, making it difficult to see her amidst Solis, the flag, and masked Zapatista figures, including Marcos who appears at the opposite end of Solis. In this photograph, the mediated gaze disappears Ramona and, yet her central positioning at the table suggests she wields significant power within the Zapatista Command: her agency cannot, therefore, be denied or dismissed. Still, Ramona’s simultaneous presence and absence conveys journalistic ambivalence, presenting yet another discursive struggle in this body of research. It can be argued that Ramona’s non-compliance of cultural scripts barring Indigenous women from the political realm incites, again, representation chaos and disorder, which requires negation to ease anxieties pertaining to Indigenous women’s power and authority.

115 Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 22, 1994, 1.

165 In Ortega’s photograph, it is the appearance of Ramona’s huipil that marks her presence,

reclaiming—like Rigoberta Menchú in Excelsior’s image (Figure 6)—her resistance and her

command at the forefront of negotiations with the state (Figure 19).116 In Maya culture, the soul of the loom creates a woman’s huipil, a hand-woven, square-cut blouse with diagonal rows of

motifs that envelop a woman’s upper body and extend across the shoulders, upper back, and

breasts, which code worldview and cosmology that can be read by those within the culture.117 As

a visual text, the huipil signifies women’s prominence, invoking pre-Hispanic philosophies

related to power, autonomy, and leadership.118 Its rich iconography represents, for example, repositories of sacred design that mark women’s social status, rank, and ancestry, which further trace linguistic and regional affiliation. 119 By placing a huipil on her body, a woman “cloak[s]” her body with “layers of cultural imagery,”120 positioning herself as the center of the universe.

Margot Blum Schevill, a scholar of textile work, affirms: “The head hole becomes the sun, and four cloth medallions affixed to the huipil represent the four cardinal points of North, South,

East, and West…The huipil forms a cross, and the wearer is placed in the center of the universe, surrounded by levels of meaning and family symbols.” 121 Through the huipil, a woman emerges from the underworld or, rather, descends into the earth’s maw, which invokes the Maya

116 Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 22, 1994, 1.

117 Ámbar Past, Xalik Guzmán Bakbolom and Xpetra Ernandes, Incantations: Song, Spells, and Images by Maya Women (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2005), 58.

118 Margot Blum Schevill, Costume as Communication: Ethnographic Costumes and Textiles from Middle American and the Central Andes of South America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986), 1-2.

119 Morna MacLeod, “Maya Dress as Text,” Development in Practice 14, no.5 (August 2004): 683.

120 Rosemary A. Joyce, Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica (Austin: University of Texas, 2000), 65, 66.

121 Blum Schevill, Costume as Communication, 2.

166 understanding of cyclic death and rebirth. Ramona’s huipil, then, not only contests disappearance, attesting to the resilience and survival of Indigenous women and traditions, but also asserts her political rank and role in the national press.

Figure 20: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 22, 1994, 13. In subsequent images, Ramona does, indeed, rupture invisibility. For example, in this

image, published in La Jornada on February 22, 1994, she appears next to Marcos at the

forefront of political negotiations with the state, declaring her agency and authority (Figure

20).122 In “Terrorist Transgressions: Exploring the Gendered Representations of the Terrorist,” historian Sue Malvern and visual theorist Gabriel Koureas argue that insurgent women simultaneously appear and disappear in the spectacle of insurrection and uprising.123 Such discursive tensions not only reveal fear of women’s power, but also disclose “confounded constructions of femininity.”124 They contend:

122 Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 22, 1994, 13.

123 Sue Malvern and Gabriel Koureas, “Terrorist Transgressions: Exploring the Gendered Representations of the Terrorist,” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 39, no. 3 (149) (2014): 68, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24146114

124 Malvern and Koureas, “Terrorist Transgressions: Exploring the Gendered Representations of the Terrorist,” 67.

167 Women who commit acts of political violence are therefore paradoxical figures and cannot be accommodated to discourses about terrorism. Women terrorists are repeatedly discounted, assumed to lack agency or to be incapable of making political choices…. The fear of women is repeatedly named as a fear of the female power to give life and to take it.125

Serving as a form of insurgency, Ramona’s image revolts against passivity, contesting the ideal of the abnegada.

Figure 21: Excelsior, February 25, 1994, 44A. Similar discursive collisions emerge in a photograph published in the February 25, 1994 edition of Excelsior (Figure 21).126 The photograph portrays La Comandanta perched on a chair

125 Ibid., 76.

126 Excelsior, February 25, 1994, 44A.

168 located on the altar of the cathedral with Marcos leaning over her in deference. His hulking

physique contrasts Ramona’s tiny frame: her feet cannot reach the floor despite leaning forward.

Although the image’s caption refers to Ramona as “capitana,” or captain, thus acknowledging her rank, in this context, the title appears to mock Marcos’ authority, seeming to take a malicious swipe at his subordinate status in relation to an Indigenous woman. Specifically, the text states,

“EL SUBCOMANDANTE Marcos speaks with Captain Ramona and hopes that she will sit

down during the break in peace negotiations.”127 By highlighting Marcos’ inferior rank,

Excelsior emasculates the virile figure, portraying him as a weak and impotent leader, hands placed limply on his thighs. Thus, the newspaper acknowledges that a campesina lacking education spearheads a campaign of chaos and disorder in the nation-state. For readers, the irony is palpable—and usurps Marcos from his exalted position as mythic leader whose communications rallied national support for the Zapatistas and captivated the attention and backing of influential celebrities, writers, human rights activists, and politicians. In taking down

Marcos, however, Excelsior hoists Ramona to the forefront of the revolutionary stage.

127 Ibid.

169 Ramona versus Salinas

Figure 22: Gary Kelley, Proceso, March 7, 1994. On the cover of its March 7, 1994 edition, La Jornada’s weekly investigative magazine

Proceso features a graphic illustration of a huipil-clad Ramona confronting Salinas, who is rendered impotent and cowardly by a poor, Indigenous woman (Figure 22).128 Reminiscent of

Diego Rivera’s post-revolutionary murals that depict broad, flattened figures, this pictorial work represents Ramona as a commanding and imposing caricature: she is formidable and fierce, dwarfing the landscape in the background. Although Salinas’ eyes fail to meet Ramona’s direct gaze, he keeps her within his sightlines with a sideways glance, suggesting vigilance, anxiety, and cowardice, provoking questions about his ability to defuse Zapatismo. Such a portrayal positions Ramona—not Marcos—at the frontlines of insurrection, acknowledging that her power threatens to overthrow the state.

128 Gary Kelley, Proceso, March 7, 1994.

170 The accompanying article unsettles this interpretation, however. By providing a

backstory for its illustration, Proceso’s ousts Ramona from her occupation of the front cover.

Specifically, the magazine identifies the huipil-clad figure as Subcomandante Marcos, rearming

the revolutionary canon with hegemonic masculinity. Explaining that its cover work first

appeared in the March 9, 1994 edition of Time International and that the Mexican magazine

acquired its rights from American artist Gary Kelley,129 Proceso provides the following caption, which originally appeared in Time: “In Mexico, Subcomandante Marcos, the eloquent Zapatista leader, forced the President Salinas’ government to sit at the negotiating table.”130 By reinforcing a narrative that privileges male leadership, Proceso intervenes in possible visual analyses that code Ramona as a figure of political authority, promoting, instead, Marcos as commander-in- chief, a virile leader who adheres to traditional revolutionary scripts that are familiar—and more agreeable—to the Mexican visual palette.

Whereas Time’s audience might be oblivious to the huipil’s appropriation, Proceso’s

Mexican readers—including those with knowledge acquired via official state culture—would potentially interpret the figure adorned in the traditional red blouse as Ramona. Here, Proceso’s reproduction of Kelley’s work both resonates and clashes with its audience’s framework of visual interpretation. In its newfound cultural context, Kelley’s image unsettles, casting Ramona as a threat to the state, which not only ruptures notions of Indigenous women’s required submissiveness, but also subjugates male leadership, authority, and dominance. In order to reestablish visual order, Proceso endorses the work’s original visual narrative—ghosting

129 Gerardo Galarzo, “El rudo camino hacia nuevas reformas políticas culminó en el anuncio del representante presidencial en San Cristóbal” Proceso, March 7, 1994, 6.

130 Galarzo, “El rudo camino hacia nuevas reformas políticas culminó en el anuncio del representante presidencial en San Cristóbal,” 6.

171 Ramona in the revolutionary archive. While the decision to remove Ramona from its cover

highlights the ongoing erasure of revolutionary women, money might also be a factor in this

decision, as coverage of the Zapatista campaign and images of Marcos boosted Proceso’s

revenues by the mid-1990s.131

Proceso’s decision to reprint Time’s caption raises further questions about the fragility

and instability of visual meaning as images circulate in the mediascape, shifting from one

cultural context to another, sloughing particular social and political ideologies and acquiring new

ones. Originally intended for American viewers, Gary Kelley’s illustration demonstrates visual

volatility and the complexities of production and reproduction, which demands an analysis of the

artist’s appropriation of the huipil. In its original production, the work depicts Marcos wearing

what is a woman’s traditional garment, thereby severing the huipil from cultural and gendered

significance. By reassigning meaning to Indigenous material culture, Kelley’s appropriation of

the huipil reenacts longstanding colonial practices of representation, ripping objects from

specific locations and contexts and resignifying these items according to the dominant culture’s

desires and needs. In this case, the image recodes the huipil, annulling its gynocentric and

matriarchal significance that, by extension, denies women’s political authority.

Conclusion

Chapter four argues that Ramona recalls and continues the work of dissident women

disappeared from the official revolutionary archive. Through her presence, the mythic, the

martyred, and the reviled reemerge as refractory figures, disordering the canon with ill-fitting,

131 Chappell H. Lawson, Building the Fourth Estate: Democratization and the Rise of the Free Press in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 62.

172 non-compliant female insurgents who defy historical erasure. Although mediated texts attempt to confine Ramona to familiar interpretational frameworks, a Biblia Pauperum that reifies archetypal narratives, La Comandanta cannot be contained or determined—these imaginary ensnarements do not hold. A disruptive agent, Ramona proclaims herself persona non grata, claiming outlier—and outlaw—status and thus joins a battalion of rebellious women in Mexican history, including Coyolxauhqui, La Malinche, and La Llorona, who, while bloodied, are unbowed. As discussed in the following chapter, during the 1996 National Indigenous Congress,

Ramona conjures Ix Chel from the pre-Hispanic past, who unsettles and unnerves the nation- state.

173

Chapter Five

The Return of Ix Chel

Figure 1: Mauricio Marat, Cihuacoatl-Tonantzin, Late Postclassic (C. 1200-1521), Museo Nacional de Antropología of Mexico (INAH). Available from INAH. https://inah.gob.mx/en/foto-del-dia/5357-cihuacoatl (accessed January 5, 2019).

In this chapter, I frame my analysis of Ramona’s attendance at the National Indigenous

Congress in October 1996 within the context of Mexico’s political landscape under President

Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000), a period in which hostilities between the Zapatistas and the state

escalate. It is within this milieu that Ramona enacts ritualized performances from the pre-

Hispanic past, transforming into a masked embodiment of Ix Chel (Figure 1), the unruly

shapeshifting deity of weaving, war, and childbirth, who returns from the fragments of sixteenth-

century extirpation to wage insurgency against Mexico’s authoritarian regime and expose its

longstanding campaign of genocide against Indigenous peoples. Hence, this chapter examines

how refractory specters haunt the present and disquiet unresolved histories, incarnating and

embodying obstinate physical forms who contest and “betra[y] a determination to objectify, to

174 confine, to imprison, to harden.”1 To provide the historical and theoretical foundation for my argument, I thus begin with a discussion of Ix Chel and an examination of pre-Hispanic philosophies relating to embodiment, along with an exploration of subversive performances during Spanish Conquest, which, I suggest, continue with Ramona’s mimetic and syncretic staging of Ix Chel at the international gathering in Mexico City.

Prior to this investigation, however, it is crucial that I outline my rationale for analyzing specific images of Ramona in this news cycle, which are not studied in any chronological order.

As part of my approach, I identify recurring frames and/or prevalent themes, which I interpret as interwoven threads that construct greater visual meaning in the national press. I note, for example, patterns and relationships among photographs that highlight Ramona’s physical appearance and that draw attention to her adornment in traditional clothing. Employing visual semiotics, I suggest that Ramona’s clothing articulates gynocentric models of power and authority rooted in pre-Hispanic traditions, which associate her with the mythic matriarch, Ix

Chel. In addition to motifs that allude to Ramona’s role as a deity and healer, other visual texts imagine her as a provocateur of the state and an interloper in the national political arena who threatens to incite resistance beyond Chiapas’ borders. Embodying both destructive and creative forces, the leader can be perceived as incorporating Ix Chel’s dualistic attributes, thus defying bounded and bifurcated identities.

1 Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 34.

175

Figure 2: Ix Chel, Glyph. Illustration. Available from Wikiwand. https://www.wikiwand.com/it/Ixchel (accessed July 5, 2018).

Reincarnated from pre-Hispanic mythologies, Ix Chel reemerges from the Popol Vuh,2

one of the few codices to survive Spanish extirpation. Known as ilob’al, meaning “instruments for seeing,”3 this historical text presents logographic signs and pictorial ideograms—knotted words and images—that emphasize corporeal “concurrence,” 4 uniting the human and the divine in iconographic expressions (Figure 2). In Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade

Runner (1492-2019), Serge Gruzinski, a theorist of visual culture, emphasizes that the public recitation of these works and the spectacle of such performances produce “epiphanic presence,”5

the actors’ physical bodies laboring to bring the hierophantic from darkness into light. Through

oral narration of these glyphs, the performer’s breath and body prompts memory, conceiving the

historical present, the mouth a canal proffering the rebirth of ancestral deities and collective

mythologies. Mythic bodies thus “retur[n]…to speak again.”6 As Gruzinski states, “[T]he

2 Dennis Tedlock, Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996),

3 Andrea Stone and Marc Zander, Reading Maya Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011), 15.

4 Stephen Houston et al., The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 271.

5 Serge Gruzinski, Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492-2019) (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 58.

6 Alan Christenson, Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Quiché Maya People (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2003), 7.

176 cosmos and its acting forces became manifest and were made present, immediate, and palpable;

they were presented and not ‘represented,’ to the spectators and the celebrants. This was a ritual

of appearance, a sort of hierophany.” 7 Drawing upon this research, I trace Ramona’s performance in contemporary mediated discourses to pre-Hispanic performances of embodiment.8

Further, to build the necessary ontological and phenomenological framework for my

approach, I rely upon the works of noted Mayanists. I use, for example, Stephen Houston, David

Stuart, and Karl A. Taube’s The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the

Classic Maya, which—predicated upon cosmogenesis and the regenerative power of destructive

forces—mines pre-Hispanic understandings of embodiment, multiplicity, and transformation and

explores Maya constructs of time as repetitious and spiralic, collapsing space and transcending

interaction.9 Jane Caputi’s and Gabriel Gómez-Cano’s studies on goddesses and myth in popular culture and contemporary politics further informs this chapter. While Gómez-Cano links

Comandanta Ramona to Ix Chel,10 Caputi insists that “[t]he reclaiming of [a] [mythic] past and

the reworking of its symbols comprise a political, emotional, spiritual, and psychical vision

that…generates a resistant, nonpatriarchal consciousness and an alternation path of becoming for

both women and men.”11 By pairing feminist theory with pre-Hispanic ways of seeing, knowing,

7 Gruzinski, Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492-2019), 87.

8 Houston et al., The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya, 12-15.

9 Ibid., 92-93.

10 Grisel Gómez-Cano, The Return to Coatlicue: Goddesses and Warladies in Mexican Folklore (Bloomington: Xlibris Books, 2010), 225-226.

11 Jane Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture (Madison: Popular Press, 2004), 10.

177 and being, I assert that Ix Chel seeps into Ramona’s flesh, ascribing the Comandanta with

mythic status and endless transformation, who becomes, through embodiment, or “corporeal concurrence,” 12 a divine warrior—her declaration of war redressing historic and contemporary violence. As part of this critical exegesis, I maintain that Ramona’s performance manifests subversive hierophany, manifesting ixiptla—a deified flesh-and-bone being—who rises and returns from the burnt fragments of sixteenth-century Spanish extirpation to protect her people and to declare war against the Mexican government.

The Many Faces of Ix Chel:

Contextual Framework

Figure 3: Xmucane, c. 1500. Illustration. Available from Revolvy. https://www.revolvy.com/page/Xmucane- and-Xpiacoc (accessed February 6, 2020). Appearing in both the Madrid and Dresden Codices, two of the earliest books written in

the Americas, the Ritual of the Bacabs, a Maya book of incantations, and the Popol Vuh, dated

between 1554 and 1558, Ix Chel wields considerable power, coalescing gender, species, and

12 Houston et al., 66, 271-273.

178 realms as part of a continuous procession of becoming and unbecoming, unmaking and making,

destruction and creation. The deity’s dualism—the cleaving of oppositional forces—represents a

perception of the natural world undergirding Maya cosmology and philosophy, which intimately

connects with agricultural rituals, specifically those related to maize, and the meaning of human

existence. 13 For instance, in the Popol Vuh, Ix Chel can be linked to Xmucane, the grandmother

creatrix who forms the first humans by grinding “the yellow ears of maize and the white ears of

maize.”14 Described as a “defender, protector/twice a midwife, twice a matchmaker,” 15

Xmucane, which translates to “She Who Buries or She Who Plants,”16 watches over the milpa

(cornfield) when her grandsons, Hunaphu and Xbalanque, travel to Xibalba, the underworld, to

avenge their father’s death. Following their deaths, her tears of sorrow revive both the withering

milpa, which sprouts, once again, “ears of maize,” 17 and the Hero Twins.

Indeed, in other depictions she performs rituals involving water that not only associate

her with fertility and fecundity, but also, in relation to flooding and destruction, identify her with

devastation and death. These multiple attributes subvert “false dichotomies and hierarchical

dualisms. The image of the goddess…dissolve[s] these destructive dualities and unite[s] human

beings in a holistic vision and common bond with the earth.”18 Hence, the deity’s capacity to

13 Ellen E. Bell, “Engendering a Dynasty: A Royal Woman in the Margarita Tomb, Copan,” in Ancient Maya Women, ed. Traci Arden. (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2002): 101.

14 A. J. Christenson, Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 183.

15 Christenson, Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya, 51.

16 Ibid., 54.

17 Ibid., 177.

18 Joseph Kroger and Patrizia Granziera, Aztec Goddesses and Christian Madonnas: Images of the Divine Feminine in Mexico (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 9, 18.

179 destroy life creates it at the same time. In addition to creating, warring, and guarding, Xmucane serves as the axis mundi connecting the underworld with the surface of the earth and the sky, articulating her centrality in Maya mythology.

Figure 4: Moon Goddess giving birth to rabbit. Goddess 0 helps the rabbit nurse (Kerr 559). Polychrome vase. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Available from Research Maya. http://research.mayavase.com/kerrmaya_hires.php?vase=559 (accessed June 16, 2017). Further, this mythic figure’s propensity for bodily transfiguration invokes nagualism,

which grants physical transformation and bodily concurrence, conjoining realms and species. As

Stephen Houston et al. argue, in the culture of Maya imaging, the representation of an individual

in pictorial codices “collapses into shared identities and presences, involving effigies that both

represent and are the things they portray.”19 Iconographic depictions of Ix Chel, for instance, portray her with clawed hands, pointed fangs, and a protruding beak-like appendage, thus conveying this belief. Additionally, in The Ritual of the Bacabs, the mythic warrior becomes a spider, the “virgin of the jade needle,” 20 who weaves the first huipil and then “climb[s] the

notches of her warping stick into the sky to become the Moon Goddess.”21 Other images portray her carrying a child made of maize on her back and holding a bird, suggesting an association

19 Houston et al., 181.

20 Bell, “Engendering a Dynasty: A Royal Woman in the Margarita Tomb, Copan,” 101.

21 Ámbar Past, Xalik Guzmán Bakbolom and Xpetra Ernandes, Incantations: Song, Spells, and Images by Maya Women (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 2005), 58.

180 with augury and prognostication.22 As depicted on one Classic period vase, Ix Chel births a rabbit and then enjoys a cigarette after a grueling labour (Figure 4).23 Relentless and unruly—an entanglement of human, animal, and celestial realms—her body "outgrow[ing] itself, transgress[ing] its own limits, and conceiv[ing] new bodies."24 The goddess thus betrays any singular determination, as the chaos and the complexity of her disordered being ruptures containment.

In modernist discourse, Ix Chel continues to escape and elude the clutches of ethnographic classification. Decipherers of Maya codices, such as Karle Taube and Linda

Schele, for instance, use a litany of names to identify the goddess, debating her authenticity in taxonomic research “dominated by a concern to classify.” 25 Such an approach fails to acknowledge her fluidity and shifting metaphoric significance, along with fluctuating

“spatiotemporal alignments,”26 thus unhinging any fixed determination that upholds ontological understandings of being in Maya culture. Referred to as Chak Chel, Red Goddess, Rainbow

Goddess, and Goddess O, Ix Chel, the deity of warring and birthing manifests, moreover, a motley pantheon of entwined warrior goddesses who share multiple attributes and affinities that extend beyond the Maya Empire and connect with Aztec deities venerated in the central and northern region of present-day Mexico.27 Notably, Ix Chel conflates with the Aztec moon

22 Bell, 102.

23 Bell, 102.

24 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, “Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics,” in Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicolas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1998), 36.

25 Susan D. Gillespie and Joyce A. Rosemary, “Deity Relationships in Mesoamerican Cosmologies,” Ancient Mesoamerica 9, no. 2 (1998): 279.

26 Gillespie and Rosemary, “Deity Relationships in Mesoamerican Cosmologies,” 279.

27 Bell, 102.

181 goddess, Coyolxauhqui, who I discuss in chapter four. Coyolxauhqui also shares attributes, however, with Xochiquetzal, the goddess of weaving, flowers, and erotic love, who is further connected to a host of disorderly warriors, including Teteoinnan, Itzpapalotl, and Cihuacoatl.

This divine sisterhood not only articulates ontological understandings of fluidity, flux, and multiplicity, but also recall gynocentric worship and matriarchal authority.

At the time of the conquest, for instance, the Spanish named an island, located off the eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, Isla de Mujeres (Women’s Island), which served as pilgrimage site for worshippers of goddesses, including Ix Chel.28 In Las Cosas de Yucatán, Fr.

Diego de Landa, who arrived in the area in 1542 and was one of the first Franciscan priests in the region, provides a detailed account of the terra cotta goddesses, which he demolished and replaced with a figure of the Virgin Mary as part of a violent campaign—known as extirpation— that, beginning in 1525, eradicated Indigenous material culture as a means to convert peoples to

Christianity.29 As part of his “obsessive” 30 and “fanatical” 31 crusade, Landa, a head inquisitor, destroyed thousands of books and sacred objects, and punished Indigenous peoples with harsh corporeal punishment if they resisted conversion.32 In one incident on July 12, 1562, for example, Landa burnt more than 20,000 idols, along with 40 Maya codices.33 As visual theorist

28 Stephen Salisbury, “Terra Cotta Figure from Isla Mujeres,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 0, no. 71 (1878): 71-89.

29 Salisbury, Terra Cotta Figure from Isla Mujeres,” 77.

30 John F. Chuchiak, "In Servitio Dei: Fray Diego De Landa, the Franciscan Order, and the Return of Extirpation of Idolatry in the Colonial Diocese of Yucatan, 1573-1579," The Americas 61, no. 4 (2005): 622.

31 Chuchiak, "In Servitio Dei: Fray Diego De Landa, the Franciscan Order, and the Return of Extirpation of Idolatry in the Colonial Diocese of Yucatan, 1573-1579," 633.

32 Ibid., 617.

33 Ibid., 614-615.

182 Serge Gruzinski states:

[Extirpation] made the brutal, spectacular, and dominating intrusion into the very heart of the indigenous culture quite real; by bartering their ‘damned idols’ against true images, the conquerors shook the symbiosis between the Indians, the world, and their gods. If this breach was felt on the spot by the natives, whose anger the Spanish feared— the Christian images were not objects like the others. They were corrosive, they carried the negation of their adversary and rendered it visually.34

While Landa’s conviction rested upon a belief that he was saving Maya peoples from the evils of

devil worship,35 he—along with his Franciscan colleagues—were threatened, in particular, by the effigial authority of female deities, along with midwives and healers, whose political power and sexual autonomy threatened patriarchal stability and colonial order.36 In response, church officials attempted to neutralize goddesses and powerful women, casting them as social contaminants: witches, harlots, adulteresses, and hermaphrodites.37

As Jean Franco notes in “The Power of the Spider Woman: The Deluded Woman of the

Inquisition,” women who functioned outside established norms and rules in colonial New Spain received severe punishment.38 Beginning in the seventeenth-century, Spanish Inquisitional authorities tortured, killed, or jailed ilusas (deluded women) who practiced healing rituals in public or claimed to manifest miracles through divine embodiment.39 Because such women

34 Gruzinski, 41.

35 Victor Montijo, “In the Name of the Pot, the Sun, the Broken Spear, the Rock, the Stick, the Idol, Ad Infinitum & Ad Nauseum: An Expose of Anglo Anthropologists Obsessions with and Invention of Mayan Gods,” Wicazo Sa Review 9, no. 1 (1993): 13.

36 Kroger and Granziera, Aztex Goddesses and Christian Madonnas: Images of the Divine Feminine in Mexico, 125.

37 Rebecca Overmyer-Velazquez, “Christian Morality in New Spain: The Nahua Woman in the Franciscan Imaginary,” in Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, ed. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 72.

38 Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, 55-59.

39 Ibid., 55.

183 threatened the authority of the church and undermined political power, ilusas contaminated the

social body, serving as agents of transgression and disorder. Ecclesiastic tribunals, located in

Mexico City, thus denounced these women as brujas (witches) who had made a pact with the devil, their disordered and “grotesque” bodies possessed with demonic forces.40

Figure 5 (left): Mauricio Marat, Cihuacoatl-Tonantzin, Late Postclassic, Museo Nacional de Antropología of Mexico (INAH). Sculpture. Available from INAH. https://inah.gob.mx/en/foto-del-dia/5357-cihuacoatl (accessed January 5, 2019); Figure 6 (right): Virgin of Guadalupe, December 12, 1531, Tepeyac Hill, Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico City. Cactus Fiber. Available from Wiki Commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Guadalupe (accessed March 30, 2016).

To subjugate ilusas and to model new standards of femininity in colonial New Spain, the

church reimagined the Virgin Mary, using her as an instrument of regulation and control. In

doing so, the ecclesiastical elite resurrected—figuratively—pre-Hispanic goddesses from the

ashes of mass pyres, constructing a syncretic revisioning of the Virgin, which blended Christian

iconography with Indigenous symbols and motifs to facilitate conversion. The union of the Aztec

goddess Cihuacoatl-Tonantzin, “Our Mother,” (Figure 5) with the Christian Immaculate Mother

conceived Guadalupe (Figure 6), an Indigenized Virgin ornamented with ciphers that reified pre-

40 Ibid., 16.

184 Hispanic mythology. As an example, the nine magnolias—or yolloxochitl—that appear on her dress symbolize the nine levels of the Aztec underworld. 41 When inverted, however, these magnolias transform into palpitating hearts and sprouting arteries, symbolizing Aztec rituals of sacrifice. 42 Moreover, the quincunx, which appears over her womb, identifies Guadalupe as the navel of the world, her body entwinning and connecting the four directions, conveying her central positioning in both Aztec and Maya cosmology. 43 While the trapezoid-shaped ribbon binding the Virgin’s tunic references her pregnancy, it also symbolizes the ending of one cycle and the beginning of a new era, which, ostensibly, refers to the termination of Indigenous spirituality with the adoption of Christianity.44

Rather than unequivocal conversion and acculturation, syncretism resisted cultural subjugation and suppression, encouraging mimetic enactments that unsettled Spanish authority in subversive and nuanced ways, which not only shrouded and preserved Indigenous traditions but also sustained matriarchal influence. Historian Amos Megged argues that syncretic iconography functioned as “memory plots,” 45 which “allow[ed] the uninterrupted flow of…sacred teachings…into future generations, despite, or more precisely because of, the unavoidable change that evolved in indigenous society under colonial rule.” 46 Adherence to such practices

41 Kirstin Noreen, “Negotiating the Original: Copying the Virgin of Guadalupe,” Visual Resources 33, no. 3-4 (2017): 363-364.

42 Mina Garcia Soormally, “The Image of a Miracle: The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Context of the Apparitions,” Chasqui 44, no. 2 (2015): 175-180.

43 Jeanette Favrot Peterson, “The Virgin of Guadalupe: Symbol of Conquest of Liberation?” Art Journal 51, no. 4 (1992): 439-443.

44 Eric R. Wolf, “The Virgin of Guadalupe,” The Journal of American Folklore, 71 no. 279 (Jan.–Mar. 1958): 37.

45 Amos Megged, “Contrasting Resistance and Alliances in the Ethnic State of Napiniaca, Chiapas (Mexico) (1521–1590): The Anthropological and Historical Aspects,” History and Anthropology 27, no. 3 (2016): 6.

185 highlighted, moreover, “social fragmentation”47 in colonial New Spain, proffering insight into the deficiencies of Spanish domination. According to Megged, the survival of pre-Hispanic traditions constituted a “pure defense mechanism”48 undermining colonial rule.

Rather, Guadalupe’s hybridized visual text storied pre-Hispanic philosophies and mythologies, encouraging the worship of Cihuacoatl-Tonantzin or Ix Chel, in addition to the virgin. As Pete Sigal confirms:

The Moon Goddess retained much of her prior status, including her promiscuity and her ability to cure disease, but she underwent a name change. Her new name and identity, that of the Virgin Mary, was a name heavily invested with the power of the conquerors. But in what one may see as a rather unconscious usurpation of this power and privilege, the newly named goddess was claimed by the Maya people and invested with many of the qualities of the Moon Goddess…..They formed a hybrid figure, one with qualities which adhered to a new liminality.49

Further, despite the eradication of material culture, extirpation could not destroy subtexts

mapped in the natural environment.50 In accordance with Maya and Aztec beliefs, female deities imbued the land and embodied mountains, trees, cenotes (water sink holes), or, in the case of

Tonantzin, a hill, which continued to be worshipped in the absence of idols and other material culture.

Deities also surfaced in human form as surrogates for effigial figures, thus preserving pre-Hispanic rituals and performances.51 In The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience

46 Megged, “Contrasting Resistance and Alliances in the Ethnic State of Napiniaca, Chiapas (Mexico) (1521–1590): The Anthropological and Historical Aspects,” 6.

47 Ibid., 13.

48 Ibid., 15.

49 Pete Sigal, From Moon Goddess to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 62.

50 Megged, 5.

51 Patricia Granziera, “The Worship of Mary in Mexico: Sacred Trees, Christian Crosses, and the Body of the Goddess,” Toronto Journal of Theology 28, no. 1 (2012): 43-60.

186 among the Classic Maya, Houston et al. link human impersonations of gods and goddesses with the concept of corporeal concurrence—the incorporation of a mythic being or a myriad of entities into a living body—that “point directly to the transcendent merger of supernatural and human identity.” 52 This enactment continues the practice of holy embodiment, which is “neither an impression nor a representation of that being,” 53 but the living manifestation of a particular being. Gruzinski refers to this concept as ixiptla, which he defines as:

[T]he container for a power; the localizable, epiphanic presence; the actualization of the power infused into an object;…. The ixiptla was reminiscent of the pictographs covering codices. In certain respects the captive dying under an obsidian knife, and the priest who put on the clothes of the god or the skin of a sacrificial victim, both constituted perfect human glyphs. They were decorated with the attributes corresponding to each divinity.54

Composed of two morphemes, ixtli, meaning “face,” “surface,” or “eye,” and xip, suggesting “to

peel, flay or hull something,”55 the ixiptla “stand[s] in for someone” or “make[s] something in one’s image.” 56 In Spanish chronicles, Indigenous sources provide detailed description of ixiptla performances that involved the shaping and dressing of statues; the skinning of victims; and, the consuming of the physical body, to partake and to embody the divine being, which encouraged renewal, revitalizing collective myth and ritual enactments.57

52 Houston et al., 66.

53 Bassett, Molly H.. Fate of Earthly Things: Aztec Gods and God-Bodies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015) ProQuest Ebook Central,132, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uregina/detail.action?docID=3571831.

54 Gruzinski, 59.

55 Eric R. Wolf, Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 296-297.

56 Wolf, Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis, 296-297.

57 Diana Taylor, “Scenes of Cognition: Performance and Conquest,” Theatre Journal 56 no. 3 (2004): 372, http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/stages-of-conflict/pre-conquest-theatre

187 In contemporary Mexico, these performances continue in the Highlands of Chiapas where

performers adorned in regalia summon and reenact the mythic past.58 As a case in point, young women serve as living deities on the Day of the Holy Cross, a syncretic conflation that honours goddess sacrifice and commemorates the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.59 Here, the iconography of the wooden cross serves as a subtext that traces back to the divine feminine, which, as illustrated in both the Codex Borgia and the Codex Madrid, is represented by a cruciform tree that connects physical and spiritual realms, an axis mundi that grows from of the bodies of mother goddesses. 60 Steeped in this iconography and mythology, the young women thus animate and incarnate deities from the pre-Hispanic past, their bodies elevated to divine status, which proffers renewal and revitalization. Professor of religious studies Molly Bassett asserts, “In making the god-body, the devotional community made itself; the community members also underwent a process of becoming—one through which they became devotees of/to an entity they could see, touch, taste, and give to and take from.” 61 Like the making of the goddess-body during Easter celebrations in present-day Mexico, the Red Goddess also reappears in the contemporary theatre of Zapatista uprising, reincarnated as Ramona during the 1996 National Indigenous Forum in

Mexico City.

58 Houston et al., 66.

59 Roberta H. Markman and Peter T. Markman, Masks of the Spirit: Image and Metaphor in Mesoamerica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 158, http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft7x0nb536/

60 Granziera, “The Worship of Mary in Mexico: Sacred Trees, Christian Crosses, and the Body of the Goddess,” 43-45.

61 Bassett, Fate of Earthly Things: Aztec Gods and God-Bodies, 194.

188

Figure 7: Diego Treviño, Reforma, October 12, 1996, 10A. Through corporeal and spiritual union with the Zapatista leader, the goddess continues

her campaign of war, haunting and unsettling regimes of power and domination to protect,

nurture, and sustain the lives of Indigenous peoples. Thrust to the frenetic forefront of mediated

rebellion (Figure 7), 62 Ramona/Ix Chel threatens—in this political context—newly elected

President Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000), who also embodies the cruelty and violence of dictatorial specters, a repetition that collapses the present with the past.

62 Diego Treviño, Reforma, October 12, 1996, 10A.

189 Under the Volcano

Under his fledgling administration, Zedillo mounted a fierce counter-insurgency

campaign that intensified state efforts to suppress Zapatismo and quash the possibility of greater

Indigenous dissent. 63 Carrying on a tradition of Caudillismo—“strongman” authoritarian

leadership backed by the military—Zedillo deployed 60,000 troops to Chiapas, swarming the

region with soldiers who engaged in “low-intensity” warfare that terrorized Zapatista

communities and their supporters.64 By November 1995, the military, with the assistance of paramilitary groups, facilitated gross human rights violations, which included the use of rape as a tool of counterinsurgency.65 In order to quell the movement, the military further dis-membered

Zapatista allies, imprisoning 860 activists and assassinating 40 supporters.66

In fall 1996, Zedillo also imposed a militarized barrier that restricted Zapatista movement

following the break-down of the second round of peace negotiations, held in the Tzotzil-speaking municipality of San Andrés Larráinzar, Ramona’s birthplace and the cradle of her revolutionary origins. While both parties initially signed the agreement, Zedillo later refused to ratify the accords, thus failing to honor the agreement. 67 The EZLN, in response, withdrew from the next round of negotiations, scheduled to take place in August 1998, and stated it would not comply

63 Luis Hernandez, “The San Andrés Accords: Indians and the Soul,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 23 no.1 (Spring 1999) http://www.culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/the-san-andr-s-accords-indians-and-soul

64 Hernandez, “The San Andrés Accords: Indians and the Soul.”

65 R. Aída Hernández Castillo, “Indigenous Women Confronting Counterinsurgency Violence,” Latin American Perspectives 35 no. 1 (January 2008): 153, https://journals-sagepub- com.libproxy.uregina.ca/doi/pdf/10.1177/0094582X07311364

66 Neil Harvey, “The Peace Process in Chiapas: Between Hope and Frustration,” in Comparative Peace Processes in Latin America, ed. Cynthia Arnson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 137-139.

67 Hernandez, “The San Andrés Accords: Indians and the Soul.”

190 with Zedillo’s barricade.68 Such defiance inflamed the president, who, as part of his offensive, leveraged the pages of national and state newspapers to wage war upon the insurgents.

On October 2, 1996, for example, Zedillo deemed it “mandatory” that 16 editors from across the country attend an official press conference during which time he threatened to punish

Zapatista delegates who arrived in the nation’s capital for the national forum.69 In addition to issuing direct threats, the president used this platform to deny that his government had violated human rights in Chiapas.70 La Jornada’s “No Form of Repression Against Armed Insurgency:

Zedillo,” published on October 2, 1996, quotes Zedillo: “Without a doubt, we have not committed any human rights violations…. Possibly, I have a different manner of exercising power. I can’t be and I don’t believe in authoritarianism. I believe in law.”71 Despite his

declaration, Zedillo’s announcement on this particular date—and in the context of

militarization—conjured authoritarian specters to the forefront of his administration.72

Held on the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre—the date soldiers killed, tortured, and disappeared hundreds of students protesting President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s dictatorship (1964-1970)—Zedillo’s press conference elicits the memory of state-sanctioned violence from Mexico’s “intrahistorical” 73 archive of trauma, recalling the brutality of his predecessor’s regime. Similar to Díaz Ordaz, Zedillo uses the press as an apparatus of state

68 Ibid.

69 Julieta Lozano and Karina Avilés, “Zedillo: la presencia de zapatistas en el DF sería una provocación,” (“Zedillo: The presence of Zapatista in the D.F. would be a provocation,”) La Jornada, October 3, 1996, 1.

70 “No Form of Repression Against Armed Insurgency: Zedillo,” La Jornada, October 2, 1996, 36.

71 Ibid., 36.

72 Julieta Lozano and Karina Avilés, “Zedillo: la presencia de zapatistas en el DF sería una provocación,” La Jornada, October 3, 1996, 1, 3.

73 Samuel Steinberg, "Re-cinema: Hauntology of 1968," Discourse 33 no. 1 (2011): 7.

191 power to suppress political opposition, re-deploying the dictator’s tactical strategies.74 Moreover, by calling Zapatista presence in the nation’s capital a “provocation” 75 of the state and a violation of law, Zedillo’s words reiterate Díaz Ordaz’s orders, delivered hours before the 1968 massacre:

“No more unrest will be tolerated.” 76 Such language conveys the despotic desperation of uncompromising and brutal regimes—a fusion of past and present—that desire to protect the elite—by any means necessary—from the supposed danger of dissent.

74 Clari Brewster, “The Student Movement of 1968 and the Mexican Press: The Cases of Excélsior and Siempre!” Bulletin of Latin American Research 21 no. 2 (2002): 171–190, doi:10.1111/1470-9856.00038

75 Lozano and Avilés, 1, 3.

76 Jaime A. Pensando, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture During the Long Sixties (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 208.

192 A Tyrannical Tango:

Zedillo and Díaz, Dancing Check-to-Check

Figure 8 (left): Former President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, April 4, 1977, Tlatelolco. Digital Print. Available from Aristeguinoticias. https://aristeguinoticias.com/0110/mexico/estoy-orgulloso-del-ano-de-1968-porque-me- permitio-salvar-al-pais-gdo/ (accessed December 3, 2018); Figure 9 (right): President Zedillo at a news conference in Mexico City, Proceso, October 6, 1996.77

In Proceso’s October 6, 1996 closely cropped cover photograph, Zedillo (Figure 9)

becomes a revenant of Díaz Ordaz (Figure 8), a spectral imprinting that conjures commingled

assemblages of historical tyranny, totalitarianism, and repression, which shatters the illusion of a

disarticulated dictatorial past. With remarkable—and uncanny—uniformity, the magazine’s

image summons an infamous photograph of Díaz Ordaz, taken during a tense 1977 press

conference in which the discussion of his controversial appointment as Mexico’s ambassador to

Spain spiraled into a strident defense of the Tlatelolco Massacre.78 In both photographs, the men dominate the visual field, a collapsing of space that conveys masculine omnipotence, which captures the men’s rage and hostility, their jaws clenched, lips pursed tightly, fingers pointed

77 “Estoy orgulloso del año de 1968, porque me permitió salvar al país: Díaz Ordaz,” (“I am proud of the year 1968 because it allowed me to save the country,”)

193 aggressively at imagined subversives—the living and the dead—in the distance. For Zedillo, the image highlights the stubbled growth of dark facial hair, suggesting that he is unkempt—a president unravelling in the face of Zapatista defiance or, rather, too distracted to maintain the regime of personal grooming. Likewise, Zedillo and Díaz Ordaz both glare beyond—and to the

side—of the camera, their antagonistic posturing either directed at journalists or averted away

from the viewer, suggesting cowardice or deceit.

Proceso’s photograph produces mimetic identification—incarnation through representation—in which journalistic portrayal projects Zedillo “as though [he] had really entered another body, another character,"79 a performance recalling the brutality of the state, reenacted in the present, despite attempts to conceal state-ordained violence, along with the memory of Mexico’s militarized slaughter of its own citizens. In “Among Olympic Fanfares,

Government Repression and Genocide,” Patricia Fournier and Jorge Martínez Herrera support this argument, noting that, in Mexico, “the past (especially, bloody historical events) is embedded in social struggles, the social imaginary and the present. The memory of violence against people who fought for political openness is continually reproduced and preserved.” 80

Indeed, Zedillo’s administration continues the state’s historical campaigns of violence against

Indigenous peoples, which include the forced sterilization of women in Mexico’s zonas indigenas (Indigenous zones). As evidence, in the October 5 and 6, 1996 edition of El Universal, journalist Francisco Arroyo’s two-part feature investigates this practice,81 stating that more than

79 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedies and Other Writings, eds. R. Geuss and R. Speirs, trans. R. Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 43.

80 Patricia Fournier and Jorge Martínez Herrera, “Among Olympic Fanfares, Government Repression and Genocide,” in Memories from Darkness: Archaeology of Repression and Resistance in Latin America eds. Pedro Funari et al. (New York: Springer New York, 2009), 167.

194 800 women in Chiapas provided testimonies to human rights organizations claiming to have

undergone the procedure without knowledge or consent.82 Arroyo charges that the state sanctions such practices, using the medical community to enact genocide, reflecting a systematic pattern of population that promotes genocide.

Ramona’s Rupture

Figure 10: Diego Treviño, Reforma, October 11, 1996, 1.

In a countervailing performance at an October 10, 1996 news conference announcing her

81 Francisco Arroyo, “Investigan varias denuncias de mujeres indigenas esterilizadas,” (“They investigate several complaints of sterilized Indigenous women”) October 5, 1996, 1, 22; Arroyo, “Investigan varias denuncias de mujeres indigenas esterilizadas,” October 6, 1996,1, 24.

82 Arroyo, “They investigate several complaints of sterilized Indigenous women” 1, 24.

195 delegation to the forum (Figure 10), Ramona calls forth the power of Ix Chel from natural

sacralized form, thus reminding those in power—journalists and government officials—of the persistent force of matriarchal authority in Chiapas’ Highlands—the birthplace of the EZLN.83

Published in colour on the front page of Reforma’s October 11, 1996 edition, Diego Treviño’s photograph uses the sacred peaks of the Sierra Madre mountains in the Zapatista municipality of

La Realidad to frame Ramona’s appearance, which, according to Maya beliefs, manifests in the physical form of the mountain.84 In the context of Treviño’s photograph, then, a parallel can be made between Ramona’s power and the Sierra Madre, who, as a deified presence, lurks and menaces, an omnipotent, foreboding, and fertile woman who dominates the landscape, her water nourishing crops or negating them with the force of flooding. 85

Reflecting the unruly chaos, turbulent volatility, and sinewy disorder of the pre-Hispanic goddess, such cultural landscape encompasses remarkable ecological diversity, broken topography, volcanic activity, and complex faults and uplifts—with scarce level terrain. 86

Anthropologist Julio Glockner states, “The mountains and the water formed a sacred geography

where many people worshipped the hills, the volcanoes, the water springs, and the currents, and

they also created a symbolic notion alluding the fertility of women and Earth…..”87 Embodied in this geologic structure, Ix Chel demonstrates resilience and physicality, which defies, moreover,

83 Karl A. Taube, “The Major Gods of Ancient Yucatan,” Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology 32 (1992), 72.

84 Taube, “Flower Mountain: Concepts of Life, Beauty, and Paradise among the Classic Maya,” 83.

85 Bell, 102.

86 Juarez Santiago, “Maintaining Social Bonds during the Preclassic: An Incipient Urban Landscape,” Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 29 no. 1 (2018): 83-98.

87 Julio Glocknew, “The Baroque Paradise of Santa María Tonantzintla (Part I)” Enthnologia Actualis, 16 no. 1 (2016): 10.

196 death and destruction: explosive forces with the power to demolish and regenerate, breaking and

splintering her body into infinite forms of being.

Maya visual culture yields considerable evidence of Ix Chel’s geomythic and

cosmological significance, coding her as a commanding being who lives and breathes, directing

and controlling natural forces.88 For example, in Classic Tzotzil period iconography (c.250-900

AD), Karl A. Taube, a decipherer of Maya codices, notes that massive breath volutes emanate from a “Flower Mountain,” imbuing the geographic with life and spirit. 89 Referred to as ch'ulel,

the Tzotzil Maya term for “the inner soul,” which is located in the heart, 90 the mountain is the

“blood of people,” 91 “the breath soul, [and] a vitalizing force,”92 whose distended, tangled, and

chaotic body bears gods and ancestors, 93 her sublime and formidable mass uniting the underworld and the celestial, offering ascension or declension. Drawing upon Tzotzil leader

Manuel Arias Sojom’s oral histories, anthropologist Calixta Guiteras Holmes describes the natural realm as a force that:

[B]rings forth and fosters all creatures, but is simultaneously their common grave. She relentlessly swallows back, as a monster, the beings that she produces. All that live on her surface come from her interior and return there. She is all-producing, all-maintaining, all- devouring. The cosmic forces—fire, wind, rain, the eclipse, the earthquake—are manipulated by the earth. Disease and famine are manifestations of her wrathful moods…. She takes advantage of any opportunity to drag man’s ch’ulel into her recesses.94

88 Taube, 83.

89 Ibid.

90 Ibid., 72

91 Ibid.

92 Ibid., 69.

93 Ibid.

94 Calixta Guiteras Holmes, Perils of the Soul: The World View of a Tzotzil Indian (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), 289.

197 Remarkably, an editorial published in La Jornada identifies Ramona with the Tzotzil concept of

ch’ulel,95 depicting her as “the inner soul” 96 and the “blood of people,”97 which counters other descriptors that cast the leader as a frail and sickly figure. Despite the ravages of Spanish

Conquest, the sacralized mountain and Ramona survive: neither is razed nor broken, despite

Marco’s declaration during the news conference that the Comandanta is dying, suffering from cancer. 98

Despite this imagining, a series of opinion pieces in Reforma draw upon dominant frames of suffering and femininity, attempting to weaken Ramona’s agency and resistance. For example, in “Zapatista’s Immorality,” prolific Mexican journalist Armando Fuentes Aguirre, known as

Catón, fashions Ramona as an unwitting symbol of Zapatismo.99 Calling the decision to send a

“tiny commander” 100 on “the verge of death”101 a desperate act of a failing insurrection,102 he accuses Marcos of being a “promoter of spectacle,”103 who uses Ramona’s suffering to rouse the necessary sympathy required to bolster national and international support for Zapatismo.104 His

95 Luis Hernádez Navarro, “Ramona: La fuerza del ch’ulel,” (“Ramona: the force of ch’ulel”) La Jornada, October 15, 1996, 6.

96 Taube, 72.

97 Ibid.

98 “Incia ‘Ramona’ viaja hacia DF,” Reforma, October 10, 1996, 4A. (‘Ramona’ Travels to D.F.”)

99 Catón, “Inmoralidad Zapatista” (“Zapatista’s Immorality,”) Reforma, October 11, 1996, 17A.

100 Catón, “Zapatista’s Immorality,” 17A.

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid.

103 Ibid.

104 Ibid.

198 subsequent commentary, “El uso de Ramona,” published in Reforma on October 21, 1996, states,

“This poor woman was sent from shipwreck to shipwreck. Manipulated and converted into an object from which one could take advantage: she was useful for publicity.”105 Not all editorials, however, cast Ramona as a suffering figure.

In the October 13, 1996 edition of Proceso, editor Heberto Castillo imagines the

Zapatista leader as a defiant warrior waging war upon Zedillo’s regime. He conveys, “Ramona

comes with a terminally-ill body. But, her spirit is not at all weak…she possesses the soul of a

warrior …unbeatable, intrusive, unconquerable…. Ramona is a symbol for all Mexican

Indigenous women.”106 Likewise, Luis Hernádez Navarro asserts that—in spite of her illness—

Ramona strengthens Zapatismo. Commenting that “[b]ehind the apparent weakness of her health is the force of her being,”107 he recognizes her as “one of the most relevant and beloved figures of the EZLN,”108 who has already conquered through “her ch 'ulel, her soul.”109 Hernádez

Navarro further contends that the Zapatista leader stands at the frontlines of Indigenous

resistance, continuing the legacy of Indigenous women of the past. He notes:

Ramona’s presence in the capital of the Republic synthesizes past and present Chiapanecan insurrections. The presence of women has been key to all of them. The tzetzal Revolt of 1712, one of the most exciting campaigns by the Sierra Mesoamerican people to liberate themselves from Spanish oppression, was heralded by the apparition of the Virgin, which inspired a rise of religious cults and the formation of the rebel army, ‘soldados de la Virgen.’ The Chamula insurrection of 1867-69 started when Augustina Gómez Checheb discovered ‘the talking stones’ and opened the way for the constitution of a new cult, which, at the time, sabotaged ladino business.110

105 Catón. “El uso de Ramona,” (“The Use of Ramona,”) Reforma, October 21, 1996, p. 15A.

106 Heberto Castillo, “Welcome, Comandanta Ramona,” Proceso, October 13, 1996, 38.

107 Hernádez Navarro, “Ramona: the force of ch’ulel,” 6.

108 Ibid.

109 Ibid.

110 Ibid. Italics mine.

199

By tracing Ramona’s revolutionary activities to historical rebellions commandeered by other

Indigenous women and inscribing Maya cosmological notions of animacy into his analysis,

Hernádez Navarro invokes a discourse of embodiment and transformation, which conveys an

understanding of time as repetitious and spiralic, in accordance with pre-Hispanic narratives. The

Comandanta’s ceremonial huipil, in particular, functions as a mnemonic prompt recalling

Indigenous women’s frontline insurgency during Chiapas’ Maya rebellions of 1712, 1869, and

1911.

A synecdoche of historical Indigenous uprising,111 the red huipil serves as embroidered

text entwining the memory of resistance, thus reassembling threads plucked from the tapestry of

historical narratives. In Incantations: Song, Spells, and Images by Maya Women, a compilation

of oral Mayan histories, Ámbar Past, Xalik Guzmán Bakbolom, and Xpetra Ernandes assert:

Augustina Kómes Chechub was directed by clay idols and companied by a saint called the Mother of War. Many women fought alongside their husbands in hope that the coldness attributed to females might cool down the enemy’s artillery fire. Chumulas who took part in the Indian movement of 1911 tell how forty-five virgins from their town ambushed the Federal Army. They lifted up their skirts and threatened the soldiers with their sex, branding weaving sticks and telling: “We advance with red huipils! Onwards with red huipils!” 112

Scholars examining the complex semiotics of clothing in Mesoamerican cultures refer to textile

work as “memory cloth,”113 sacred bindings that serve as visual text. Patricia Rieff Anawalt, who

studies the significance of dress in Latin America, argues that “such clothing truly can be said to

111 Gruzinski, 52.

112 Past, Incantations: Song, Spells, and Images by Maya Women, 65.

113 Patricia Anawalt, “Analysis of the Aztec Quechquemitl: An Exercise in Inference” in The Art and Iconography of Late Post-Classic Central Mexico Elizabeth Hill Boone ed., (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982), 36.

200 hold memory.”114 According to Mayan anthropologist Rosemary Joyce, the huipil as bodily

ornamentation “form[s] the ground for social memory, including social memory of what it is to

be in the flesh and how bodily being can be understood.”115 Houston et al. further note that cloth bindings “protect a holy object or substance…to contain some sacred essence held within.” 116

Ramona’s red huipil thus reminds and recalls, which not only summons the warrior goddess and her dissident allies from the counter-narrative of revolutionary history, but also functions as a sacred shroud that facilitates transcendence. The textile itself signifies rebirth and transformation: an unravelling and remaking that, following Maya cosmology, grants recomposition and renewal. Hence, by donning her huipil, Ramona sheds the transitory casing of the body, her skin desquamated and regenerated, becoming—in the process—the Red Goddess.

114 Anawalt, “Analysis of the Aztec Quechquemitl: An Exercise in Inference,” 36.

115 Joyce, “Performing the Body in pre-Hispanic Central America,” 161.

116 Houston et al., 83.

201

Figure 11: Reforma, October 13, 1996, 20A. Taken in Mexico City’s Zocalo, the locus of political power and symbolic heart of the

nation, Reforma’s color photograph, published on October 13, 1996, highlights Ramona’s red

huipil, which not only serves as the focal point of this image, but also—in accordance with Maya

gendered philosophies—situates the leader at the centre of the universe (Figure 11).117 While the sprawling National Palace—the seat of federal governance—becomes indistinguishable, heavily blurred in background, Ramona’s upper-body fills the vertical frame, establishing a sense of eminence and stature, a positioning her huipil confirms and articulates. As a cultural and political

117 Reforma, October 13, 1996, 20A.

202 marker, its design represents the surface of the earth and the four quarters of the world, which are

bordered by celestial symbols, the sun and the moon. 118 The garment’s collar, located in the middle of the textile, serves, moreover, as a portal to otherworldly realms. Specifically, by placing the huipil over her head and onto her body, Ramona simultaneously emerges from the underworld and descends into the earth’s maw, 119 becoming a central axis that invites unity and cohesiveness among all spheres, the natural and the human, and the temporal and the spiritual, conjoining La Comandanta’s body with the ancestral deities. Ramona’s adornment of her body not only manifests pre-Hispanic cosmologies, but also reinscribes matriarchal philosophies recalling Ix Chel’s pivotal role in Maya societies, thereby reasserting Indigenous women’s political power in the nation-state.

In the same vein, the process of creating a huipil articulates gynocentric and gynocratic traditions. The backstrap loom, for example, envelops the entire body, with one end wrapped around the back and the other tied to a sturdy object, positioning a woman at the center of creation. Likewise, news coverage of the leader’s arrival in Mexico City places Ramona at the core of contemporary Indigenous uprising. 120 In the October 12, 1996 edition of Excelsior,

Elizabeth Velasco and Conrado Garcia describe Ramona as “the heart of the EZLN.”121

Additionally, on October 13, 1996, Ariadna Estevez’s article, “Crowd Turns out to Cheer

Ramona,” published on the front-page of El Universal’s English edition, refers to the “rebel

118 Katherine O'Donnell, Weaving Transnational Solidarity: From the Catskills to Chiapas and Beyond (Boston: Brill, 2019), 70-71.

119 Brian Stross, “The Mesoamerican Sacrum Bone: Doorway to the Otherworld, “ University of Texas, 52, http://www.utexas.edu/courses/stross/papers/stross-sacrum.pdf.

120 Barbara Tedlock and Dennis Tedlock, “Text and Textile: Language and Technology in the Arts of the Quiché Maya,” Journal of Anthropological Research 41 no. 2 (1985): 139.

121 Elizabeth Velasco and Conrado Garcia, “‘Never Again a Mexico Without Us, Without Indians,’ Ramona Proclaims,” Excelsior, October 12, 1996, 11A.

203 leader” 122 as the driving force of a “crusade for justice, freedom, and democracy.”123 Estevez further identifies Ramona as a mobilizing figure, whose speech calls upon the crowd to “walk with [the Zapatistas]. We need you to help us…walk, just as you helped me to walk from

Chiapas here.” 124 An agent of transformation who appeals for a “new Mexico,”125 Ramona’s politicization can be traced, once again, to weaving and her involvement with artisan co- operatives established in Chiapas during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In Weaving Transnational Solidarity: From the Catskills to Chiapas and Beyond,

sociologist Katherine O'Donnell argues that the Zapatista leader’s early work in these collectives,

such as J’Pas Joloviletik and K’inal Antzetik, which means “learning to walk in women’s

land,”126 mobilized other Indigenous women, inciting political resistance. She confirms:

The impact of the Zapatista movement on the women involved with Jolom was heightened by the presence of Ramona, a Zapatista commander, official delegate to the 1994 dialogues with the government, and a Tzotzil woman who wore a huipil (traditional blouse) like those that the majority of women in the co-op make and wear themselves…. Ramona’s dress sent a very strong message of pride as an indigenous woman from the San Andrés area. One member of the early co-op, J’Pas Joloviletik, said: Ramona told us that we can, that Tzotzil women have that power; she told us that we have the power to go forward. 127

122 Ariadna Estevez, “Crowd Turns out to Cheer Ramona,” El Universal (English Edition), October 13, 1996, 1.

123 Estevez, “Crowd Turns out to Cheer Ramona,” 1.

124 Ibid.

125 Ibid.

126 O'Donnell, Weaving Transnational Solidarity: From the Catskills to Chiapas and Beyond (Boston: Brill, 2019), 70.

127 Ibid., 24.

204 It is the huipil, in particular, that articulates Indigenous women’s formidable power: its colors

and zoomorphic designs serve as language, shattering the silencing forces of subjugation,

exploitation, and bifurcation.128

Indeed, Reforma’s closely cropped photograph allows the viewer to glimpse the huipil’s brocaded motifs, which serve as subversive “public statements,”129 reiterating ancestral designs from the community of San Andrés Larráinzar—Ramona’s place of birth—that not only encode

power and authority, but also proffer renewal and regeneration (Figure 7).130 Barbara Tedlock and Dennis Tedlock comment:

As a metaphor for the process of writing, [the huipil] has two readings, both of them referring to intertextuality: on the one hand, it means that the authors are ‘transplanting’ the Ancient Word from an existing text to a newly written one; on the other hand, it means that the Ancient Word itself will be ‘interplanted’ among their own words.131

Illegible to outsiders, the intricate patterns on Ramona’s textile display toads enclosed in

diamond-shaped figures that, while symbolizing water, life, and fertility, 132 also exhibit iconography that associates the leader with Lady Xoc (709 CE), considered one of the most prominent political figures and artisans in Maya history.133

According to Mayanists Helen R. Haines, Philip W. Willink, and David Maxwell, Classic pictorial works portray the huipil-adorned queen performing bloodletting rituals, a gendered

128 Ibid., 77.

129 Jean Molesky-Poz, Contemporary Maya Spirituality: The Ancient Ways Are Not Lost (Austin: University of Texas, 2006), 50.

130 Reforma, October 13, 1996, 20A.

131 Tedlock and Tedlock, “Text and Textile: Language and Technology in the Arts of the Quiché Maya,” 126.

132 Molesky-Poz, Contemporary Maya Spirituality: The Ancient Ways Are Not Lost, 50-51.

133 Ibid.

205 practice that not only links Lady Xoc with Ix Chel,134 but also casts her as a sacrificial figure who risks death to renew life.135 By piercing her tongue with stingray spines, for instance, Lady

Xoc’s blood recompenses the gods to maintain cosmic order.136 Unlike other illustrations of bloodletting in Maya iconography, however, Lady Xoc’s use of a toxic and potentially deadly instrument highlights her sacred status, 137 as she “literally teeter[s] on the brink between the mortal world (the world of the living) and the super natural world (death and the afterlife).”138

Similarly, by participating in armed insurgency, Ramona jeopardizes her own life to protect

others, her weapon analogous to a venomous spine, which articulates the belief that death

fecundates, bringing to life deific bodies who nurture and protect. According to Maya

worldviews, it is Ramona’s huipil, though, that enables ontological transformation, allowing her

to embody Lady Xoc/Ix Chel.

Conquering the Virgin

Additionally, the three roses Ramona holds above her head serve as a metonymic symbol

of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Figure 7).139 This mythology, which is chronicled in Fray Bernadino

134 Jennifer Dornan, “Blood from the Moon: Gender Ideology and the Rise of Ancient Maya Social Complexity. Gender and History,” 16 no. 2 (2004): 459-475.

135 Helen R. Haines, Phillip W. Willink, and Maxwell, David, “Stingray Spine Use and Maya Bloodletting Rituals: A Cautionary Tale,” Latin American Antiquity 19, no. 1 (2008): 95.

136 Haines et al., “Stingray Spine Use and Maya Bloodletting Rituals: A Cautionary Tale,” 83.

137 Ibid., 89.

138 Ibid., 95.

139 Reforma, October 13, 1996, 20A.

206 de Sahugún’s Nican Mopohua, a text written in the Nahuatl language that remains seminal in

Mexican cultural, provides an account of Guadalupe’s apparition before Juan Diego on

December 9, 1531 near Tlatelolco, the site of Cihuacoatl-Tonantzin’s sanctuary.140 As a sign of

her miraculous appearance, the Virgin requests that the Indigenous campesino gather roses from

the barren dessert and then present them to Fray Juan de Zumarraga, the first bishop of Mexico.

After discovering the flowers amidst a stony summit, Juan Diego carries them in his tilma (a

cloth made of cactus fiber) to the Franciscan authority. Once displayed, however, the roses fall

from his tilma, revealing an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.141

Drawing upon syncretism as a framework of analysis, Ramona can be perceived as emulating the Virgin while enacting Ix Chel, masquerading iconographic Marianismo to convert

non-believers to the Zapatista faith. Posed as a dissident Guadalupan figure “[w]ith her fragile

and weak body,”142 Ramona is, according to Velasco and Garcia, “the centre of attention before hundreds of supporters.”143 In “Admired and Rejected,” published in La Jornada on October 14,

1996, columnist Eduardo R. Huchim refers to Ramona’s “brief public apparitions” 144 as

“captur[ing] and endors[ing] her and her cause.” 145 Additionally, Miguel Ángel Granados

Chapa’s commentary, printed in Reforma on October 11, 1996, casts the leader, like the virgin,

140 Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, 84-85.

141 D.A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix; Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1-12.

142 Elizabeth Velasco and Conrado Garcia, “‘Never Again a Mexico Without Us, Without Indians,’ Ramona Proclaims,” Excelsior, October 12, 1996, 11A.

143 Velasco and Garcia, “‘Never Again a Mexico Without Us, Without Indians,’ Ramona Proclaims,” 11A.

144 Eduardo R. Huchim, “Admired and Rejected,” La Jornada, October 14, 1996, 7.

145 Huchim, “Admired and Rejected,” 7.

207 as a suffering figure, who is “at the same time, a symbol of liberty and dignity.”146 In “The

Significance of Ramona’s Presence in D.F.: Samuel Ruiz,” published in La Jornada on October

14, 1996, Elio Henríquez describes Ramona as an agent of “social transformation”147 whose actions encourage Indigenous solidarity. Staging “godly immanence and transubstantiation,”148 the leader employs strategies of syncretism and mimesis rooted in conquest and colonialism to reconceive pre-Hispanic ontological understandings of interdependency and multiplicity.

Figure 12: El Universal, October 12, 1996, A1.

146 Miguel Ángel Granados Chapa, “Comandanta Ramona,” Reforma, October 11, 1996, 15A.

147 Elio Henríquez, “The Significance of Ramona’s Presence in D.F.: Samuel Ruiz,” La Jornada, October 14, 1996, 6.

148 Houston et al., 270.

208 This subversive performance is further evident in El Universal’s front-page photograph of Ramona, which appears in the newspaper’s English edition on October 12, 1996 (Figure

12).149 In addition to roses, Ramona holds a bouquet of calla lilies that represent purity and chastity, which, beginning in the Renaissance period, became a predominant motif associated with the Virgin Mary. 150 However, similar to Ix Chel, the lily is “ever changing,” 151 uniting

“dramatic opposites: chastity vs. sexuality; good vs. evil; nurturing vs. poisoning; life vs. death.” 152 Theorist Marcia Reiss affirms, “The myths of their origins are tales both of blood and mother’s milk.” 153 As a case in point, while the devout honor the Virgin of Guadalupe with

offerings of lilies in contemporary Mexico, pre-Hispanic mythologies link this flower with an

Aztec goddess of ill-repute, Xochiquetzal (Precious Flower), a hermaphroditic sorceress and

prostitute, who is the patroness of healers, harlots, and weavers. In the Florentine Codex, this

deity’s genitals blossom with lilies after being bit by a bat, thus birthing medicine, beauty, and

sensual delights.154 Further, in Mexican visual culture, the calla lily continues to be a popular

motif in works espousing indigenismo. Diego Rivera’s paintings, for example, often pair the

flower’s sensual curves and fleshly folds with Indigenous women’s backs, bottoms, and

breasts.155

149 El Universal, October 12, 1996, A1.

150 Marcia Reiss, Lily (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 9.

151 Reiss, Lily, 7.

152 Ibid.

153 Ibid.

154 Elizabeth Hill Boone, The Codex Magliabechiano and the Lost Prototype of the Magliabechiano Group (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

155 Horacio Legras, “Walter Benjamin and the Mexican Revolution: A Meditation on the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ and Diego Rivera's Murals,” Discourse 32, no. 1 (2010): 81.

209 In the context of Zapatismo, it can be argued that the lily acquires additional meaning that

highlights the prevalence of western culture and commercialism, which exploits and destroys the

natural world, thus pointing to the environmental implications of the nation’s neoliberal

restructuring. Here, Ramona cradles lilies wrapped in plastic, juxtaposing organic and synthetic

materials, which emphasize the commoditization of natural resources vis-à-vis consumer

capitalism. Columnist Guadalupe Loaeza imagines the Indigenous leader, however, as a

protective force that shields the nation from NAFTA and the vapidity of American corporate

culture,156 reiterating Ix Chel’s role as guardian and warrior. In “Ramona of Our Heart,” printed in Reforma on October 17, 1996, Loaeza states:

Imagine our country without her [Indigenous] origins, without her past, without her history, without her identity, without her customs? We would be like McAllen or like any one of North America’s suburbs where they proudly show you their one-of-a-kind mall with Hallmark, Donuts, Sushi, Victoria's Secret, etc.157

Cradling a small Mexican flag, which partially covers the bouquet of lilies, Ramona can be

perceived as holding the nation in her arms, demonstrating her hold over state power and

asserting her resistance against an economic model that thrives upon cheap labor that harms—in

this particular context—Indigenous women, who, like corporate refuse and consumer waste,

become disposable byproducts of industrial manufacturing. 158

156 Guadalupe Loaeza,“Ramona de nuestro corozón,”(“Ramona of Our Heart,”) Reforma, October 17, 1996, 17A.

157 Loaeza,“Ramona of Our Heart,” 17A.

158 Melissa M. Wright, “Feminine Villains, Masculine Heroes, and the Reproduction of Ciudad Juarez,” Social Text 19 no. 4 (2001): 97.

210

Political Interloper and Agitator

Figure 13: Tomás Martínez, Reforma, October 12, 1996, 1.

Using the flag to contest political dominance, Ramona interjects herself into the political

workings of the nation, threatening disorder. As Adolfo Piña proclaims in La Jornada’s October

10, 1996 editorial: “La guerrilla is now permanently moving into the political landscape.”159 This imagining can also be seen in Tomás Martínez’s front-page photograph, published in Reforma on

October 12, 1996 (Figure 13).160 Here, three men surround Ramona, holding the national emblem across her body, enveloping her—both figuratively and literally—within the nation, an act that can be interpreted as restoring Indigenous women’s authority in the contemporary nation-state. Rather than a marginalized figure, then, La Comandanta becomes the heart of

Mexico. With her eyes cast down, Ramona, too, clutches the flag, as if asserting her political status and subverting authoritarian rule, which is also pronounced in the following image.

159 Adolfo F. Piña, “Ramona,” La Jornada, October 10, 1996, 5.

160 Tomás Martínez, Reforma, October 12, 1996, 1.

211

Figure 14: El Universal, October 12, 1996, 16. Published in El Universal on October 12, 1996, this panoramic photograph of the

National Indigenous Congress displays pre-Hispanic iconography inscribed on the national flag, a co-opting that strikes at the core of PRI’s institutional imaging and power,161 rupturing and reordering a symbol deeply entwined with the ruling regime (Figure 14).162 Such appropriation contests, in particular, the party’s long-standing use of the flag’s tri-color ribboning—red, green, and white—as its official logo, which not only renders the state indiscernible from the party, but also articulates the idea that the party is the state.163 By using national and institutional material culture to wage political dissent, however, the National Indigenous Congress both employs and

161 Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 20.

162 El Universal, October 12, 1996, 16.

163 Victoria E. Rodríguez and Peter M. Ward, “Disentangling the PRI from the Government in Mexico,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 10, no. 1 (1994): 163-186. doi:10.2307/1051970.

212 inverts PRI’s strategic use of visual propaganda to shift national discourse, composing a new

imaginary, while reformulating syncretic conventions.

Although the eagle and serpent imagery remains in the middle panel—ostensibly for its

symbolic reference to Aztec migration and the founding of Tenochtitlan from the Codex

Mendoza164—in this revisioning, a hulking Motecuhzoma II rises and returns from death to redress Spanish conquest. Part-human, part-beast, the Aztec leader holds his arms above his head in a triumphant stance, using his hands to break chains that imprisoned him following his defeat.165 Such an illustration conveys the emancipatory power of Indigenous resistance, which defies forces of death and domination. To the left side of the flag—in front of the masked

Zapatista insurgent—images of two Indigenous figures replicate the stylistic flat features depicted in Maya hieroglyphics, suggesting a relationship between historical and contemporary resistance, which reclaims institutionalized visual determination and re-appropriates indigenismo’s exploitation of pre-Hispanic pictorial conventions. 166

In Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture, historian Eric Zolov argues that the co-opting of the Mexican flag conjures the specter of student radicalization in the wake of the Tlatelolco massacre.167 During Avándaro, a music festival held near Mexico City in 1971,

Zolov notes, for instance, that students defiled the flag as an attack upon the political establishment following Díaz Ordaz’s systematic slaughter of protestors:

164 David Carrasco, “City as Symbol in Aztec Thought: The Clues from the Codex Mendoza,” History of Religions 20, no. 3 (1981): 209-212.

165 Gideon Baker, “The Spectre of Montezuma: Hospitality and Haunting,” Millennium 39, no. 1 (2010): 31.

166 Lucretia Hoover Giese, “A Collaboration: Diego Rivera, John Weatherwax, and the Popol Vuh,” Archives of American Art Journal 39, no. 3/4 (1999): 2-10.

167 Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture, 208.

213 This in itself was scandalous: the Mexican flag was hung from makeshift tents and wooden flagpoles against the backdrop of a mud-soaked multitude flouting national values. But, photographs of a transfiguration of the national flag shocked not only conservatives but leftist intellectuals as well: several flags had replaced the eagle and serpent emblem with the peace sign [which referred to the student movement of 1968]. Not only did this act represent a subversive affront to a primordial national icon, but, in that the ruling regime had long since identified the PRI with the colors and symbolism of the flag itself, the act suggested an attack on the political system as well.168

In light of this history, the co-opted flag at the 1996 forum conveys Indigenous defiance against

Zedillo’s administration.

In the immediate forefront of the flag, Ramona—the sole masked figure—sits at the

frontlines of Indigenous political power, posing another threat to the regime. The Zapatista

leader’s centrality at the sprawling table suggests that she leads the delegation, pointing to her

prominence among disparate and diverse Indigenous nations, her revolutionary spirit extending

beyond Chiapas and overcoming hostile forces, including that of a military barricade. Situated at

the helm of this movement and elevated on a platform-turned-altar, which serves as a ritualistic shrine, Ramona can be viewed as a reincarnation of Ix Chel who is venerated on the altar of

Indigenous insurrection.

Indeed, in the October 18, 1996 edition of La Jornada, columnist Horacio Labastida uses religious rhetoric to illustrate the power of the leader’s voice, elevating her to that of Indigenous savior.169 He states, “The word of Ramona is the true path of the nation and denounces structures of power that have upset [social justice]. Champion Ramona and champion truth as opposed to lies.”170 By asserting that the “word of Ramona” 171 is the “true path of the nation,”172 Labastida

168 Ibid.

169 Horacio Labastida, “Ramona and Petroleum: Red Hot Topics,” La Jornada, October 18, 1996, 5.

170 Labastida, “Ramona and Petroleum: Red Hot Topics,” 5.

171 Ibid.

214 casts her as a messianic figure. In turn, the writer can be viewed as a convert of Zapatismo, a

disciple who genuflects at the altar of a Maya Goddess, leveraging his platform in the national

press to “champion” 173 her truth.

Figure 15: Hector Garcia, Reforma, October 14, 1996, 24A. Moreover, by interjecting herself into the national arena and using her voice to expose,

according to Huchim, “the abuse and exploitation of Indigenous peoples,”174 Ramona rejects discourses of erasure and silence, which have been imposed upon Indigenous women via political marginalization and official state culture. A case in point, in Hector Garcia’s photograph, published in Reforma on October 14, 1996, La Comandanta sits at a negotiation table with Josefina Bravo, her aide, and Javier Elorriaga, a journalist-turned-Zapatista supporter, surrounded by press microphones, which transforms the leader’s voice into text for consumption in the national press (Figure 15).175 As Marisa Belausteguigoitia suggests, the dissemination of

172 Ibid.

173 Ibid.

174 Huchim, 7.

175 Hector Garcia, Reforma, October 14, 1996, 24A.

215 Zapatista women’s voices not only violates indigenismo’s unofficial gag order, but also counters

passive and/or vilified archetypes, breaking, in particular, the curse of Malinche, who, as

Cortes’s translator, speaks with a forked tongue. Zapatismo thus provides Indigenous women a

platform to reframe and restory. According to Belausteguigoitia:

Body and tongue together, reclaiming access to modernity, citizenship and the nation, and furthermore speaking with a broken tongue and a body too full of signs of difference—gender and brownness in unison—constitute an excess that citizenship and its representation of ‘lo mexicano’ cannot digest.176

In this case, Ramona speaks for her own people, her tongue translating experiences of

Indigenous injustice, exploitation, and resistance.

For example, on October 13, 1996, Proceso quotes Ramona as stating: “The government is aiming its gun at our children.”177 This statement fully invokes the horrors of Indigenous peoples’ realities in Chiapas. Like other Maya revolutionary figures, such as Rigoberta Menchú and Victor Montejoa, Ramona employs the power of personal story to “inscrib[e] into history…lives and realities that could otherwise be erased,”178 providing testimonio to the nation.

As a literary genre, Maya testimonio emerged in the wake of Guatemala’s Civil War (1960-

1996), intervening official narratives with strident, subaltern voices. For example, Menchú’s I,

Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, presents an account of her life and her community’s experiences under repressive military rule

176 Marisa Belausteguigoitia, “Rajadas y alzadas: de malinches a comandantes: Escenarios de construccion del sujeto feminino indıgena” (“Cracks and Elevations: From Malinches to Commanders: Constructions of the Indigenous Feminine Subject”) in Miradas feministas sobre las mexicanas del siglo xx, ed. Marta Lamas, (Mexico: Fondo de Cultural Economica, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2007), 231– 232.

177 “Zapatista’s Presence in the Medical Centre, a Product of Difficult Negotiations on Our Part,” Proceso, October 13, 1996, 21.

178 S. Armstrong, “Testimonios: An Indian Perspective” International Review of World Literature 6 no. 1, (January 2010): 4.

216 that enacted a campaign of genocide against Indigenous peoples. In her work, the activist

unhinges domination, bearing witness and exposing what those in power want to conceal. She

states:

For my part, the horrors I have suffered are enough for me. And, I’ve also felt in the deepest part of me what discrimination is, what exploitation is. It is the story of my life. In my work I’ve gone hungry. If I tried to recount the number of times I’d gone hungry in my life, it would take a very long time. When you understand this, when you see your own reality, a hatred grows inside you for those oppressors that make the people suffer so.179

Speaking and writing, then, serve as political acts that constitute revolutionary performances,

which continue the work of historical liberators and warriors.

As a case in point, Labastida compares Ramona’s words and activities to Ramon Catholic

priest and revolutionary José Maria Morelos, the leader of Mexico’s Independence Movement

whose draft of the fledgling nation’s Constitution during the Congress of Anáhuac called for the

abolishment of slavery. According to the columnist, “When Ramona proclaimed before the

republic: ‘never again a Mexico without us…we all want Mexico to be a place of dignity,’ [she]

expressed the social justice that Morelos demanded in the Constitution of 1813.”180 It can be argued that Ramona’s mask—like the huipil—incites this renewal, allowing her—in accordance with pre-Hispanic ontologies of embodiment and transformation—to transmogrify into these figures and, thereby, challenge authoritarian rule. Indeed, cultural theorists writing about the significance of masking in Mexican culture identify this performance with concealment and obstruction, along with revelation and recognition. For instance, acclaimed Mexican writer and poet Octavio Paz refers to the mask as a veil that obscures alienation, dissociation, and

179 Rigoberta Menchu, I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth Burgos- Debray, (London: Verso, 1984), 133.

180 Labastida, 5.

217 disconnection, arguing that it functions as a metaphor for political regimes that have attempted to

hide the nation’s Indigenous origins.181

As another example, philosopher Michael Taussig contends that the Zapatista balaclava

exposes masked despotism, disfiguring and exposing political deception.182 Likewise, Heather

Levi’s The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity traces this enactment to its pre-Hispanic origins, noting the relationship between masking and satire or

“combat play.”183 According to Levi, masking camouflages, inverts, and reviles, allowing those

who are oppressed to mock powerful figures without the fear of retribution.184

Figure 16: Reforma, October 4, 1996, 1.

181 Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, 30.

182 Michael T. Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 51.

183 Heather Levi, The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 106.

184 Levi, The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity, 106.

218 Similarly, Ramona’s mask mocks Zedillo’s presidency, which exposes his violent suppression of Indigenous peoples and reveals his deceptive claims of support for Indigenous nations. As evidenced, Reforma’s front-page photograph, published on October 4, 1996, captures

Zedillo’s tour of Chiapas (Figure 16).185 As an attempt to assuage concerns over his administration’s orders to deploy troops to the Highlands, a region known as a Zapatista stronghold, the president distributes educational supplies to campesinos in Ocosingo, an event broadcast to the community with large speakers, which appear in the background of the photograph. However, despite curating his presidential image as one of benevolent caretaker,

Ramona’s presence at the National Indigenous Forum disillusions this imaginary, proclaiming that the intensification of warfare in this region continues the regime’s longstanding practice of

Indigenous genocide.

Unleashing Ramona’s Box

Ramona’s vocal opposition to Zedillo enacts a particular form of political dissent that rouses Indigenous resistance and provokes the ire of the political elite. For instance, Jose Chavez

Jaime’s editorial, “Zapatistas in the Federal District,” published in El Universal on October 5,

1995, comments that “[t]he Zedillo government never believed that the EZLN was capable of breaking the military barricade and entering political life of the nation.”186 By making this statement, Jaime reveals the subversive power of revolutionary figures, who, with limited power,

185 Reforma, October 4, 1996, 1.

186 Jose Chavez Jaime, “Zapatistas in the Federal District,” El Universal, October 5, 1995, 6.

219 conquer the power of government institutions and organizations, such as the military. I support my argument with a visual text, which appears in the October 13, 1996 edition of Reforma.

Figure 17: Miguel Velasco, Reforma, October 13, 1996, 1. Miguel Velasco’s front-page photograph records hostility in the streets during the

leader’s arrival in the city, depicting a confrontation between an Indigenous man, outfitted in

Aztec warrior regalia, and granaderos (riot police), pointing to pronounced tensions between

Indigenous nations and the state (Figure 17).187 In contrast to the man’s distressed expression, his leather amour and exposed belly, the police wear state-issued blue uniforms and don matching helmets fitted with visors, becoming faceless, almost mechanized, opponents that form a wall of protection in front of banking institutions and other businesses, which appear in the background, located along Mexico City’s Reforma Avenue. While the lone warrior raises a macuahuitl

(obsidian weapon) in one hand and uses a yaochimalli (shield) adorned with feathers to protect himself, the riot police arm themselves with full-body shields made of plastic, guarding the corporate elite and capitalist establishments from Indigenous unrest and upheaval.

187 Miguel Velasco, Reforma, October 13, 1996, 1.

220 According to Diana Taylor, protests and ritualized enactments, like the one depicted in

Velasco’s photograph, “make the absence visible–from marches that call attention to the disappearances of political dissidents in the 60s and 70s, to masked insurgents that highlight the invisibility of indigenous communities [that confirm the] dictatorial past...seems never to go away.”188 Following this perspective, then, repressive political regimes unwittingly sire countervailing contestations and resistant acts, innerving and weaponizing those harmed by the state, who actively contest the erasure of state-ordained violence.

Figure 18: Augstín Marquez, Reforma, October 12, 1996, 20A. Rather than repression, Zedillo’s military campaign animates Ix Chel, revealing the

productive power of state violence in bringing to life deity warriors, which reinforces—rather

than depletes—Zapatismo’s arsenal, nurturing and strengthening cultural continuity rooted in

Pre-Hispanic traditions and practices. In Augstín Marquez’s color photograph, published in

Reforma on October 12, 1996, Ramona can be viewed as impersonating the warrior goddess in

188 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 343.

221 Mexico City’s Zocalo, restaging embodied practices from pre-Hispanic rituals that actualize

mythic bodies, making the divine tangible and the sacred visible in situ in the locus of federal

political power (Figure 18).189 Predicated upon the “ability to see (and be seen) and on its ability to act (and look) like the [goddess] it represented,”190 these performances serve as “act[s] of transfer,”191 which, as exhibited in Classic Maya iconography (c.250-900 A.D), display

corporeal concurrence: “divine essences…made animate by human flesh and motion.”192

According to anthropologist Carolyn E. Tate, women’s impersonations of goddess figures

“signal a desperate measure to revitalize their communities” 193 in times of war and crisis. She suggests that by summoning and embodying ancestral deities, female leaders “destroyed the old patterns and initiated a new one.”194 When considered in the context of Zapatista uprising and the intensification of militarization in Chiapas, Ramona’s performance can be viewed as a subversive act that proffers renewal at a time of profound social and political distress, signaling the destruction of the old regime and the creation of new political order—one that restores Ix

Chel to the center of the nation.

189 Augstín Marquez, Reforma, October 12, 1996, 20A.

190 Bassett, 145.

191 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 1.

192 Ibid., 276.

193 Carolyn E. Tate, “Writing on the Face of the Moon: Women’s Products, Archetypes, and Power in Ancient Maya Civilization” in Manifesting Power: Gender and the Interpretation of Power in Archaeology, ed. Tracy L. Sweely (New York: Routledge, 2012), 94, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uregina/detail.action?docID=165510.

194 Tate, “Writing on the Face of the Moon: Women’s Products, Archetypes, and Power in Ancient Maya Civilization,” 94.

222 In this interpretation, Ramona “bring[s] the unmanifest into being,”195 enacting -iknal, a

Maya term that derives from y icnal or y-iknal, meaning “in the presence of.”196 Witnesses, in

turn, attest to the existence of the divine body, as seeing serves as “notarial presence.”197

According to Houston et al., “The visual conveyance of sense suggests that it was understood to be projective, meaning that the body did not receive passively but actively reached out to see, smell, taste, touch, and hear, as though by tendrils extending from the body.”198 Marquez’s photograph appears to capture this sense of communion and exchange, articulating an understanding that Ramona’s presence before the crowd manifests ixiptla.199

Venerated by thousands of worshippers, who extend their arms towards the leader and

hold their fingers in a V-shape to symbolize “victory,” Ramona stands on a stage, holding a

microphone to speak to her flock, a scene that can be interpreted as a continuation of pre-

Hispanic traditions associated with acts of witnessing and confirmation in public rituals.200 In

“Zapatistas Capture DF Again,” which appears in the English version of El Universal on October

12, 1996, American journalist and activist John Ross further likens Ramona’s arrival to Zapata’s siege of the capital city in 1914.201 Noting the similarities between Ramona and her Zapatista

195 Bettina L. Knapp, “The Popol Vuh: Primordial Mother Participates in the Creation,” Confluencia 12, no. 2 (1997): 37.

196 T. W. Knowlton, “Literacy and Healing: Semiotic Ideologies and the Entextualization of Colonial Maya Medical Incantations,” Ethnohistory 62, no. 3 (2015): 588, doi:10.1215/00141801-2890247.

197 Houston et al., 173.

198 Ibid., 134.

199 Gruzinski, 59.

200 Houston et al., 173.

201 John Ross, “Zapatistas Capture DF Again,” El Universal (English edition), October 12, 1996, 1.

223 antecedent, including their “humble demeanor”202 and press’ “headlines”203 announcing their invasion, Ross declares that “[h]istory has repeated itself here,”204 the Zapatista’s “flame rekindled”205 with Ramona’s presence in the heart of the nation.

The Miraculous and the Profane:

Brujas, Curanderas, and Nilda 206

Figure 19 (left): José Luis Fuentes, Excelsior, October 12, 1996, 11A; Figure 20 (right): Teresa Urrea (Santa de Cabora) in El Paso, Texas, 1896. Digital Print. Fototeca de la Dirección General del Acervo Históric Diplomático de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, México, D.F. Available from Researchgate. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Teresa-healing-in-El-Paso-Texas-Courtesy-of-Fototeca-de-la-Direccion- General-del_fig1_327681225 (accessed January 10, 2019).

202 Ross, “Zapatistas Capture DF Again,” 1.

203 Ibid.

204 Ibid.

205 Ibid.

206 Witches, Healers, and Nilda

224 Recalling the power of bodily performance in producing epiphanic presence, José Luis

Fuentes’ photograph of Ramona arriving by bus in the nation’s capital, published in Excelsior on

October 12, 1996, imagines the zeal and devotion afforded to holy figures, healers, and mystics

(Figure 19),207 conjuring an image of Teresa Urrea, an Indigenous ilusa known as Santa de

Cabora who inspired Indigenous uprisings during the Porfirian regime, which resulted with her imprisonment in 1892 (Figure 20). Here, Ramona emancipates Urrea from historical persecution

in Mexican culture and history, exonerating and honouring the dissident mystic.208

Whereas the frenetic clamoring of Ramona’s supporters contrasts the solemnity and reverence of women surrounding la Santa, both photographs draw attention to the women’s hands, emphasizing bodily connection and exchange, evoking rituals associated with spiritual transference, which code the women as spiritual healers and seers, their hands holding and conferring the power of transformation—and the contempt of the state. The photograph of Teresa

Urrea demonstrates, for instance, the “laying of hands” upon a sick baby, while a group of women—peasants wearing rebozos—encircle the mystic, watching and, possibly, waiting to be

cured of their own suffering.

In Christianity, such ritual performance invokes the holy spirit, the body—and

specifically, the hands—serving as an intermediary between the nonphysical and the physical

realms, passing divine presence and power from one body to another for healing.209 Likewise, in

Tzotzil Maya communities, deities grant healers divine vision—the power of “in-sight”—which

207 José Luis Fuentes, Excelsior, October 12, 1996, 11A.

208 Alex Nava, “Teresa Urrea: Mexican Mystic, Healer, and Apocalyptic Revolutionary,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 73, no. 2 (June 2005): 501, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfi045

209 Gary B. Ferngren, “Early Christianity As a Religion of Healing,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 66 no. 1 (Spring 1992): 6.

225 manifests in the hands.210 Similar to x-ray imaging, the curandera’s hands see the cause of internal suffering through touch, which is accessed by taking the pulse of the sick. 211 Hence, the

Tzotzil word for curer is j’ilol, meaning “one who sees.” 212 According to Alex Nava, a professor of religious studies, Teresa Urrea also claimed to see sickness as though she “were looking through a window.” 213 As Nava confirms, “Usually [she] would take the hands of the ill into her own and then stare deeply into their eyes. She claimed to possess an exceptional ability to see the cause of a person's troubles.” 214 In the same vein, Fuente’s image suggests that Ramona embodies divine presence, an ilusa performing, through touch, miraculous redemption to an entangled mass of devout disciples.

Like a saint elevated in the street during religious festival, Ramona—encarnación brought to life—appears above her followers, reaching out to them through an open window, which functions as a frame within a frame, allowing her to see and be seen for the first time. This gesture symbolizes her liberation from confinement—that she has, indeed, ruptured Zedillo’s militarized barricade, asserting her status as an agitator and a pícara.215 Armed with a Mexican flag and a few roses, her physical appearance inspires a mass of frenzied supporters, which

210 Kevin P. Groark, "Social Opacity and the Dynamics of Empathic In‐Sight among the Tzotzil Maya of Chiapas, Mexico," Ethos 36, no. 4 (2008): 427.

211 Groark, “Social Opacity and the Dynamics of Empathic In‐Sight among the Tzotzil Maya of Chiapas, Mexico,” 442.

212 Ibid.

213 Nava, “Teresa Urrea: Mexican Mystic, Healer, and Apocalyptic Revolutionary,” 501.

214 Ibid.

215 A picara is a woman who does not conform.

226 confirms her power to rally the disenfranchised and to incite dissent, imagining the possibility of rebellion that carries apocalyptic prophecy for the political elite.

Figure 21: Excelsior, October 11, 1996, 8A. A photograph appearing in the October 11, 1996 edition of Excelsior illustrates the remarkable potency of Ramona’s image to garner support for Zapatismo and to revive the spirit of revolution (Figure 21).216 The image portrays a woman crouched in the street at the foot of a young girl, fixing or adjusting the child’s traje, who wears the uniform of Zapatista women, replicating, in particular, Ramona’s appearance. Looking directly at the photographer, the girl holds one hand to her masked face, while clutching, in the other hand, an imitation rifle, replacing, ostensibly, a doll. In contrast, the woman—perhaps, the girl’s mother—is faceless, bent and bowed in the street, a space encoded with masculinity and associated with danger,

216 Excelsior, October 11, 1996, 8A.

227 transgression, and poverty. It is reasonable to infer that the photograph’s visual narrative

suggests the possibility of imminent socio-cultural transformation and political change. By

adorning her daughter in revolutionary attire, the mother imagines a future of possibility and

potential—a life without abject social conditions. As opposed to becoming a mother, the girl will

rise up and resist, emancipated from the cult of motherhood and the confines of femininity. The

photograph further conveys that the daughter is not destined to become her mother: a faceless,

marginalized figure crouching in the filth of the street. Rather, through her performance, the girl

becomes Ramona, declaring herself a dissident subject, visible and empowered, threatening

mechanisms of state power—its “hold over life,” which is “capable of suppressing life itself.”217

In this sense, Ramona heals those suffering from state violence, which nurtures the seeds of

rebellion.

Similarly, Teresa Urrea’s powers of healing galvanized Indigenous peoples, “bring[ing]

God's presence to the troubled and chaotic circumstances of their lives,” 218 stirring resistance and revolutionary activity (Figure 20). A series of Yaqui and Mayo rebellions in the 1890s, for example, have been attributed to Urrea, as insurgents cried out “Viva la Santa or Niña de

Cabora!” prior to raids.219 Not surprisingly, Urrea garnered Díaz’s disdain. She not only represented “a major impediment toward modernization [and] the stubborn refusal of indigenous communities to concede their territories,”220 but also “the ostensible superstitious and primitive

217 Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended, Lectures at the Collège de France, May 17, 1976” in Biopolitics: A Reader eds. Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 73, http://www.arch.ntua.gr/sites/default/files/resource/12208_/timothy-campbell-biopolitics-reader-1.pdf

218 Nava, 497.

219 Ibid., 498.

220 Ibid., 500

228 worldviews of Mexico's religious past,”221 which threatened political stability. As Nava argues,

using subversive bodily performance, a non-literate woman without formal education provoked,

disordered, and terrorized Díaz’s well-armoured “law and order” regime:

With Teresa the growing authority and power that she possessed to heal the bodies and spirits of others, especially the powerless and poor, became a dangerous gift that exposed the glaring faults and corruptions of Mexican society, economics, and culture under the Porfiriato. If Teresa insisted that her message was a purely spiritual one, it was a message that was no less revolutionary than other more strictly political ones. She was a mystical- political figure. Her apocalyptic messages, tied with the sheer number of followers flocking to be in her presence, if not actually crying out her name in subversive, revolutionary acts, made her a threatening figure to the stability of Díaz dictatorship.222

To quell the Santa de Cabora from provoking further Indigenous uprisings, Díaz had her arrested

and exiled—without trial—to the United States in May 1892, thus perpetuating the persecution

of the ilusa during the Spanish colonial period. The Mexican press further contributed to her

vilification, calling Urrea the bruja de Nogales.223 Despite being banished and nearly killed by her husband, Urrea worked as a curandera until her death in 1906 in Clifton, Arizona, where she was buried in an unmarked grave.224

Neither exile nor denigration has extinguished her power, however. Urrea’s followers

continue their veneration—and she has since risen and returned, rupturing the revolutionary

archive as the central protagonist in Brianda Domecq’s The Astonishing Story of the Saint of

Cabora (1998) and Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird's Daughter (2005). It is this ilusa, then,

221 Ibid.

222 Ibid., 499.

223 Gillian Newell, “Teresa Urrea: A Chicana Precursor? Social Memory Challenges, History and Identity of Chicanos from United States,” Frontera Norte, 14 no. 28 (2002): 92, http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0187-73722002000200005

224 Desirée A. Martín, Borderlands Saints: Secular Sanctity in Chicano/a and Mexican Culture (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 35.

229 who exposes the delusions of the state, and its erasure of historical presence in official narratives,

undermining canonical authority. Such a rupture, according to Derrida, reveals the archive’s inherent instability, as it rejects totality and refutes rigidity, thus compelling ruin and renewal:

[It] not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mnemeor anamnesis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced to mnemeor to anamnesis, that is, the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnema...because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory. 225

It is through Ramona’s intervention—her appearance and presence, in particular—that the revolutionary archive decays and crumbles, summoning Teresa Urrea into being, who is, thus, recalled from exile and liberated from persecution. Such embodiment continues the work of la

Santa de Cabora, healing the marginalized and inciting Indigenous insurrection.

Figure 22: La Jornada, October 22, 1996, 18.

225 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 11.

230 In what can be interpreted as a carefully contrived intervention that attempts to oust

Ramona from her position as revolutionary redeemer and to reify the state’s illusory role as care-

taker and provider, a photograph published in La Jornada on October 22, 1996 codes First Lady

Nilda Velasco de Zedillo as a benevolent savior, performing miraculous works in Zinacantan, an

Tzotzil Maya community located in Chiapas’ Highlands, which had been, until the early 1990s, a

PRI stronghold (Figure 22).226 Travelling with a convoy of national press journalists, President

Zedillo and Nilda visited the state to deliver medication to Indigenous peoples—and to show their support for the military—in the immediate weeks following the Comandanta’s visit to

Mexico City. La Jornada’s image thus glimpses the presidential journey into the nation’s

Indigenous margins, capturing a tender moment between a young girl and the First Lady, who stares into the child’s face while providing her medical treatment. Although the child’s mother stands nearby, Nilda spoons medicine into the girl’s mouth, holding the child’s face to carefully administer the dose. In doing so, the First Lady, a gendered figurehead of the Partido

Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), casts herself as a savior of Indigenous Mexico, appropriating

Ramona’s role as protector and healer of the marginalized.

Nilda is, however, a mere surrogate, a body that reproduces dominant ideologies, returning the state to guardian and primary caregiver of the nation, which, again, deposes

Ramona of this role. As she embraces the child, the First Lady positions herself an ally of

Indigenous nations, forging this alliance by wearing an exuberant floral huipil—a pattern distinctive of Zinacantan women, which suggests that the First Lady has “gone native.” Here,

226 La Jornada, October 22, 1996, 18. For more on Zinancantan’s historical political affiliation with PRI, consult Roy Køvel’s “Fighting Superior Military Power in Chiapas, Mexico: Celebrity Activism and its Limitations” in Transnational Celebrity Activism in Global Politics: Changing the World? eds. Liza Tsaliki, Christos A. Frangonikolopoulos, Asteris Huliaras (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), 121-138.

231 Nilda attempts to perform and replicate Ramona’s identity. Instead, she continues the state’s

practice of masking injurious political ideology.

As she leans down from her podium, which creates a border between the First Lady and

the child, her hair further masks her face, rendering Nilda—like Ramona—without identity,

imperceptible and featureless. By obscuring her face, she forsakes her elite status and privilege,

allowing her to transform from First Lady to a faceless body among the Mexican masses. The

photograph actualizes—in this moment—the triumph of Revolutionary goals and, yet, despite

lowering herself, Nilda remains elevated above the child and her mother. The First Lady’s bowed

posture suggests, moreover, an attempt to negate her eminent positioning and eliminate social

hierarchy, casting herself as a humble caretaker of Indigenous children, inverting the role of the

elite in Mexico, who, in many cases, employ Indigenous women as nannies. Rather than being

disaffected and removed from suffering, Nilda embeds herself in an environment of dire poverty,

intimately confronting—face-to-face—the misery of subjugation. Hence, the First Lady performs the role of Indian savior, demonstrating altruistic acts that temporarily alleviate misery.

The irony here is remarkable and unmistakable. Nilda’s distribution of medicine is unlikely to reverse the devasting and longstanding effects of state biopolitics, which ensure, for the elite, regeneration: “death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.”227

Moreover, it is her husband’s administration that has magnified Indigenous suffering by

launching a militarized campaign in the region, facilitating gross human rights violations that

contest Ramona’s efforts to ameliorate Indigenous peoples lives, which is reflected in the

227 Foucault, “Society Must be Defended, Lectures at the Collège de France, May 17, 1976,” 75.

232 Zapatista leader’s own suffering with cancer, a condition widely noted in Mexico’s national

press.

Conclusion

Through corporeal manifestation, Ramona unleashes the Red Goddess, along with a host of liminal and dissident deities from the pre-Hispanic pantheon, along with historical revolutionary figures, reiterating acts of contestation that heal, transform, and renew, a continuity that undermines historical conquest and challenges political subjugation in the contemporary nation-state. By rupturing the militarized barricade, she demonstrates this defiance, summoning the refractory specters of historical violence, who intervene and, thereby, fracture the authoritarian imaginary. Chapter six continues to examine Ramona’s eruptive contestations in the national press, covering her reemergence in the public sphere following a kidney transplant in 1997. In this coverage, I argue that Ramona replicates subversive tactics and disruptive strategies that transform archetypal maternal tropes into countervailing performances, which continues to unsettle Mexico’s authoritarian regime.

233

Chapter Six

Ramona’s Revolution:

Militant Mothers and Wailing Women

Figure 8: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 16, 1997.

Chapter 6 investigates discourses of physical suffering and trauma that emerge in

Mexico’s national press from 1997 to 2005. Codifying Ramona and other campesinas as the

archetypal embodiment of the Mater Dolorosa (Sorrowful Mother), a rendering of the Virgin

Mary whose heart is impaled with swords to signify grief over the death of her son, this

iconography interweaves news stories and images throughout this period, reiterating the cultural

paradigm of marianismo, which consigns women to agony, misery, and victimhood. As anthropologist Kaja Finkler notes, “In Mexico, there is a collective conviction that women must suffer: it is their destiny.”1 Specifically, women must experience pain—physical or otherwise— to attain spiritual transcendence. 2 In contrast to submissive and self-sacrificing Marian figures

1 Kaja Finkler, Women in Pain : Gender and Morbidity in Mexico (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 54.

2 Finkler, Women in Pain: Gender and Morbidity in Mexico, 53-70.

234 that appear in chapter four, however, I argue that maternal archetypes manifest as dissident and

refractory figures in this news cycle. Through performative acts, for instance, Ramona—as a

revisioning of this icon—weaponizes suffering, transforming trauma into forceful indictments against the state, thus redeeming the Mater Dolorosa from her allegorical imprisonment of frailty, who is then reimagined as a symbol of strength and resistance.

To support this argument, I begin this chapter with an analysis of Ramona’s first appearance in the national press following her kidney transplant in 1996 (Figure 1).3 In a

February 16, 1997 feature article in La Jornada, I assert that, despite Hermann Bellinghausen’s attempts to impose frailty upon the Zapatista leader, Ramona ruptures and arrests such constructs, employing counter-discursive strategies that impede victimization, which results in a discursive tug-of-war. Moreover, by accusing the state of conducting a campaign of Indigenous genocide during her March 1997 speech to students in Mexico City, La Comandanta emerges as a dissident agent—rather than an ailing or infirm figure. In this coverage, I suggest that she advances the scourge of Indigenous suffering to infect the public body with the rage of

Zapatismo, spreading political dissent beyond las zonas indígenas (Indigenous zones). Thus, I argue that Ramona can be perceived as a vengeful Desmadre,4 who rises and revolts, staging a radical form of revolutionary activism.

3 Hermann Bellinghausen, “If They Will Not Comply—Indigenous People will Continue to Mobilize: Ramona,” La Jornada, February 16, 1997, 1, https://www.jornada.com.mx/1997/02/16/ramona.html

4 The root of Desmadre is madre, meaning mother. The prefix des refers to the opposite meaning of the word it modifies. The idiomatic expression “Desmadre” denotes disorder, chaos, and aggression.

235

Figure 9: Jenny Hart, La Llorona, 2005, cotton with cotton embroidery and metallic threads. Smithsonian Art Museum. Available from Smithsonian Art Museum. https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/la-llorona-83823 (accessed June 3, 2019). Of the many desmadres in Mexico’s rich mythos, the wailing Llorona who grieves for

her drowned children serves as one of the most feared and maligned (Figure 2).5 A conflation of the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl and Malinche,6 she assails the living, cursing those who hear her cries. 7 In Borderlands/ La Frontera, feminist author Gloria Anzaldúa identifies the suffering mother as an unruly and disruptive protester, tracing acts of weeping and wailing to Aztec resistance. According to Anzaldúa, “[R]ites of mourning were rites of defiance protesting the cultural changes which disrupted the equality of and balance between female and male, and protesting their demotion to a lesser status, their denigration.”8 Like la Llorona, Ramona wails in

5 Consult chapter four for my analysis of La Llorona.

6 I discuss the significance of Cihuacoatl in chapter five. I also address the Malinche myth in chapter four.

7 Renee Domino Perez, There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 2-3, ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uregina/detail.action?docID=3443351

236 protest, reiterating the mythic mother’s subversive tactics and disruptive strategies to seek

justice.

Figure 3: Ramona Doll, n.d. Wool cloth and wood. Available from Zapatista Dolls. http://www.zapatistadolls.com/id/ (accessed June 17, 2014). Following this speech, however, from 1998 to 2004, Ramona seemingly vanished from

the mediated spectacle of the Zapatista arena. Although this lacuna raises a number of questions

concerning the leader’s activities during this timeframe, scholarly literature probing Ramona’s

whereabouts remains scant and speculative. Journalist John Ross, for instance, humorously

insists that, in this period, the leader “became, in effect, her doll,”9 a hand-stitched figurine sold

in Chiapas’ artisanal markets (Figure 3). Others, including social anthropologist Irma Molina-

Alfaro, proffer a far more nuanced analysis of Zapatista activities during these six years,10

8 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza - La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 21, https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/1516594/5a117bcaabdc7fd8e613f2e767d30674.pdf

9 John Ross, ¡Zapatistas!: Making Another World Possible: Chronicles of Resistance, 2000-2006 (New York: Avalon, 2006), 331.

10 Irma Molina-Alfano, “Indigeneity, Warfare & Representation: The Zapatista Case (1994-2003),” (PhD diss, University of Toronto, 2010), 67. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/26307/1/Molina_Irma_201011_PhD_thesis.pdf

237 providing a broader framework for understanding how political forces and militarization affected

Zapatismo and, by extension, Ramona.

In “Indigeneity, Warfare & Representation: The Zapatista Case (1994-2003),” Molina-

Alfaro suggests that the state’s use of low-intensity warfare suppressed the movement and subjugated its supporters.11 Military blockades, in particular, restricted the mobility of people living in the region, obstructing access to and from communities, which prevented many journalists, scholars, and activists from entering Zapatista villages and communicating with its

leaders. She comments:

The context of militarization in the region obliged Zapatista militants to implement a number of security measures towards outsiders in order to restrict the flow of information outside the conflict zone. Such restrictions included, among other aspects, non- communication with non-Zapatistas and isolation (of the outsiders) from the daily social and political activities of community members (including Zapatistas). 12

This climate of fear intensified in December 1997, when PRI Governor Albores Guillen

deployed private security forces—known as guardias blancas (white guards)—to dismantle

autonomous EZLN municipalities in Chiapas’ Highlands. 13 In addition to destroying homes and forcing international human rights observers to leave the region, these hired guns murdered and detained Zapatista supporters.14 In one attack, on December 22, 1997, soldiers massacred 21 women and 15 children in the village of Acteal, located 20 kilometers north of San Cristóbal de las Casas.

11 Molina-Alfano, “Indigeneity, Warfare & Representation: The Zapatista Case (1994-2003),” 31.

12 Ibid., 22.

13 Mariana Mora, "The Imagination to Listen: Reflections on a Decade of Zapatista Struggle," Social Justice 30, no. 3 (93) (2003): 10.

14 Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustin Pro (CDHMAP), “La Guerra en Curso,” (Mexico City: CDHMAP, 1998), 5.

238

Figure 4 (left): Día de Lucha de la Mujer Mexicana en Defensa de la Patria (Day of the Women’s Fight in Defense of La Patria). Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), Mexico City, inv. 869;15 Figure 5 (right): Jose Carlo Gonzalez, January 9, 1998, La Jornada, 8.

Following this event, news photographs predominantly cast campesinas as sorrowing mothers, recalling and renewing visual campaigns of the past, which emerged in Mexico’s national press during times of national crises. I suggest these re-imaginings encode maternal attributes associated with pain and suffering as a means to rouse empathy for victims of the massacre, while enflaming antipathy for the state, thus inverting and politicizing marianismo.16

As support for this argument, I draw upon historian Monica A. Rankin’s examination of Marian iconography in Mexican print media, which traces early representations of Indigenized

Dolorosas to World War II (1939-1945).

In “Mexicanas En Guerra: World War II and the Discourse of Mexican Female Identity,”

Rankins argues that illustrations of grieving mothers attempted to provoke moral condemnation

15 Monica A Rankin, “Mexicanas En Guerra: World War II and the Discourse of Mexican Female Identity,” Frontiers - A Journal of Women's Studies 32, no. 2 (2011): 92.

16 Emily Klein, “Spectacular Citizenships: Staging Latina Resistance Through Urban Performances of Pain,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32, No. 1 (2011): 105.

239 and galvanize support for wartime policies. 17 According to Rankin, these visual campaigns specifically called upon the service of Indigenous women in national war efforts.18 She states:

The bowed head…evokes the familiar Catholic image of Mary weeping—itself an icon of traditional, maternal ideals—and it aimed to invoke feelings of sacrifice and mourning…. The use of the female image not only calls attention to the maternal aspects of Mexicana identity but also makes a powerful appeal to Mexican masculinity. The nation is portrayed as a female victim, and this message targets an imagined male viewer who will want to protect the Mexican homeland—presented as a feminine space. The woman invokes the notion of home and thus metaphorically invokes the notion of the nation as the homeland.19

One etching, for instance, depicts a campesina “wrapped in a rebozo…[while] holding a baby in

one hand and a Mexican flag in the other,” thus casting her as a “powerful”20 and “belligerent” 21

agent in the public sphere (Figure 4). 22

A photograph in La Jornada on January 9, 1998 presents an uncanny re-imagining of this figure, imprinting historical conventions of marianismo in the contemporary context of Acteal.

In Jose Carlo Gonzalez’s image, a campesina boldly confronts the camera as she cradles her baby in the presence of soldiers (Figure 5).23 While combatants wield automatic rifles, she, in contrast, brandishes a stick for protection. Far from suffering victims, these discursive representations convey formidable strength and defiance, employing maternal imaginings of passivity and self-sacrifice to veil political protest and dissent. 24

17 Rankin, “Mexicanas En Guerra: World War II and the Discourse of Mexican Female Identity,” 90-91.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 91, 90.

20 Ibid., 91.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Jose Carlo Gonzalez, January 9, 1998, La Jornada, 8.

240

Figure 6 (left): Pedro Valtierra, La Jornada, January 4, 1998, 8; Figure 7 (right): Pedro Valtierra, Masiosare (La Jornada’s Sunday Magazine) January 11, 1998, 4.

Likewise, in the weeks following the massacre, Mexico’s national press published

dramatic images of campesinas defending their communities from military incursion, which

further exemplify archetypal inversion and rupture. As witnessed in both of Pedro Valtierra’s

photographs, Las Abejas (the Bees), a coalition of Zapatista supporters, use their bodies to guard

and to protect, forming, for instance, córdones de resistencias (resistance lines) that prevent

soldiers from accessing their villages (Figure 6 and 7).25 Drawing upon the concept of embodied memory, 26 I submit images of Las Abejas—often depicted with babies strapped to their backs— imagine the intergenerational transfer of resistance, portending the rebirth of revolutionary movements in the future that seek retribution for unresolved trauma from the past.

Indeed, as Marisa Belausteguigoitia comments in “Cracks and Uprisings: From Malinches to

Commanders,” Las Abejas incarnate La Malinche/Malintzin, weaponizing their bodies to seek

24 Klein, “Spectacular Citizenships: Staging Latina Resistance Through Urban Performances of Pain,” 105.

25 Pedro Valtierra, La Jornada, January 4, 1998, 8; Pedro Valtierra, Masiosare, January 11, 1998, 4.

26 Roberta Culbertson, “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting Trauma, Te- Establishing the Self,” New Literary History 26, no. 1 (1995): 169-195.

241 vengeance for the historical crime of rape.27 Other theorists, including Teressa Marrero, also identify the campesinas as descendants of Mexico’s mythic mother. 28 In “Eso sí pasa aquí:

Indigenous Women Performing Revolutions in Mayan Chiapas,” Marrero argues that, by

preventing violent invaders from accessing their land, Las Abejas redress historical wrongs, answering Malinche’s cries for justice. She insists, “[T]hese acts of civil disobedience by [Las

Abejas] single-handedly revolutionize the collective casting of postcolonial indigenous women as subjects and historical agents. Perhaps, finally, Malintzin is avenged…. they are frontline players in one of the most important social reimagining in Mexican history since the Mexican

Revolution of 1910.”29 This argument aligns with David M. Boje’s notion of spiral- antenarrative, which suggests tumultuous historical enactments—in this case, rape—reverberate as spiral-helices entangling the present, producing a “revolution of whorls” 30 that generate dynamic cultural, social, and political movements.

Despite Ramona’s absence in this particular period of news coverage, I argue she

persists, her body “outgrow[ing] itself, transgress[ing] its own limits, and conceiv[ing] new

bodies,” 31 re-embodied, for example, in the physical presence of Las Abejas. To support this

argument, I draw upon Elina Matoso’s work, El Cuerpo, Territorio de la Imagen (The Body,

27 Marisa Belausteguigoitia, “Rajadas y Alzadas: De Malinches a Comandantes: Escenarios de Construccion del Sujeto Feminino Indıgena,” in Miradas Feministas sobre las Mexicanas del Siglo xx, ed. Marta Lamas (Mexico: Fondo de Cultural Economica, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2007), 231–232.

28 Norma Alarcón, “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic of Chicana Feminism,” Cultural Critique, No. 13 (Autumn, 1989): 57-87.

29 Teressa Marrero, “Eso sí pasa aquí: Indigenous Women Performing Revolutions in Mayan Chiapas” in Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform eds. Diana Taylor and Roselyn Costantino (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 326.

30 David M. Boje, Organizational Research: Storytelling in Action (New York: Routledge, 2019), 110.

31 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, “Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics” in Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicolas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1998), 36.

242 Territory of the Image), which examines imprinting and bodily representation in the production

of mediated images.32 According to Matoso, “The body of resistance constructs a social body with a new, mended, sewn-up skin. The popular assemblies, the concrete protests, the cacerolazos, [and] the solidarity networks repair the skin and in that way fortify and give time for the skin to regenerate.” 33 Hence, embodiment—the process of making and becoming a body—proffers continuity and renewal, opening a space for the reconstitution of being—and new iterations of resistance and insurgency.34

I also employ Barbara Sutton’s study of women’s embodiment and political resistance to

strengthen my critique. Sutton, a scholar of Latin American studies, notes that the body is the

locus of all resistance. She insists: “Bodies need to be taken into account in order to understand

political resistance. Activist bodies are the vehicles of political protest; they can be deployed as

symbols; and they convey power when joined with other bodies.”35 Identifying the Mater

Dolorosa as a predominant cultural figure in these movements, Sutton maintains that political dissent “appears not only in the form of suffering bodies, but also as bodies of resistance and renewal.”36 Specifically, by employing and subverting maternal archetypes in public

32 Elina Matoso, El Cuerpo, Territorio de la Imagen (Buenos Aires: Instituto de la Mascara, 2001), 24.

33 Matoso, El Cuerpo, Territorio de la Imagen, 24.

34 Barbara Sutton, “Poner el Cuerpo: Women's Embodiment and Political Resistance in Argentina,” Latin American Politics and Society 49, no. 3 (2007): 129-162.

35 Sutton, “Poner el Cuerpo: Women's Embodiment and Political Resistance in Argentina,” 154.

36 Ibid., 154.

243 demonstrations of resistance,37 women not only invert tropic imaginings, but also veil radical

resistance.38

In the final section of this chapter, I provide an analysis of Ramona’s re-emergence in the national press in 2005 during La Otra Campaña (Other Campaign), a Zapatista endeavor that focused on strengthening international support for the movement.39 Despite ongoing concerns for her health, I argue Ramona’s attendance at a plenary session for this campaign reveals her unrelenting resistance and protest against the state. I suggest, moreover, that images of the leader at this event position her at the center of Zapatista political power, testifying to the persistence of matriarchal authority and power, a legacy of pre-Hispanic political traditions that will be passed on to future campesinas.

37 Emily Klein, “Spectacular Citizenships: Staging Latina Resistance Through Urban Performances of Pain,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32, No. 1 (2011): 105.

38 Klein, “Spectacular Citizenships: Staging Latina Resistance Through Urban Performances of Pain,” 105.

39 Mora, “Zapatista Anticapitalist Politics and the Other Campaign: Learning from the Struggle for Indigenous Rights and Autonomy,” 65.

244 Recovering Ramona

Figure 8: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 16, 1997, 1.

While national press reports focused on Ramona’s failing health in 1996,40 this image, which appears in La Jornada on February 16, 1997, ruptures any imaginings of frailty, illustrating, instead, the leader’s resilience and recovery (Figure 8).41 Taken six months after receiving a new kidney, Raúl Ortega’s black and white photograph depicts Ramona playing a game of catch with a toddler, her hands, which once carried a rifle, now reaching for a ball in mid-flight. As a contrast to earlier representations that locate Ramona in political contexts challenging Salinas or Zedillo, this image shows Ramona frolicking with a child in a cloistered setting. Despite conveying a sense of frivolity, however, its somber tones and framing hint at despair and dejection.

40 Hermann Bellinghausen, “La Comandante Will Travel to Mexico City on Behalf of EZLN” La Jornada, October 10, 1996, 3.

41 Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 16, 1997, 1.

245 Employing social realist conventions that draw upon visual metaphor and symbolism to

awaken class struggle,42 this photograph confines Ramona within a concrete compound in

Mexico City, a space segregated and detached from the natural world, which is fortified—like that of a prison—with high, impenetrable walls. In addition to its oppressive weight, strong lines incise the frame, establishing a sense of rigidity. As a metaphor for Ramona’s positioning in the nation-state, this photograph imagines the leader’s captivity in indigenismo’s unyielding institutions and ideologies. Notwithstanding, it can also connote her strength and determination to achieve revolutionary transformation and hope for the future through Mexico’s children.

Published on the anniversary of the San Andrés Accords, which failed, as noted in chapter four, due to Zedillo’s refusal to ratify the agreement, Ortega’s image accompanies

Hermann Bellinghausen’s article, “If They Will Not Comply—Indigenous People will Continue to Mobilize: Ramona.”43 Here, Ramona emancipates herself from structural detainment and physical infirmity, scripting herself as a resilient fighter who is prepared to return to the frontlines of insurgency. Rather than focusing on her recovery, she tells Bellinghausen that she is

“thinking about how [the Accords] are not fulfilled, why the government has not already signed

it.” 44 Ramona further proclaims, “We have to work harder.... Indigenous people will continue to mobilize”45 and that she “will not stop until [the agreement] is fulfilled. If nothing else is signed and they will not comply, what is it for?”46 Despite these assertions, Bellinghausen shifts her role

42 Maricela González Cruz Manjarrez, “Tina Modotti and Muralism: Notes on a Common Language,” Third Text 28, no. 3 (2014): 272.

43 Hermann Bellinghausen, “If They Will Not Comply—Indigenous People will Continue to Mobilize: Ramona,” La Jornada, February 16, 1998, 1.

44 Bellinghausen, “If They Will Not Comply—Indigenous People will Continue to Mobilize: Ramona,” 1.

45 Ibid..

46 Ibid.

246 from Comandanta to one of peacemaker, storying her within the narrative conventions of marianismo.

As Bellinghausen comments, now that she is distanced from the wilds of the Lacandón jungle, Ramona has “gained more than 10 kilos in weight,”47 “her language has improved,” 48 and

“[h]er eyes, strong and dark…no longer show the fatigue of four months ago. They are happy, vivacious, and radiate—how to say it, serene.”49 Bellinghausen thus queries: “How can a woman who once voted for war radiate such peace?”50 Rather than a commander, he codifies her as a selfless savior and a beacon of hope for her people. He states:

In the urban context, it is hard to imagine little Ramona as a popular leader. She is not a speaker like her comrades David, Tacho or Zebedeo. Not even as commanders Trini or María Alicia. She is a peasant activist, who knows how to speak with her people and that is why she represents them. Suffering from a kidney failure that could cost her life, Commander Ramona was the Trojan horse of those distant towns that seemed to vanish in abandonment. 51

In addition to “radiate[ing]” 52 “peace,” 53 she is also a “Trojan horse,”54 which casts her as a

deceptive enemy of the state. Indeed, despite this kinder, gentler—and ambivalent—revisioning,

Ramona’s clothing, as displayed in Ortega’s image, still marks her rank as a revolutionary leader.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

247 Bellinghausen also ascribes Ramona a litany of chronic illnesses, encoding the archetype

of the Mater Dolorosa into the subtext of his story. Noting that she is “modest,” 55 “shy and grim,” 56 the journalist comments that Ramona has faced death many times in the past ten years, a

revelation that alludes to her prolonged suffering. He further notes that in addition to “barely

recovering” 57 from eye surgery, “suffer[ing] from pulmonary tuberculosis[,] and los[ing] kidney function due to…old, untreated infections,” 58 Ramona has since endured another “very painful” 59 operation on a “delicate” 60 part of her body due to complications from the transplant.

Ramona’s counter-discourse, once again, unsettles Bellinghausen’s imaginings, disarming any scripts that weaken her agency. In response to questions about the state of her health, she discloses that she was a dancer prior to her transplant, although “with [her] scar, [she] does not dance very often.”61 Regardless, she performs a “dance step,”62 while playing catch with the child, and then turns and smiles at Bellinghausen. When the journalist then pushes the leader to address her deteriorating physical state, she instructs Bellinghausen to be “[q]uiet.”63

She insists: “I'm better, I'm going to work the same way, keep going and everything…we have still have not achieved what people want.”64 Importantly, Ramona maintains that her anguish

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid.

248 unites her with other marginalized individuals, and that that her suffering is the source of her

politicization:: “[M]any people are suffering, many people are dying in the street. That is why

political work is necessary, it is necessary to work harder.”65 In what can be interpreted as militant and combative, she also tells the journalist that Zapatismo is not dead. As long as the government refuses to ratify the San Andrés Accords, she vows that “indigenous people are going to keep coming together. We will not stop until it is fulfilled.”66 She then warns: “The

people are going to win, that's the way it's going to be.67 As a final statement, Bellinghausen describes this assertion as conveying a “chilling confidence,” 68 which ends his story with an ominous tone.

Figure 9: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 16, 1997, 1.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.

249

Another photograph emphasizes Ramona’s connection with textile production, which not

only imparts visibility and import to her labour, but also lauds her association with weaving co-

operatives, a mobilizing political force for campesinas in Chiapas’ Highlands, a discussion I take

up in chapter five of my research. Taken from a low angle, which amplifies the leader’s physical

presence so that her torso fills the photographic frame, Ortega’s portrait focuses on Ramona’s

hands, accenting her work—largely invisible and undervalued—as a weaver (Figure 9).69

Drawing upon the aesthetic conventions of social realism, this photograph recalls Tina Modotti’s political works, including Hands of a Washerwoman (1928) and Hands of a Puppeteer (1929), which exalt labourers, artisans, and social leaders.70 As art historian Erika Zerwes comments,

Modotti’s series on workers are “clearly political images,” 71 which “expressed the social issues and problems of the working class.” 72 When analyzed within the context of this history, it is possible to interpret Ortega’s image as connecting weaving with class revolt and political dissent.

In his accompanying text, Bellinghausen also highlights the physical toll of Ramona’s

trade. According to the journalist, the leader can no longer “embroider a huipil like the one she is

wearing” 73 due to the deterioration of her eyesight. Regardless, he states that she “spends the day weaving.”74 In response to questions about Ramona sending her work to street sweepers on a

69 Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, February 16, 1997, 1.

70 Manjarrez, “Tina Modotti and Muralism: Notes on a Common Language,” 273.

71 Erika Zerwes, “Tina Modotti and Kati Horna. Two Generation of Women Photographers between Worker Photography and Humanism,” Chronica Mundi 13, no. 1 (2018): 391.

72 Zerwes, “Tina Modotti and Kati Horna. Two Generation of Women Photographers between Worker Photography and Humanism,” 391.

73 Bellinghausen, “If They Will Not Comply—Indigenous People will Continue to Mobilize: Ramona.”

74 Ibid.

250 hunger strike in the state of Tabasco, she states that she “did political work to awaken people.”75

Hence, through her labor, Ramona weaves a network of support for other struggling workers,

mobilizing campesinos to use their hands to create revolution.

International Women’s Day:

Breastfeeding Warriors and Desmadres Dolorosas

Figure 10: Reforma, March 9, 1997, 2A. Following this interview and in the two week period leading up to Ramona’s speech for

International Women’s Day in March 1997, Zapatista women marched in the streets of

Ocosingo, Pantelhó, and San Cristóbal de las Casas, among other municipalities in Chiapas, demanding that Zedillo withdraw the military from the state and end low-intensity warfare in the region. 76 An image published in the March 9, 1997 edition of Reforma records this scene, showing campesinas—most masked, many carrying babies—protesting in San Andrés

75 Ibid.

76 Elio Henríquez and Juan Balboa, “Marchan 5 mil Mujeres Indígenas en San Andrés,” La Jornada, March 9, 1997, 5.

251 Larráinzar, the birthplace of La Comandanta (Figure 10).77 Wearing huipiles and wielding

banners, they raise clenched fists, a gesture that asserts defiance and solidarity in the tradition of

left-wing organizations.

In Elio Henríquez and Juan Balboa’s coverage of the event, published in La Jornada on

the same day as Reforma’s photograph,78 they note that, during this demonstration, women denounce military blockades that prevent artisans from working with Jolom Mayaetik (Women

Who Weave), a co-operative of weavers and Zapatista sympathizers.79 Women accuse military and paramilitary troops of using “constant”80 force, including sexual violence, to terrorize them.81 In addition to calling for the end to social, political, and economic inequality and marginalization in the nation-state, they denounce “the culture of machismo”82 that contributes to violence in the “private realm”83 and appeal for men to share responsibilities in the domestic sphere. Like Llorona, they, too, cry out in protest for their children. As one unnamed leader proclaims, “We are the women and it is our children who suffer the most under low-intensity warfare in Chiapas.”84 In light of these demonstrations, it is intriguing that Reforma published news stories and feature articles in the same edition or within days of the protest that deflected from or negated Zapatista women’s grievances against the state.

77 Reforma, March 9, 1997, 2A.

78 Henríquez and Balboa, “Marchan 5 mil mujeres indígenas en San Andrés,” 5.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid.

252 Guadalupe Irízar’s “Injustice Prevails for Women—EZP,” published in Reforma on

March 9, 1997, reveals substantial political indifference to campesinas’ concerns, despite its headline. In this news story, President Zedillo undermines Indigenous women’s allegations of abuse, arguing that his administration has implemented legal reforms, which have benefited women. 85 According to Zedillo, such laws specifically address “the protection of [women’s] physical integrity and social security.”86 In the same edition, an article in Reforma refers to

Chiapas as a “paradise”87 for national and international tourists. Its travel section dedicates a lengthy feature reinforcing constructs of indigenismo, presenting a colour photograph of a

“traditional Indigenous festival.”88 The image depicts men wearing huaraches and crisp, white ceremonial uniforms festooned with red sashes.89 Instead of guns, they carry in their arms sweeping bouquets of live calla lilies, a flower signifying purity and rebirth, which is traditionally offered to the Virgin Mary for the Annunciation, a feast celebrating the immaculate conception.

In contrast to Reforma’s photograph of women protesting in Chiapas, on March 9,

1997—the same day as Henríquez and Balboa’s news story—La Jornada evokes indigenismo’s

mythic imaginings, along with the archetype of the Mater Dolorosa. Attempting to pay homage

to Indigenous women, Fernando Benitez, the author of a four-volume study on Mexico’s

Indigenous cultures (1967), espouses romanticized constructs that exalt Indigenous women as

85 Guadalupe Irízar, “Prevalence injusticia para la mujer-EZP,” Reforma, March 9, 1997, 6A.

86 Irízar’s “Prevalence injusticia para la mujer-EZP,” 6A.

87 “Un Paraíso llamado Chiapas,” Reforma, March 9, 1997, 12E.

88 Ibid.

89 Ibid.

253 caretakers of children, hearth, and home, rather than political dissidents. In his commentary,

Benitez asserts:

On International Women’s Day no one remembers Indigenous women…. They cook with love: perform the difficult task of kneading dough, work with children tied to their backs in a rebozo (shawl), rocking them at the same time. They pat tortillas with a destruction and an admirable elegance. They cook beans, and prepare nopales (cactus stems) and prickly pears. In the molcajete (mortar and pestle), they make their tasty salsas…. Sometimes, they make casseroles in clay pots and comales (frying pan). And, they still give time to go to church. 90

By stating that Indigenous women effortlessly perform these domestic duties, the author draws

upon essentialist discourses, which suggest such work is natural or inherent for the nation’s

“nannies.”91 Moreover, Benitez’s idealization of drudgery, subservience, and servitude struggles to ensnare Indigenous women within indigenismo’s ideological regime.

Benitez’s commentary further emphasizes Indigenous women’s obedience and docility.

Pointing to polygamous marriage, he comments that they accept this “conjugal life” 92 and that

they agree with their husband’s decision to marry two or three wives, a situation that would

“horrify most white, ‘civilized’ women.”93 In addition to calling Indigenous women “queens and slaves,” 94 the author uses identifiers equating campesinas with animals. Benitez notes, for instance, that “[t]hey know how to give birth alone” 95 and “[t]hey work without tiring.”96 In this particular example, the author not only fails to acknowledge structural barriers that force

90 Fernando Benitez, “Indigenous Women,” La Jornada, March 9, 1997, 3.

91 Benitez, “Indigenous Women,” 3.

92 Ibid.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid.

95 Ibid.

96 Ibid.

254 Indigenous women to birth alone and work without rest, but also dismisses demands for pre-natal care and birthing clinics, which, as discussed in chapter four, are mandated in Ramona’s

Revolutionary Women’s Law.

Figure 11: Francisca Zetina Chavez (left), also known as La Paca, and Caralampia Mondogo (right), Reforma, March 5, 1997, 2C.

When examined in the context of International Women’s Day and women’s public

expression of dissent, it is, perhaps, not surprising that Reforma’s March 5, 1997 edition summons the archetype of the whore from the national mythos, reminding its readers of her potent force in Mexican culture.97 In “Celebration or Reminder?” Silvia Isabel Gómez, Antonio

Beltrán, and Miryam Audiffred ask a number of acclaimed culturistas, including performance artist Jesusa Rodríguez, to crown Mexico’s Woman of the Year.98 Known for her revisionist and satirical portrayals of national figures, including Coatlicue and La Malinche, who, in her 1999 revisioning, is cast as President Zedillo’s interpreter,99 Rodríguez names both Francisca Zetina

97 Silvia Isabel Gómez, Antonio Beltrán, and Miryam Audiffred, “¿Celebración o Recordatorio?” Reforma, March 5, 1997, 2C.

98 Gómez, Beltrán, and Audiffred, “¿Celebración o Recordatorio?” 2C.

99 Jesusa Rodríguez, “La Conquista De Tenochtitlan Según la Malinche,” YouTube. Video file, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPqcX_T2dZc

255 Chavez, a bruja (witch) known as La Paca, and Caralampia Mondogo, a fictional “broom-

wielding matron,”100 as the nation’s most important women of 1997 (Figure 11).101 Whereas

Caralampia Mondogo first appeared in the pages of El Padre Cobos (1869-1876), a satirical newspaper “renowned for its derisive opposition to the Díaz regime,”102 La Paca, a trusted spiritual advisor to the upper echelons of the state, played a leading role in a messy PRI political scandal (1994-1998) involving bribery, a disinterred corpse, and assassination—one entangling

Raúl Salinas de Gortari, the brother of the former president and the lover of Díaz Ordaz’s ex- daughter-in-law. 103

Upon first glimpse, La Paca and Caralimpia might appear to embody bifurcated notions

of femininity. A deeper reading reveals, however, their radical recomposition of archetypal

tropes that transgress cultural and political boundaries. Both women not only embody and

subvert idealized conceptualizations of gender, but also destabilize authority. In addition to their

remarkable and uncanny resemblance—as displayed in side-by-side images appearing below

Reforma’s headline—La Paca and Caralampia humiliate the political elite, exposing state corruption and impunity—from Díaz’s dictatorship to Zedillo’s regime. 104

For example, in 1997, Mexican authorities arrested La Paca for plotting to frame Raúl

Salinas for the 1994 assassination of his brother-in-law, José Ruiz Massieu, PRI’s secretary

100 Edward Wright-Ríos, “La Madre Matiana: Prophetess and Nation in Mexican Satire,” The Americas, 68, No. 2 (October 2011): 258.

101 Gómez, Beltrán, and Audiffred, “¿Celebración o recordatorio?” 2C. Translation mine.

102 Wright-Ríos, “La Madre Matiana: Prophetess and Nation in Mexican Satire,” 258.

103 Steve Fairnaur, “Mexico's Case of Witch and State Mystic: A Spiritualist known as ‘La Paca’ is Accused in a National Soap Opera involving ‘corruption, crime and the Hitchcockian,’” The Baltimore Sun, February 15, 1997, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-02-15-1997046058-story.html

104 Gómez, Beltrán, and Audiffred, “¿Celebración o recordatorio?” 2C.

256 general and the former governor of Guerrero.105 Although he was convicted of his role in the assassination, La Paca, who was Raúl Salinas’ personal bruja and former mistress, indicated that

Carlos Salinas had ordered her to plant human bones on his brother’s ranch, thereby sullying evidence against Raúl.106 In return, she received a payment of 1 millions pesos, causing a major embarrassment for the Mexican judicial system, which Zedillo had vowed to clean up during his presidential campaign.107 In “Apparition and Resurrection: The Indian Female Body as Majestic

Surface,” Marisa Belusteguigoitia, a professor who works at UNAM and whose research examines Zapatista women, argues that news reports about La Paca’s involvement in the political scandal served as a distraction for the support Ramona received in Mexico City.108

According to Belusteguigoitia, La Paca’s overwhelming presence in the media cast a penumbra

over Ramona:

The newspapers reported extensively about the ‘apparition’ of the conspirator’s body and little about Ramona, with the exception of La Jornada…. Did the government engage with a phantasmagoric rhetoric to re-cover the space that Ramona would, for sure, deserve in the media? 109

While she might have overshadowed the Zapatista leader, La Paca illuminated state corruption

and crime, revealing its venality and vice. Here, she uses her position as bruja (witch) and

mistress to overthrow the integrity of the PRI.

105 Fairnaur, “Mexico's case of witch and state Mystic…”

106 Ibid.

107 Julie Preston, “A Jilted Mistress, A Clairvoyant, and a Plan,” New York Times, February 1, 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/01/world/a-jilted-mistress-a-clairvoyant-a-plot.html

108 Marisa Belusteguigoitia, “Apparition and Resurrection: The Indian Female Body as Majestic Surface,” Lucero 11 (1) (2000): 70, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6rz3x089

109 Belusteguigoitia, “Apparition and Resurrection: The Indian Female Body as Majestic Surface,” 70.

257 Likewise, the fictional Caralampia Mondogo presents herself as an innocuous domestic to scour Díaz’s grit and grime, an act that is veiled under the guise of political satire. Cultural historian Edward Wright-Rios asserts:

Cast as a liberal version of the honest Mexicana, she appears as the image of popular domesticity and maternal umbrage. She is a sturdy housewife reluctantly drawn out of her home by troubling public happenings and, once perturbed, is an energetic punisher. As with other female satirical figures, her political task is an extension of her domestic duties: she cleans up the public sphere. 110

From Caralimpia’s campaign of cleaning that defaces dictatorship to the reframing of the Mater

Desmadre, the subversive staging of cultural archetypes in public contaminates and disorders, waging political dissent.

110 Wright-Ríos, “La Madre Matiana: Prophetess and Nation in Mexican Satire,” 258.

258 Resilience and Resurgence

Figure 12: Jaime Boites, Reforma, March 12, 1997, 1.

In her first public campaign since her operation, Ramona delivers a speech for

International Women’s Day, crying out in protest against the genocide of Indigenous peoples

under Zedillo’s regime.111 As evidenced in Jaime Boites’ photograph, which appears on the

front-page of Reforma on March 12, 1997, Ramona addresses more than 10,000 students and

supporters at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City (Figure

12).112 Shot from Ramona’s perspective—slightly over her shoulder—this image confirms and

reinforces the massive turnout, suggesting that terminal illness has neither weakened the strength

of her leadership nor debilitated her capacity to mobilize disaffected masses. As Ramona looks

out from her podium, she faces, moreover, UNAM’s main library, adorned with Juan

O’Gorman’s Historical Representation of Culture (1952-1956), a stone mosaic illustrating the birth of Mexico, which, according to cultural theorists Alejandro Hernández Gálvez and David

111 Adriana Diaz and Guillermina Guillen, “The Government Lost its Dignity, says Commander Ramona at UNAM,” El Universal, March 12, 1997, 26.

112 Jaime Boites, Reforma March 12, 1997, 1.

259 A. Auerbach, imagines Indigenous peoples as “romanticized objects rather than…living subjects

and agents of history.”113 Here, O’Gorman’s iconic façade and architectural design serves as dramatic visual foil in relation to Ramona. Flat and static, the hulking structure exemplifies injurious ideologies that ossify Indigeneity and that render Indigenous peoples to the past. In this setting, Ramona, however, represents living evidence of indigenismo’s failure to eradicate

Indigenous existence in the nation.

In their coverage of this event, El Universal journalists Adriana Diaz and Guillermina

Guillen comment that the leader denounces state-sanctioned violence and demands that Zedillo stop the massacre of Indigenous peoples in zonas indigenas (Indigenous zones). They quote her:

“How many from Chiapas, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Veracruz have been sacrificed by the power of money? Enough already!”114 Ramona also calls for the removal of the military from Chiapas and commands that the state sign the San Andrés Accords, vowing “[w]e are going to win and we are going to build a Mexico with all of you!”115 Additionally, in a news story in La Jornada, Ramona declares, “[Indigenous nations] no longer lower [their] heads. We face power.” 116 Indeed, in the days following Ramona’s speech and in response to escalating violence in Chiapas, 117 journalist Elio Henríquez indicates that campesinos in the state have,

113 Alejandro Hernández Gálvez and David A. Auerbach, “Juan O’Gorman: Architecture and Surface,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 26 (2010): 212-215.

114 Diaz and Guillen, “The Government Lost its Dignity, says Commander Ramona at UNAM,” 26.

115 Ibid.

116 Jaime Avilés, “Ten Thousand Students Demand the Release of Jesuit Prisoners,” La Jornada, March 12, 1997, 8.

117 Elio Henríquez, “Fifteen Deaths Due to Recent Violence in Chiapas,” La Jornada, March 16, 1996, 11.

260 once again, taken up arms, forming a defense coalition to protect themselves from state- sanctioned violence.118

Figure 13: Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, March, 12, 1997, 8.

A photograph of Ramona with a young girl during this event further imagines the strength and regenerative force of Indigenous revolution, suggesting the intergenerational transmission resistance (Figure 13).119 Published in La Jornada on March 12, 1997, Raúl

Ortega’s image portrays Ramona accepting flowers from a young girl. As she makes this offering to the leader, the child’s hand slightly touches the bouquet, an encounter that conveys interchange and reciprocity, connecting the past with the future. When viewed in this light, La

Comandanta relays her struggle for Indigenous human rights and sovereignty to the next generation.

A column published in La Jornada on March 19, 1997 also supports this perspective. In

“Chiapas or Impotence,” Arnoldo Kraus, a scholar of ethics, contends:

After three years, it is clear that attempts to treat Indigenous communities’ old wounds have the smell of defeat, of battles that have been lost. Not in Chiapas, in Mexico. With

118 Henríquez, “Implementation of Indigenous Defense in Chiapas,” 21.

119 Raúl Ortega, La Jornada, March, 12, 1997, 8.

261 regard to the immense problem of lethargy in current negotiations, it is not only force is useless, but that it is increasingly dangerous to resort to it. The EZLN have sown seeds of tenacity, and it is imperative to restore the rights of these Indians who have gained great support throughout the world.120

Accordingly, the child in Ortega’s photograph can be perceived as carrying on and renewing

Ramona’s efforts to decolonize the nation: she is one of Zapatismo’s “seeds.”121 The girl’s face serves, moreover, as support for this assertion. Shielded by a few wisps of hair that sweep across one of her eyes, her face is fully exposed—discernible to a nation that has attempted to efface and deface Indigenous girls and women.

Ramona and Las Floras: Make Pageants—Not Protests!

Figure 14: La Jornada, March 20, 1997

120 Arnoldo Kraus, “Chiapas or Impotence,” La Jornada, March 19, 1997, 16.

121 Kraus, “Chiapas or Impotence,” 16.

262 In the days following her speech at UNAM, a photograph of Ramona appeared on the

front page of La Jornada’s special feature, Ciudadania (Citizenship), an issue dedicated to

human rights, peace, and citizenship (Figure 14).122 Distributed on March 20, 1997, a national holiday commemorating president Benito Juárez (1861-1872), the title of this publication infers that Ramona has, indeed, acquired citizenship, thus contesting the state’s invalidation of her

Indigenous status. In contrast to previous images that sequester Ramona to the back pages of

Zapatista coverage or that highlight Marcos’ centrality within the movement, Ciudadania presents La Comandanta at the forefront and centre of Indigenous resistance, casting her as a symbol of human rights, which suggests that her cries of protest against genocide have been heard and acknowledged. Coding her as a Marian figure, Ciudadania frames her portrait with roses, suggesting an association with this maternal archetype.

Figure 15: María Luisa Severiano, La Jornada, March 20, 1997, 8.

Serving as a counter-narrative to Comandanta Ramona’s defiance, the March 20, 1997 edition of La Jornada also published a photograph of beauty contestants in Xochimilco’s annual

122 “Derechos Humanos y Ciudadana,” La Jornada, March 20, 1997.

263 La Flor Más Bella del Ejido (The Most Beautiful Flower of the Ejido) pageant (Figure 15),123

which reinforces indigenismo’s narrative of subservience. In María Luisa Severiano’s image,

eight Indigenous women smile and pose in uniform, wearing floral crowns, white huipils, and

sashes as they surround PRI delegate David Ramos Galindo. A mural of flowers in the

background associates the contestants with delicacy, fragility, and passivity. Such a depiction

stages the Indigenous exotic: a sensual harem of Indian Venuses encircle a figurehead of the

state, imagining erotic possibilities.

Indeed, sexuality and sexualization entangle the genealogy of Mexican Indigenous

pageantry. In the 1920s, promoters called participants gatitas, a derogatory term meaning

“kittens” or “pussy cats,”124 which, as Historian Rick A. López, asserts:

was often used by white middle- and upper-class urbanites to refer to young indigenous girls, especially migrants who came from rural areas to the city, where they developed ties with wealthy whites through some form of menial employment whether working a market stall, grinding corn into nixtamal, or cleaning houses. The term also carried a licentious connotation, since it often suggested a certain kind of sexual allure.125

Such contests, according to the author, provided a safe platform upon which to stage official imaginings: they “remained limited and nonthreatening—even the few portrayals of indígenas generally avoided any allusion to political marginalization or class oppression.”126 When analyzed in this historical context, then, Ramona’s imaging commandeers the ideological force

presented in Severiano’s photograph, usurping indigenismo’s prescribed delicacy and passivity.

123 María Luisa Severiano, La Jornada, March 20, 1997, 8.

124 Rick A. López, The India Bonita Contest of 1921 and the Ethnicization of Mexican National Culture,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82 no. 2 (2002): 300, https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/Lopez%2520HAHR_IBC.pdf

125 López, “The India Bonita Contest of 1921 and the Ethnicization of Mexican National Culture,” 300.

126 Ibid., 313.

264 Maternal Pain as

Propaganda and Protest

Figure 16: Jose Carlos Gonzalez, La Jornada, January 2, 1998, 14.

Months following Ramona’s public indictment against the state for the crime of

Indigenous genocide, PRI-affiliated paramilitary groups attacked the village of Acteal,

slaughtering 21 women and 15 children during a church service on December 22, 1997. In the immediate days after the massacre of Zapatista supporters, the archetype of the Mater Dolorosa emerged as a predominant motif in news photographs, which portrayed grieving campesinas at vigils, funerals, and hospitals. Such iconography is evident, for example, in Juan Carlos

Gonzalez’s photograph, which appears in La Jornada on January 2, 1998 (Figure 16).127 While a crowd of mourners fills the visual frame, thus conveying the profundity of collective trauma among campesinos, this image focuses on an Indigenous woman embracing a statue of the

sorrowing virgin, which is draped in a black shroud to signify grief and loss. Employing social

realism, this poignant scene accentuates the woman’s anger and sorrow, as she stands in the

127 Jose Carlos Gonzalez, La Jornada, January 2, 1998, 14.

265 forefront between another woman and a child, who carry calla lilies and chrysanthemums,

symbols associated with the Virgin Mary and death, to the site of the massacre. In the aftermath

of tragedy, it is the women, then, who conduct this procession of mourners, which—like the

Mater Dolorosa—imagines them as spiritual leaders and beacons of peace.

This notion is further reinforced in Emilio Pradilla Cobos’ editorial, which appears in La

Jornada on January 7, 1998. In “Citizens of the Capital and Peace,” Cobos, a cultural theorist,

refers to campesinas as saviors who bring “political change”128 to a country implementing destructive neoliberal policies. Calling these women “peaceful instruments of democracy,”129 he appeals for citizens throughout the nation to follow their “crusade for peace,”130 which calls for

“a radically different policy from the current one.”131 As Cobos asserts, “The women of Chiapas, sunk in misery and exploitation for five centuries, armed only with their immeasurable dignity and courage and their children…show us the way to achieve peace, which Mexico needs for its true development.”132 Hence, in this reimagining, Cobos codifies mourning campesinas as dissident marian figures, whose campaign for justice proffers political renewal—and, thereby, salvation—for the nation.

128 Emilio Pradilla Cobos, “Citizens of the Capital and Peace,” La Jornada, January 7, 1998, 49.

129 Cobos, La “Citizens of the Capital and Peace,” 49.

130 Ibid.

131 Ibid.

132 Ibid.

266

Figure 17: Jose Carlos Gonzalez, La Jornada, January 2, 1998, 14.

A subsequent photograph published in La Jornada on the same day further inscribes

traditional iconographic conventions associated with material loss (Figure 17).133 In Gonzalez’s image, a grief-stricken campesina draped in a white shroud attends a vigil for victims of the

massacre. Holding her hand to her face, she gazes downward in sorrowful contemplation,

an expression accentuated by the image’s closely-cropped framing, which forces the viewer to

confront the woman’s anguish and to experience her grief, thus transforming personal

suffering—like that of the Mater Dolorosa’s grief—into universally shared pain.134 Similarly, in his January 4, 1998 editorial, “Women,” Mexican historian Adolfo Gilly allegorizes campesinas

133 Jose Carlos Gonzalez, La Jornada, January 2, 1998, 14.

134 Adolfo Gilly, ”Women,” La Jornada, January 4, 1998, 8.

267 as self-sacrificing figures whose anguish unites the nation.135 Using pronominal forms that claim

possession and that mark inclusion, he declares, “These are the women. This is our war and they

are our peace. This is our life and our death. We are all them and stand with them.”136 Here, the slaughter of women and children becomes personal and collective—a loss for the nation that, as

Gilly suggests, compels individuals to “stand”137 in solidarity with campesinas.

Figure 18: Reforma, January 14, 1998, 6A.

Regarding the mothers of dead children, Gilly pronounces that they, too, are dead, having

experienced insufferable pain due to the loss of their children.138 Referring to the massacre as an undeclared war against Indigenous women, he states, “These are the women and their children.

This is the war. For this reason, Acteal killed more women than men and almost as many children as women, which is like killing women twice.” 139 Indeed, such trauma is evident in a

135 Gilly, ”Women,” 8.

136 Ibid.

137 Ibid.

138 Ibid.

268 photograph published in Reforma on January 14, 1998, which shows an unnamed mother standing—head in hand, her face obscured—next to her three-year-old daughter who recovers from bullet wounds in a hospital bed (Figure 18).140 Shot from above, the image highlights the child’s frail physique, which is framed by metal bars that extend beyond the visual field, juxtaposing fragility with steel and the sterility of whiteness. To the forefront of the frame, the child’s tiny hand is pierced with an intravenous needle, denoting that she has undergone an operation to remove bullet fragments from her delicate body. While tragic, this photograph is not without irony: in a region without access to healthcare, it is a paramilitary attack that grants the little girl medical attention.

Like a death shroud, a white blanket covers the child’s listless and bandaged body, her eyes closed, face turned from the camera, recalling the funerary tradition of photographing deceased children in Mexico, which captured “the death and rebirth of [a] child, and the transformation of that child into an angel.” 141 A common genre in early Mexican photography

that has been reproduced, for example, in many of Graciela Iturbide’s contemporary works,142

these posthumous portraits—referred to as angelitos (little angels)—display bodies of dead children, eyes closed, mouth open, resting on one side as if to simulate sleep.143 Another convention of these photographs includes dressing the body in costumes of religious figures,

139 Ibid.

140 Reforma, January 14, 1998, 6A.

141 Elisa C. Mandell, “Posthumous Portraits of Children in Early Modern Spain and Mexico,” Hispanic Issues On Line 7 (Fall 2010): 68. http://hispanicissues.umn.edu/DeathandAfterlife.html.

142 Nathanial Gardner, “Visual Witness: A Critical Rereading of Graciela Iturbide’s Photography,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 35, no. 1 (2017): 178.

143 Gardner, “Visual Witness: A Critical Rereading of Graciela Iturbide’s Photography,” 178.

269 which, as art historian Elisa C. Mandell notes, grants divine transformation: the child “acquires

the characteristics of the holy figure whose costume he or she wears, thereby attaining the ability

to act as messenger between God and the living.”144 As a subtext encoding Reforma’s

photograph, this visual narrative presages death, proffering little hope for the child’s recovery,

whose body is prepared—like that of an angelito—for the afterlife.

In relation to Reforma’s coverage of the Acteal massacre, this image serves as a strident

counter-narrative to other stories and commentaries published in the newspaper during this

particular news cycle. Rather than focusing on murdered women and children, a full-length page

dedicated to the “Massacre in Acteal” on January 9, 1998 announced, for instance, that Chiapas

held the highest birthrate in the country.145 In “Family Planning Not Available in Chiapas,”

Ivonne Melgar notes that the lack of contraception in the state presents “the most serious public

health problem”146 and that births were particularly high among “poor women in rural regions,” 147 thus codifying excessive reproduction with Indigenous women, which serves to deflect from the slaughter of children. According to Melgar, these pregnancies begin with

“underage”148 girls and continue late into life, despite advanced maternal age,149 which further invokes notions of promiscuity and sexual licentiousness among campesinas.

144 Ibid.

145 Ivonne Melgar, “Family Planning Not Available in Chiapas,” Reforma, January 9, 1998, 3A.

146 Melgar, “Family Planning Not Available in Chiapas,” Reforma, 3A.

147 Ibid.

148 Ibid.

149 Ibid.

270 Additionally, Reforma published lengthy interviews with officials, including high- ranking members of the military, who absolved the state of any blame for the massacre. For example, in Patricio Sotelo’s full-page feature, “The Military is Not at Fault,” published on

January 10, 1998, Álvaro Vallarta Ceceña, the former General of Mexico’s Military, who served at the time, as the PRI senator for Nayarit, accuses the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas for inciting violence vis-à-vis its indoctrination of campesinos.150 Ceceña also charges the EZLN of provoking violence and denies that Mexican soldiers violated human rights, vowing the military is “clean from sin.” 151 Instead of committing atrocities, he states that soldiers are assisting campesinos displaced due to tensions caused by Zapatismo in the region.152 Two days later, on

January 12, 1997, Ceceña reiterates this defense in his editorial:

The Mexican Military did not violate human rights, they are simply fulfilling their constitutional obligations in the presence of armed groups…. If you do not monitor or act to disarm inflators, it is a mistake for not complying with your obligations…there is no need to declare that there is repression.153

As another example, journalist Claudia Guerrero’s news story, “Army Falsely Accused,” which

appears on the front-page of Reforma’s on January 17, 1998 further supports Ceceña’s

contention, blaming the execution of women and children on inter-ethnic violence. 154

Weeks later, on March 2, 1998, La Jornada’s weekly supplement Doble Jornada published accounts of women’s experiences during the massacre, which included testimonies of violence, including rape, and resilience. In “Journey to the Centre of the Wrath,” journalist Laura

150 Patricio Sotelo, “The Military is Not at Fault,” Reforma, January 10, 1998, 6A.

151 Sotelo, “The Military is Not at Fault,” 6A.

152 Ibid..

153 Álvaro Vallarta Ceceña, “The Problems in Chiapas,” Reforma, January 12, 1998, 22A.

154 Claudia Guerrero, Army Falsely Accused,” Reforma, January 17,1998, 1.

271 Castellanos highlights the story of Maria, who gave birth to a son under the occupation of PRI- affiliated paramilitary troops. 155 Unable to produce breastmilk due to illness, her “body possessed with fever,”156 Maria could not feed her son. Although her husband attempted to find another woman who could provide breastmilk, the militia, which “bragged the streets with their heavy-gauge weapons,”157 restricted his mobility. As Castellanos conveys:

No one could enter or leave…without their authorization. Once they learned of her husband’s efforts to leave, they threatened: ‘Chingada Puta Madre (fucking prostitute mother)! We will shoot everyone in this house!’ Maria is now in the shelter of the sisters of the Divine Shepherd in San Cristobal. Carrying her baby and wiping her tears at the end of her story, she is the sweetest and saddest tzotzil. The child looks out the living room window. There are no mountains, only the asphalt road on which the children of other displaced families run around. 158

Situated in the broader framework of national press coverage, this narrative can be interpreted as

a dramatic revisioning of the nativity story, which interjects biblical myth in the contemporary

context of the massacre, casting Maria as a dispossessed dolorosa, whose testimony ruptures

official accounts of the event.

155 Laura Castellanos, “Journey to the Centre of the Wrath,” Doble Jornada, March 2, 1998, 1-2.

156 Castellanos, “Journey to the Centre of the Wrath,” 1-2.

157 Ibid.

158 Ibidd.

272 The Swarming of Las Abejas

Figure 19: Pedro Valtierra, January 4, 1998, La Jornada, 8.

In the aftermath of Acteal, a coalition of campesinas, known as Las Abejas, used their

bodies to protect their communities from military incursion, thus transforming pain into defiant

protests that demonstrated political dissent.159 In Pedro Valtierra’s photograph, for example, Las

Abejas form a córdone de resistencia (resistance chain), guarding their village from attack. Shot from behind, this image shows the perspective of people in the village and invites, moreover, the viewer to witness this hostile confrontation, which pronounces the disparity between the military and the women (Figure 19).160 In contrast to the well-armoured bodies of soldiers who tower above the women, Las Abejas wear traditional clothing and hold hands to prevent troops from

entering their community. While the soldiers carry body shields, the women’s bodies are fully

exposed, their braided hair and pony tales juxtaposed with Kevlar helmets. In the face of a

seemingly unconquerable opponent, the women’s selfless and altruistic actions express their

159 Klein, “Spectacular Citizenships: Staging Latina Resistance Through Urban Performances of Pain,” 105.

160 Pedro Valtierra, January 4, 1998, La Jornada, 8.

273 strength and ferocity. Indeed, as depicted in this photograph, one woman stands before a soldier

and stares confidently in the direction of the camera—devoid of any fear—while her baby sleeps

in a rebozo on her back.

By using their bodies as a chain or protection, Las Abejas invite unity and cohesiveness, binding the individual with the collective, and the present with the past. This assertion is supported in Gilly’s commentary, which identifies Las Abejas as historical figures, who continue the tradition of “taking up arms in all of [Mexico’s] wars.” 161 He further notes that their “image reflects another time” 162 and that “[t]heir bodies are filled with spirit,”163 suggesting ancestral

forces, such as Malinche’s—impel resistance. Quoting Octavio Paz’s “Sun Stone,” an epic poem

that employs the metaphor of the Aztec sacrificial altar to illustrate the recurrent force of

political revolutions in Mexican history,164 he states that Las Abejas carry these battles in “the memory of their bodies.”165 Hence, this demonstration of civil disobedience not only serves as a continuum of Ramona’s resistance against the state, but also reiterates more than 500 years of defiance against domination.

161 Gilly, 8.

162 Ibid.

163 Ibid.

164 Ruth Grogan, “The Fall into History: Charles Tomlinson and Octavio Paz,” Comparative Literature 44, no. 2 (1992): 148.

165 Gilly.

274

Figure 20: Pedro Valtierra, La Jornada, January 4, 1998, 8.

On the same date of La Jornada, another of Valtierra’s photographs captures the chaos of

military incursion and the dynamic opposition of Las Abejas, portraying an unnamed—and

unarmed—Tzotzil woman pushing back a soldier, his automatic rifle wedged between their

bodies, a phallic symbol that recalls the military’s use of sexual violence (Figure 21).166 Despite the woman’s small stature and the combatant’s overwhelming physicality and weaponry, she overpowers him, her thrust jolting the solider back, an expression of distress on his face, his eyes closed. In contrast, the Abeja directly looks up at the soldier’s face, challenging machista culture

and patriarchal dominance, which emulates Ramona: both women no longer lower their heads,

but confront power.167

Filled with frenetic movement and clashing bodies, the photograph’s background

heightens this tension, illustrating a hostile entanglement of military fatigues and white huipils,

rebozos and rifles, helmets and hair, emasculation and empowerment. In this imagining, it is the

166 Pedro Valtierra, La Jornada, January 4, 1998, 1.

167 Avilés, “Ten Thousand Students Demand the Release of Jesuit Prisoners,” 8.

275 women who humiliate and vanquish, exacting retribution for state-sanctioned violence. Indeed, days following the publication of this image, a news story printed in La Jornada on January 9,

1998 appears to support this assertion. As quoted by Herman Bellinghausen, an unnamed member of Las Abejas states: “Every action that the government does against us, empowers us to move forward. Now our women’s value is being recognized like never before in the history of

Mexico.”168 Moreover, in a news story published in La Jornada on January 23, 1998, another

leader insists, “We will never stop fighting, and if they want to kill us all, that we all die, maybe

they will be ashamed when it is published all over the world.” 169 In the subtext of these journalistic texts and images, then, the mythos of La Llorona, Malinche, and the Mater Dolorosa collide with Las Abejas, producing a discordant constellation that ruptures archetypal bifurcations.

La Otra Campaña (2005)

In 2005, the EZLN launched La Otra Campaña in preparation for the 2006 presidential election. As national press accounts indicate during this period, profound disparities continued to widen under President Vicente Fox (2000-2005),170 whose historic win for the National Action

Party (PAN) ousted PRI from more than 70 years at the helm of federal political power. Despite

Fox’s declaration that his administration would depart from the authoritarian rule of the past and

168 Hermann Bellinhausen, “The Value of Women who Faced the Military an Example to Move Forward,” La Jornada, January 9, 1998, 8.

169 Elio Henríquez, “Mass in Acteal One Month After Massacre,” January 23, 1998, La Jornada, 5.

170 Chappell Lawson, “Fox's Mexico at Midterm,” Journal of Democracy 15, no. 1 (2004): 140.

276 would engage in dialogue with Indigenous nations to improve penurious conditions,171 evidence suggested that Indigenous peoples—and, especially, women—continued to contend with

ongoing violation and subjugation.

Figure 21: Mario Vazquez de la Torre, La Jornada, September 1, 2005, 51. As a case in point, in the weeks prior to the first plenary session for the campaign,

campesinas in the state of Mexico donned traditional dresses and wielded imitation rifles,

threatening to cut off water to Mexico City after a federal treatment plant located in their

community pumped excess water into canals, which flooded their crops and destroyed their

harvest (Figure 21).172 In addition to demonstrating in front of the environment minister’s office and blockading its entrance, the women began a hunger strike to protest the lack of potable water: whereas inhabitants of Mexico City accessed water from their community, they could

171 Loaeza Soledad, “Vicente Fox's Presidential Style and the New Mexican Presidency,” Mexican Studies 22 no. 1 (Winter 2006): 5.

172 Mario Vazquez de la Torre, La Jornada, September 1, 2005, 51.

277 not.173 Meanwhile in Chiapas, Herrán Salvatti, Zedillo’s former drug czar who held the position of Attorney General in 2005, argued that the murders of 63 Indigenous women in the state had been “decontextualized,” dismissing the violence as “delinquency.”174 In the midst of genocide,

Ramona upended rumors that she, too, had died, 175 making a surprise speech to 700 Zapatista supporters, including Mexican actress Ofelia Medina, in the community of Dolores Hidalgo.

Figure 22: Victor Camacho, La Jornada, September 17, 2005, 16. Published on September 17, 2005 in La Jornada, Victor Camacho’s photograph

demonstrates Ramona’s unrelenting battle against the state (Figure 22).176 In the image, Zapatista insurgents surround La Comandanta, leaning and bowing, as they offer their hands to guide her to a podium. While this photograph conveys a sense of the leader’s vulnerability, it also—in

173 Hugh Dellios, “Villagers Fight Mexico Over Water,” February 6, 2005, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2005-02-06-0502060400-story.html

174 Angeles Mariscal, “Feminicide Complaints in Chiapas ‘Decontextualized,’ Herrán Salvatti” La Jornada, September 21, 2005, 11.

175 Hermann Bellinghausen, “Plenary for the Zapatista Campaign Begins,” La Jornada, September 17, 2005, 10.

176 Victor Camacho, La Jornada, September 17, 2005, 16.

278 many respects—recalls images of Ramona from chapter five that point to her centrality in

Zapatismo, connoting the persistent force of matriarchal authority in Chiapas’ Highland

communities. Rather than frailty, then, this scene imagines her prevailing power and influence. If

also underscores Ramona’s will to carry on her role as a commander and as a spokesperson for

the EZLN and her determination to spread her revolutionary message. As evidenced in

Bellinghausen’s coverage of this event, other campesinas vow to continue her work.177 The journalist comments, for example, that her compañeras (comadres) spoke about the importance of upholding tenets enshrined in the Revolutionary Law of Women—a document Ramona helped shape and implement—and confirmed their commitment to holding political positions and participating as equal comandantas in future resistance. 178

Figure 23: Victor Camacho, La Jornada, September 21, 2005, 19.

177 Bellinghausen, “Comenzó la Plenaria para el Despegue del Plan Zapatista,” 10.

178 Ibid.

279 In the days following the session, Ramona appears in a photograph published in La

Jornada on September 21, 2005 (Figure 23).179 In this image, Ramona can be seen in the distant left, her signature huipil distinguishing her among members of the EZLN, as they descend down a dirt road in Dolores Hidalgo. Victor Camacho’s long shot establishes their distance and marginalization, emphasizing the command’s emergence from the Selva Lacandóna. The dirt road, which extends before the EZLN, can be interpreted as a symbol of the movement’s journey, suggesting that the Zapatistas navigate rough political terrain with limited means. At the same time, the image’s low angle—shot at the end of the road—emphasizes their power and authority. While conveying a sense of ambivalence regarding the future of the EZLN, the appearance of the little girl, who plays without alongside a boy in the foreground, portents hope.

Positioned at the front of the command without shoes, the girl leads the Zapatista insurgents out of the Selva—foretelling what is to come: she is the next generation of revolutionary fighters who will continue Ramona’s legacy.

Conclusion

From 1997 to 2005, the iconography and mythos of the Mater Dolorosa, La Llorona and

La Malinche encode representations of trauma in the national press, confirming how the

“culturally legitimated ideology of the suffering woman pervades Mexican society.”180 Despite attempting to delegate women to victimhood and misery, however, such narratives, as demonstrated in this chapter, can be inverted and weaponized, converted into tools of political

179 Victor Camacho, La Jornada, September 21, 2005, 19.

180 Finkler, 54.

280 dissent in specific contexts. Through reclamation, for instance, suffering campesinas transform

into disruptive agents, decrying and exposing crimes of the state. This is, perhaps, most

pronounced in the news coverage of Las Abejas, who, incarnating historical insurgents, become

dissident desmadres, protecting their communities form military onslaught. Additionally, this investigation considers how the entanglement of mythologies fractures archetypal bifurcation, creating new discursive space for syncretic imaginings. As a case in point, several news stories and images suggest Ramona simultaneously embodies and contests iconic configurations. Like

Llorona, for instance, she testifies to the oppression of hegemonic state power, 181 thus deviating from passivity, while demonstrating the virtues of marianismo: suffering, self-sacrifice, and self- negation. Such discordance splinters indigenismo’s limiting maternal constructs and tropes, proffering, instead, unruly revisionings that empower, rather than subjugate. Significantly, news stories and photographs imagine the intergenerational transfer of resistance, suggesting

Ramona’s calls for revolution and retribution will be passed from mother to daughter. As I will now discuss in chapter 7, the leader’s revolutionary cries are, indeed, heard throughout Mexico and the world, following her death in January 2006.

181 Wendy Swyt, “Hungry Women: Borderlands Mythos in Two Stories by Helena Maria Viramontes,” MELUS 23, no. 2 (1998): 196.

281

Chapter Seven

The Death and Life of La Comandanta Ramona

Figure 10. El Universal, January 7, 2006, A10. Chapter seven explores discursive representations of La Comandanta Ramona following

her death on January 6, 2006. Coded as an hierophanic figure who battled state-sanctioned

violence and indifference while suffering from cancer, Ramona’s defense of the land and

campesinos serve as sacrificial acts, marking the leader as a martyrial figure in mediated texts.1

As Marisa Belusteguigoitia suggests in “Apparition and Resurrection: The Indian Female Body

as Majestic Surface,” “Ramona is Ramoncita, the tiny woman whose sacrifice is magnificent, the

tiny resurrected woman…is outstanding, auratic, [and] majestic.”2 Indeed, Ramona’s passing on

1 Marisol López-Menéndez, Miguel Pro: Martyrdom, Politics, and Society in Twentieth-Century Mexico (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), xii.

2 Marisa Belusteguigoitia, “Apparition and Resurrection: The Indian Female Body as Majestic Surface,” Lucero 11, no. 1 (2000): 71.

282 El Día de Los Reyes (Three Kings’ Day), a Christian observation known as Epiphany that celebrates the manifestation of Christ, confirmed—for many journalists—Ramona’s holiness.

Hence, I argue that Mexico’s national press plays a critical role in constructing this mythologization and that journalistic narratives elevate her to status of martyr, thereby surrendering to the power of Zapatista imaginary and deploying its weaponry.3

Contextual Framework:

Martyr-Making and Ramona in Mexico’s National Press

Although some columnists attempt to demystify Ramona—and thereby deflate her mythic imagining, many editorials and commentaries canonize her in the tradition of venerating folk saints in Mexican culture. 4 Based on popular devotion rather than official procedures established by the Roman Catholic church, the creation of folk saints recovers pre-Hispanic spiritual practices, which fuse traditional veneration of deities with ritualized elements of

Catholic sainthood, 5 demonstrating yet another example of syncretic ritualized practice. Here, popular canonization resists by wresting authorship from institutional power, usurping the church of its control over who and what qualifies as holy. In her examination of Latin American folk saints, June Macklin, an anthropologist, argues that the “struggle over who controls the stories continues to mark the making of saints.”6 Her research reveals a significant pattern: although

3 López-Menéndez, “The Holy Jester: A Story of Martyrdom in Revolutionary Mexico,” 61-62.

4 James F. Hopgood, “Saints and Saints in the Making,” in The Making of Saints Contesting Sacred Ground, ed. James F. Hopgood (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 12.

5 William Breem Murray, “Spirits of a Holy Land: Place and Time in a Modern Mexican Religious Movement,” anthropologist William Breen Murray,” in The Making of Saints Contesting Sacred Ground, ed. James F. Hopgood (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 121.

283 folk martyrs fulfill the necessary standards of self-sacrifice and piety required for beatification, their liminal status makes them hostile to the panoply of sainthood. Macklin notes:

All were marginal to the social and religious power structures by reason of gender, class, race, or legitimacy of birth….Their very marginality permitted independence of action and they always operated in spaces outside those controlled by the Church. In that way they successfully contested the hegemonic discourse and exercised the power of the weak.7

Hence, even in death, these figures—like Ramona—remain highly dissident and rebellious.

Marisol López-Menéndez further argues that narrativization constitutes an integral part of

martyr-making. In “The Holy Jester: A Story of Martyrdom in Revolutionary Mexico,” she

asserts that “martyrs do not exist per se. They arise as a narrative construction which shapes real

events and real lives to make them fit into a pattern….Thus, martyrdom is not ‘found’ in history,

but made.” 8 It is not only death, then, that makes the martyr, but, rather, it is the storying of an actor’s life that creates martyrdom.9 While martyrial narratives follow cultural patterns and draw upon historical events to structure meaning, these mythologies inhabit unstable terrain, contending with shifting interpretations that revision and, often, conceal faults to fit formulaic conventions. López-Menéndez identifies factual criteria, for instance, as unsettling and impeding martyrdom, as actuality makes mystification impossible.10 She notes:

Subsequently, the narrative reworks both the facts of life and the circumstances of death to model them after a pattern of persecution, confrontation with the State, humiliation and public death. Remembrance based on this pattern necessarily leaves aside aspects which

6 June Macklin, “Saints and Near-Saints in Transition: The Sacred, the Secular, and the Popular,” in The Making of Saints Contesting Sacred Ground, ed. James F. Hopgood (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 29.

7 Macklin, “Saints and Near-Saints in Transition: The Sacred, the Secular, and the Popular,” 24.

8 López-Menéndez, “The Holy Jester: A Story of Martyrdom in Revolutionary Mexico,” 62.

9 Marisol López-Menéndez, Miguel Pro: Martyrdom, Politics, and Society in Twentieth-Century Mexico, xii. 10 López-Menéndez, Miguel Pro: Martyrdom, Politics, and Society in Twentieth-Century Mexico, xii.

284 do not pertain to the narrative flow. The making of martyrial narratives shapes real events infusing them with meaning and changing with sociopolitical events.11

Colliding socio-cultural and political interjections, for instance, complicate these accounts,

intervening and disrupting martyr-making. Such constructions, moreover, rely on “three leading

roles: the martyr, [her] followers, and the state.” 12 In an analysis of the national press’ narrativization of Ramona’s death and life, these actors do, indeed, play significant roles in the fashioning of mythopoesis, which is particularly evident in works written by newspaper columnists, along with letters to the editor.

Rather than Marcos or López Obrador, in the immediate days following her death,

Ramona occupied the pages of La Jornada, which provided the greatest number of stories and commentaries commemorating the weaver-turned-martyr. Although such narratives often beatify

Ramona and reveal significantly more information about her life and contributions to the

Zapatista campaign than at any other point in mediated coverage, commentaries attempting to unmask La Comandanta also trouble and confound, provoking more questions than answers about her identity.

11 López-Menéndez, “The Holy Jester: A Story of Martyrdom in Revolutionary Mexico,” 66.

12 López-Menéndez, Miguel Pro: Martyrdom, Politics, and Society in Twentieth-Century Mexico, xii.

285 Weaver, Warrior, Soldier, Saint

Figure 2: El Universal, January 7, 2006, A10.

A departure from previous coverage, textual accounts dominate discursive representation

in this period. This front-page photograph of Ramona’s “last apparition,”13 taken in 2005 during

La Otra Campaña, stands out, however, as the exception (Figure 2).14 Published in El Universal on January 7, 2006, Ramona, who is referred to as a “guerrillera,”15 or guerilla, stands next to

Subcomandante Marcos, who towers over her, supporting Ramona’s back as he escorts the leader from the podium following her speech. What is particularly haunting about this image is

Ramona’s gaze: she looks directly at the unnamed photographer, diverging from previous photographs published during her life.

Marcos—now known as Delegate Zero—recalls this event in Hermann Bellinghausen’s news story, “EZLN Suspends Tour Due to Ramona’s Death,” published on January 7, 2006 in La

Jornada. During the plenary session, Marcos comments that Ramona “gave us a textile that she

13 Fredy Martin, El Universal, January 7, 2006, 1.

14 Martin, El Universal, 1.

15 Ibid.

286 had done in convalescence after her operation. [Ramona] did it almost 10 years ago, and she

handed it to me and told me she hoped the Other Campaign would be like that embroidery.” 16

Following her death, then, Ramona’s weaving not only serves as a living record of her resistance, but also serves a metaphor and a visual model for Zapatismo’s future. Like the process of creating a textile, the movement must weave together individual threads of different colors—in this case, national and international networks of support—to form an interlocking tapestry of resistance. As Marcos notes, “That is what we have to do.”17 Hence, in death, Ramona continues to direct the operational aspects of the EZLN, just as she had during the initial January 1, 1994 uprising.

Bellinghausen’s news story also provides an official account of Ramona’s death, the first description of her passing in the national press. The journalist indicates that on the morning of

January 6, 2006, the leader “started vomiting, bleeding and having diarrhea. She then died en route to hospital in San Cristóbal de las Casas.” 18 Marcos also comments, “What we know is what everyone knows. Over the past ten years, cancer ripped apart Comandanta Ramona.” 19 By presenting these details, Bellinghausen and Marcos bare Ramona’s diseased body and abject suffering to the public, making her flesh-and-bone, a tangible woman who bleeds and vomits, thus invoking the conventions of marianismo that demand women must experience pain to

16 Hermann Bellinghausen, “EZLN Suspends Tour Due to Ramona’s Death,” La Jornada, January 7, 2006, 3.

17 Hermann Bellinghausen, “EZLN Suspends Tour Due to Ramona’s Death,” 3.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

287 achieve sainthood.20 Such visceral description proffers, moreover, her supporters with a physical body to mourn.

In news stories, Marcos plays a critical role in constructing this mythopoetic narrative, scripting Ramona as a relentless and selfless insurgent who battled disease, while fighting the state. He comments, for instance, that “the world lost one of those women created new worlds.

Mexico lost one of those fighters it needs.”21 He laments that “a piece of our heart was torn from us.” 22 In Claudia Herrera’s “They Grieve Ramona’s Death,” which appears in La Jornada on the same day as Bellinghausen’s story, the spokesperson proclaims that Ramona advocated for the

“poorest and most marginalized women of Mexico. Comandanta Ramona’s efforts were not in vain because her example and her word will continue to raise awareness about need for justice.” 23 In another news story, published on January 10, 2006 in La Jornada, news story,

Marcos declares, “Those who die for life cannot be called dead.” 24 Such imaginings codify her as an immortal figure, thus ascribing the leader with divine attributes.

Likewise, in “A Sweet and Shy Woman with the Force of a Bomb,” which appears in La

Jornada on January 7, 2006, Bellinghausen melds hyperbole and reality with the imaginary to apotheosize Ramona. As a case in point, Bellinghausen refers to Ramona as “incarnating an

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Hermann Bellinghausen, “EZLN Suspends Tour Due to Ramona’s Death,” La Jornada, January 7, 2006, 3.

23 Claudia Herrera, “They Grieve Ramona’s Death,” La Jornada, January 7, 2006, 1.

24 Elio Henriquez, “Criminal, Sahugún Acts Like She Holds Public Office: Marcos,” La Jornada, January 10, 2006, 6.

288 image of one the most powerful and unforgettable women in Mexico, and the world.”25 The title indirectly likens her to Ix Chel, recognizing that she synthesizes disorder and embodies oppositional dualities. Similar to the shapeshifting Red Goddess, Ramona is a weaver with

“unstoppable hands, always with thread between them,” 26 “her chest lit with a magnificent red huipil.”27 Although she speaks with the “voice of a bird,”28 the “small, illiterate”29 and “gravely ill”30 woman is “armed, courageous and dangerous.”31 He further asserts: “Each time she was

seen outside of San Andrés, she was like a bomb”32 who “[woke] the people,”33 “[shaking] up the [political] regime and beat[ing] death in a surgical theater.” 34 Here, La Comandanta becomes both a sacrificial figure and a mythic warrior.

For the first time in the national press and in the scope of my research, Bellinghausen, also acknowledges Ramona’s accomplishments. He lists, for example, that Ramona not only participated in the January 1, 1994 uprising, but also planned its strategic operation, leading and coordinating the campaign.35 In addition to holding the highest command in the EZLN,

25 Hermann Bellinghausen, “A Sweet and Shy Woman with the Force of a Bomb,” La Jornada, January 7, 2006, 3.

26 Bellinghausen, “A Sweet and Shy Woman with the Force of a Bomb,” 3.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

289 Bellinghausen notes that Ramona was the founder of the rebel army and the foremother of its

civil arm.36 In addition to these actions, she campaigned for women’s rights, overseeing and implementing the Women’s Revolutionary Law.37 Because these contributions have been widely

unrecognized in media reports, such facts, however, might be interpreted as fiction, provoking

questions as to why these details have been erased or obscured in previous reportage.

In the same edition, Blanche Petrich’s commentary, “Ramona, the Zapatista Leader who

Preferred the Fight to Marriage,” refers to the leader as a “symbol” 38 who “rarely talked, but

spoke with her eyes.”39 Petrich, the first journalist to interview Ramona for the national press in

1994, describes her initial meeting with the commander in Guadalupe Tepeyac, a Zapatista community located in the Lacandon jungle. She recalls:

She was not wearing a balaclava, but a new bandana; some gray hairs already shone in her braided hair. David had lent her a sweater, not so much because of the cold, but because that way she could cover her huipil, whose embroidery would have betrayed her home community. They were days of rigorous secrecy. Her boots and the hem of her blue skirt were stained with mud.40

Similarly, in a news story published two days later in La Jornada, Yosadora Vega of Brigada

Zapatista calls Ramona an “inextinguishable fighter who broke through machista”41 culture to

“vindicate” 42 revolutionary women.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Blanche Petrich, “Ramona, the Zapatista Leader who Preferred the Fight to Marriage,” La Jornada, January 7, 2006, 5.

39 Petrich, “Ramona, the Zapatista Leader who Preferred the Fight to Marriage,” 5.

40 Ibid.

41 Brigada Zapatista, “Goodbye in Coyoacán,” La Jornada, January 9, 2006, 12.

42 Brigada Zapatista, “Goodbye in Coyoacán,” 12.

290 Imagining the La Comandanta as a disciple of revolution and a dissident insurgent who

fails to conform to the conventions of marianismo, Petrich obverses that Ramona was

“engaged”43 to the movement. It was Ramona, moreover, who made the final decision to rise up against the state. According to Petrich:

The only woman, the only monolingual speaker of the group that was commissioned to spread the word of the EZLN in that first meeting with the press, Ramona maintained her martial position, with a shotgun against her chest; silent, she looked around among her companions, who explained to reporters how, in hundreds of indigenous communities, after 10 years of a quiet and profound process, the decision of war or peace was put to the vote…‘she is the one who told us now, let's start. We don't want to take it anymore because we're already starving.’44

As evidence of the leader’s authority and rank, Petrich remarks that, during negotiations with the

Mexican government in February 1994, “she always appeared at the right hand of the mediator,

Bishop Samuel Ruiz.” 45 However, “[s]itting at the negotiating table, her feet did not reach the ground. Because of her short stature, one journalist called her llaverito (keychain).”46 While unruly and rebellious, she is also endearing and diminutive, alluding to her subversive attributes.

43 Petrich, “Ramona, the Zapatista Leader who Preferred the Fight to Marriage,” 5.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

291 Santos Rebeldes: Ramona and Che47

Figure 3 (left): La Jornada, January 9, 2006, 2; Figure 4 (right): Jim Fitzpatrick, Guerrillero Heroico, c.1968. Digital Print adapted from Alberto Korda’s original photograph. Available from Wall Paper Flare. https://www.wallpaperflare.com/search?wallpaper=Che+Guevara (accessed August 3, 2019).

In addition to these framings, La Jornada printed messages of condolences from

supporters and human rights activists in Mexico and the United States, which identify the leader

as a symbol of various causes, including Indigenous rights, women’s rights, human rights,

workers’ rights, and the rights of the poor. A rebel with many causes, Ramona becomes a

malleable icon adopted by multiple campaigns—evoking the iconic status accorded to other

revolutionary figures, such as Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who, as an emblem of suffering and

struggle, continues to transcend movements and to galvanize disparate factions.48 Indeed, following her death, it can be argued that Ramona becomes Mexico’s Che. As evidence, La

Jornada created an avatar in her likeness—appearing alongside letters expressing condolences—

47 Rebel Saints.

48 Jeff A. Larson and Omar Lizardo, “Generations, Identities, and the Collective Memory of Che Guevara,” Sociology Forum 22 no.4 (December 2007): 427-428 DOI: 10.1111/j.1573-7861.2007.00045.x

292 that replicates Che’s renowned graphic illustration (Figure 3),49 an image adapted from Alberto

Korda’s 1960 photograph of the revolutionary leader (Figure 4).50

Although Korda’s image has been co-opted, appropriated, and commoditized in a myriad of configurations, illustrations of Che—especially, in Latin America—most often fuse and conflate Christian iconography.51 In “Chesucristo: Fusions, Myths, and Realities,” art historian

David Kunzle argues this aestheticism exalts the revolutionary figure—who, in life, was an atheist—to that of a holy figure: “Che stands above all for social justice and the necessity of sacrifice: Che, like the suffering Christ, was a sacrifice to the prevailing ideology.”52 For instance, Kunzle presents numerous examples of Che’s visual transubstantiation in popular culture. From t-shirts to fridge magnets, his image incorporates:

many of the attributes of Jesus and events from his Passion have been fused with the iconic Che images: the three-letter name (IHS = CHE), star, halo, stigmata, crown of thorns, crucifixion, Deposition/Pietà, etc. The Anglican Church has done the reverse: fused a Jesus face with that of Che.53

Similar to the Argentine guerrilla, Ramona’s iconography also exhibits syncretic iconography, reclaiming, subverting, and exploiting coded religious symbols and mythologies as a means to diffuse Zapatismo.

This statement becomes evident in letters to the editor—sent to La Jornada in the days following her passing—that serve as acts of public veneration, storying La Comandanta as a

49 La Jornada, January 9, 2006, 2.

50 Larson and Lizardo, “Generations, Identities, and the Collective Memory of Che Guevara,” 436-439.

51 David Kunzle, "Chesucristo: Fusions, Myths, and Realities," Latin American Perspectives 35, no. 2 (2008): 97-115.

52 Kunzle,. "Chesucristo: Fusions, Myths, and Realities,” 101.

53 Ibid., 97.

293 divine figure. In “The Death of Comandanta Ramona Distresses Greatly,” published on January

9, 2006, members of Colectivo Votan Zapatista Coyoacán, a solidarity organization based in

Mexico City, insist that Ramona lives through them, an immortal being who continues her

revolutionary campaign.54 They affirm, “Because you have not died, you continue with us and push us to fight until our last breath.” 55 Drawing upon elegiac conventions and employing apostrophe, this collective addresses Ramona directly, emphasizing the certainty of her existence—that she lives and, perhaps, reads the letter. Laudatory expressions of admiration and devotion further confirm their belief in Ramona’s sanctity, constructing a mythical narrative that codifies her as martyred saint. Referring to Ramona as a “great warrior”56 who died fighting for

Indigenous women,” they maintain her death and life “nurture[ed] seeds for a better life.”57

Hence, they promise to “follow [her] on the road that [she] constructed to create justice and

equality in this country.”58 By publicly proclaiming this fidelity, the Zapatista supporters declare themselves devotees to the cult of Ramona.

Further, members of the Permanent Seminar on Gender and Anthropology at the

Autonomous University of Mexico, which includes Sylvia Marcos, an acclaimed writer and

scholar of Indigenous movements, imagine the leader as a mythic figure who symbolizes

“women’s struggle for dignity, autonomy and solidarity.”59 Following mythological conventions,

54 Colectivo Votan Zapatista Coyoacán, “The Death of Comandanta Ramona Distresses Greatly,” La Jornada, January 9, 2006, 2.

55 Colectivo Votan Zapatista Coyoacán, “The Death of Comandanta Ramona Distresses Greatly,” 2.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid.

59 “Grieving the Death of Ramona,” La Jornada, January 23, 2006, 2.

294 which, in many cases, begin with miraculous or preternatural origins, these scholars claim

“indigenous rebellion gave birth to the great Ramona.” 60 An allegory of “the past and the present,”61 she is also a “channel”62 for “indigenous peasants and non-rural women struggling

for their rights as citizens” 63 that discloses the “lack of respect and recognition…suffered for more than 500 years.” 64 Moreover, like Virgin of Guadalupe whose right eye reflects the image of a man, “the kindness of [Ramona’s] black eyes,”65 which “expose deep wounds,” 66 become “a mirror of rebellion…where we can reflect by saying: we all want to become Ramona.”67 Vowing to don a bandana and to continue her struggle, members of this organizations make this final

proclamation: “¡Todos somos Ramona!”68

In other letters, state dignitaries and international celebrities sacralize La Comandanta, curating her as a mythic heroine. On January 7, 2006, La Jornada published condolences from

Luis H. Alvarez, a National Action Party (PAN) candidate who ran for president in 1959, and

President Fox’s main negotiator in peace talks with the Zapatistas in 2000.69 In his message,

Alvarez states that he mourns in solidarity with Ramona’s supporters, expressing his grief for the

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid., “We are all Ramona!”

69 La Jornada, January 7, 2006, 6.

295 “fallen”70 soldier, whom he refers to as a “relevant actor” 71 in the Zapatista movement. Alvarez remarks, “Her voice pronounced resounding words about rights to assist the poorest and most marginalized women in Mexico…. Her fight was not in vain—her example and words shifted consciousness about human rights.”72 This statement becomes, then, a testament to the power of

Ramona’s language that, when uttered, produces performative acts.73

In “Condolences for Ramona’s Death,” published on January 13, 2006, American

celebrities comment that Ramona’s fight for justice transcended borders, forging an international

family of activists and supporters.74 Signed by Zack de la Rocha, the lead sing of Rage Against the Machine (Figure 6),75 Oliver Stone, the Academy award winning film director, and Lydia

Brazon, an international human rights lawyer, the letter refers to Ramona as an “integral woman

in the defense of human rights.”76 They further comment that La Comandanta battled “with the strength, the tenderness, and the generosity of her soul…which makes her unforgettable.” 77 All three had met the leader during their travels to Mexico City and Chiapas to demonstrate their support and solidarity for the movement, which ramped up, in particular, following Zedillo’s militarization of Chiapas.78

70 La Jornada, 6.

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid.

73 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 9.

74 Zack de la Rocha, Oliver Stone, Lydia Brazon, “Condolencias for Ramona’s Death,” La Jornada January 13, 2006, 2.

75 Zack de la Rocha, La Jornada del Campo, August 17, 2003, 3.

76 Rocha et al., “Condolencias for Ramona’s Death,” 2.

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid.

296

Figure 5 (left): Ramona, Mexican actor Ofelia Medina, Oliver Stone and Comandante Tacho in San Cristóbal de las Casas, La Jornada, March 25, 1996; Figure 6 (right): Zack de la Rocha, La Jornada del Campo, August 17, 2003, 3. A photograph printed in La Jornada on March 25, 1996 shows, for instance, Stone during

one of his visits to San Cristóbal de las Casas, attesting to the persuasive force of Ramona’s

leadership, which helped cultivate celebrity support for the movement (Figure 5). 79 Taken from a low-angle, this image pronounces the director’s prominence, while highlighting disparities between Stone and members of the General Command, most notably Ramona. A towering figure, the celebrity-cum-activist dominates the frame, overshadowing La Comandanta, who stands at a slight distance from Stone. Although Ramona appears aloof and reserved, Mexican actor Ofelia Medina—located in the centre of the back row—gazes in admiration at the iconic director. While Stone looks to the left of the camera, Ramona and the insurgents peer in the opposite direction. Further, in contrast to the masked leader’s traditional huipil and faja, Stone wears an unstated blazer with matching trousers, his collared shirt unbuttoned. The photograph lacks, moreover, compositional balance, which emphasizes these incongruities.

79 Jaime Avilés, “Oliver Stone with the Little Ones,” La Jornada, March 24, 1996. https://www.jornada.com.mx/1996/03/25/AVILES00-PG.html

297 A Burial at San Andrés

Figure 7: El Universal, January 9, 2006, A1.

Although the Zapatistas prevented the media from attending Ramona’s funeral, which was held in San Andrés Larráinzar on January 9, 2006,80 the national press photographed the burial from the outskirts of the municipal cemetery, as evidenced in El Universal’s black and

white, wide-angle panoramic depiction of her interment, also published on January 9, 2006

(Figure 7).81 Shot from a high vantage point, this front-page photograph portrays a somber gathering of indistinguishable mourners at Ramona’s interment, using chiaroscuro as a dramatic technique to convey a sense of grief and sorrow. Such aestheticism recalls and draws upon the conventions of nineteenth century French social realism, reproducing many of the compositional features and themes from Gustav Courbet’s 1849 painting, A Burial At Ornans, which depicts a crowded congregation of peasants with imperceptible bodies and faces at a burial in the French

80 El Universal, January 9, 2006, A1.

81 El Universal, January 9, 2006, A1.

298 countryside (Figure 8). 82

Figure 8: Gustave Courbet, A Burial At Ornans, 1849, oil on canvas.

Created during a time of political and social unrest in France—the ousting of King Louis

Philippe and the revolt of workers during the June Days’ Uprising—Courbet’s painting ruptured artistic conventions of its time by depicting—like the newspaper’s image—“unidealized workers and peasants in mundane scenes of everyday urban or rural life…the sort of grand scale normally reserved for paintings of religious or historical subjects.”83 In doing so, the artist elevated the lives of common people—often, poor and invisible—to a visual space that had been dominated by aristocrats, historical events, and classic mythology.84 A similar argument can be made about

El Universal’s photograph. By publishing the image of the funeral on the newspaper’s front

page, Ramona—a poor campesina—intervenes discursive spaces generally allocated for the

political elite or reserved for contemporary conflicts of national and international import.

Likewise, in the photograph, barriers between physical bodies and the natural environment

82 “A Burial at Ornans (1849) by Gustave Courbet” http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/paintings- analysis/burial-at-ornans.htm#analysis

83 “A Burial at Ornans (1849) by Gustave Courbet” http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/paintings- analysis/burial-at-ornans.htm#analysis

84 Ibid.

299 dissolve, invoking themes related to land and identity.85

Although there are few accounts of the service, Bellinghausen’s “Between Prayers and

Songs the Body of the Great Comandanta was Inhumed,” published in La Jornada on the same

day, provides the most detailed description of the event.86 Like other stories related to her death,

the journalist describes Ramona as a revolutionary martyr. Referring to her as a “fallen”

commander, for instance, he notes that Ramona received a military funeral with full honours,

which was conducted by Felipe Arizmendi Esquivel, the bishop of San Cristóbal de Las Casas

diocese.87 During the service, Esquivel read a condolence letter written by Celia Hart, a member

of the Cuban Communist Party and the daughter of Cuban revolutionary leaders Haydée

Santamaría and Armando Hart Dávalos. In her message, she appeals for “everyone…to fight”88

in honor of the leader’s memory and calls Ramona’s death “a lie”89 because her “life has been devoted to preventing the death of…fellow human beings.” 90 In this imagining, Ramona will never die: her life continues in the lives of others, who are called upon to continue her revolution.

85 Ibid.

86 Hermann Bellinghausen, “Between Prayers and Songs, The Body of the Little Great Commander was Buried,” January 9, 2006, 12.

87 Bellinghausen, “Between Prayers and Songs, The Body of the Little Great Commander was Buried,” 12.

88 Ibid.

89 Ibid.

90 Ibid.

300 The Birth of Josefina:

An Invisible Weaver of Hope and a Tenacious Rebel

Figure 9: Luís Castillo, Reforma, January 9, 2006, 9. On the day of Ramona’s funeral, questions about the leader’s identity dominate news

stories. In “They Bury Ramona Without A Ski Mask,” Jorge Octavio Ochoa of El Universal

declares that Ramona’s real name is María Díaz Santiz, aged 47, 91 noting this name appeared on a black cross in her funerary procession (Figure 9).92 That same day, Reforma columnist Roberto

Zamarripa reports in “Josefina’s Legacy” that she is, in fact, Josefina Hernández, a Tzotzil woman who died at the age of 46.93 Zamarripa claims he discovered this information in hospitalization records at the time of her transplant ten years ago.94 Less than a week later, Luis

91 Jorge Octavio Ochoa, “Ramona is Buried without her Balaclava,” El Universal, January 9, 2006, A9.

92 Reforma, Janaury 9, 2006, 9.

93 Roberto Zamarripa, “Josefina’s Legacy,” Reforma, January 9, 2006, A9.

94 Zamarripa, “Josefina’s Legacy” A9.

301 Javier Garrido alleges in La Jornada that Ramona died at the age of 36, making her 24 years old at the time of the 1994 uprising.95

In contrast to commentaries and letters that immortalize the leader, Zamarripa pronounces Ramona—or, rather, Josefina—dead, along with Zapatismo. According to

Zamarripa, now that Ramona has died, “[t]hat movement of surprise and freshness is left behind; of authenticity and sharpness; of indigenous vindication and social autonomy…[F]rom now on when guerrilleros come out into the light something burns them…. They just want to fight.” 96

He then calls upon the Zapatistas to create “a democratic policy that vindicates the legacy of

Josefina Hernández.”97 Zamarripa further claims that the Zapatistas used Ramona’s health as a

weapon and states that, at the end of her life, even she had distanced herself from the EZLN,

which was, perhaps, the reason Marcos failed to show up for her funeral.98 There is, however, no evidence to support Zamarripa’s claims. In fact, Marcos had announced that he was suspending his national tour to attend the service.99

As opposed to transforming political structures and effecting social change, Zamarripa also comments that Ramona prolonged Indigenous suffering and sustained political indifference.

He charges, in particular, that Ramona’s movement enabled dependency: “The rain of international economic aid, either from foundations or prestigious world organizations, has allowed the rural communities and indigenous Chiapas to benefit from decades that had been

95 Luis Javier Garrido, “La Comandanta,” La Jornada, January 13, 2006, 21.

96 Zamarripa, A9.

97 Ibid.

98 Ibid.

99 La Jornada, January 7, 2006, 1.

302 denied.”100 Here, then, he implicates her in maintaining conditions that sustain the political status quo.

On January 10, 2006, Guadalupe Loerza’s commentary employs irony and satire, heightening narratorial ambiguity. Entitled “Dos pésames,” or “Two Condolences,” Loerza laments the death of La Comandanta and the symbolic death of Marcos, who now calls himself

Delegate Zero.101 Diverging from conventional eulogy, Loerza’s satirical approach offers a persuasive mode of writing, which serves to demystify her and to make her identifiable, steeping her revolutionary origins in the domestic sphere. She writes:

Thanks to Comandanta Ramona, I learned what life is like for Indians that live in Chiapas. I know that since they were children, they have witnessed their mother suffer. They see them wake up at three in the morning and prepare maíz. They spend all day working, carrying water, transporting heavy loads, washing clothes, weaving belts to sell in the market, and then take care of their eight little brothers. They saw that if there was a lack of food, they always gave the last tortilla to children and her husband. They see that their father had guaraches, but their mother was barefoot. When their father arrived home drunk and she helped him, he beat and insulted her….She is a great revolutionary who, in her 12 years of struggle, never once let me once think about the real causes of the Zapatista movement. 102

Drawing upon Petrich’s early interview in La Jornada,103 Loerza states that she now understands why Ramona prefers wearing muddy combat boots and sleeping with some compañero in a tent at night over marriage and motherhood. 104

In the immediate days following her burial, editorials also apotheosize La Comandanta, canonizing her as mythic figure with preternatural powers. Such portrayals demonstrate how

100 Zamarripa, A9.

101 Guadalupe Loerza, “Two Condolences,” Reforma, January 10, 2006, 11.

102 Loerza, “Two Condolences,” 11.

103 Blanche Petrich and Elio Henríquez, “The People Demanded that We Begin,” La Jornada, February 4, 1994, 1, 6-7.

104 Loerza, “Two Condolences,” 11.

303 Ramona’s imagery continues to serve as tactical weaponry for the Zapatista campaign. Garrido’s

“La Comandanta,” for example, casts Ramona as a sacrificial warrior and a tragic figure.105 In his commentary, Garrido, a political analyst, asserts that he desires to free the leader from the ragged trappings of her “very cute, very little doll”106 and calls her death a “crucifixion.” 107

Tracing Ramona’s radicalization to the 1980s, he identifies the “cruelty”108 of structural inequalities and political power as the impetus for her involvement in the EZLN,109 and makes an “urgent”110 appeal that “the example of Ramona multiplies from below, and forces change with all their tenacity. She must be a seed.” 111 Likewise, opinion editor Luis Hernandez

Navarro’s commentary, “Ramona: The Invisible Weaver of Hope,” published in La Jornada on

January 10, 2006, portrays her as a martyr to women’s rights. He states:

There were few cases of women’s taking up arms as equals to men…. Unknown, she transformed herself into an admired and tenacious rebel. Her image and name became synonymous with the fight for women’s rights. Protest after protest, her name was shouted by thousands of protesters. Her fight was your fight—for women. The world knows this today and gives her thanks for her sacrifice.112

Although Ramona at the age of 36 from an “illness that devoured her from within,”113 the columnist recalls, however, that the media pronounced her death more than a decade earlier.114

105 Luis Javier Garrido, “La Comandanta,” La Jornada, January 13, 2006, 21.

106 Garrido, “La Comandanta,” 21.

107 Ibid.

108 Garrido, “La Comandanta,” 21.

109 Ibid.

110 Ibid.

111 Ibid.

112 Ibid.

113 Ibid.

304 According to Navarro, in February 1995—two weeks before the presidential election rumors began circulating about Ramona’s death,115 suggesting that the state viewed Ramona as a

threatening figure to Zedillo’s campaign. Although I did not locate articles reporting Ramona’s

death in 1995, in The War Against Oblivion: The Zapatista Chronicles, John Ross, an American

author who has written extensively about the Zapatista uprising, asserts that this fabrication

became reality—prompting Zapatista supporters in other parts of Mexico to mourn her death.116

For instance, at the third National Democratic Convention, held in Querétaro on February 2-5,

1995, the National Women’s Convention staged a memorial for Ramona.117 According to Ross,

“Another death mourned at Querétaro was that of Comandante Ramona, ‘the smallest of the small’ and leader of the Zapatista women who, newspapers reported, had died in Mexico City of uterine cancer….She was 32. RIP.”118 Subsequently, days after Zedillo’s presidential win—on

February 19, 1995—an unnamed newspaper printed a story claiming La Comandanta had

succumbed to illness.119 When Ramona appeared later at public events, ostensibly resurrected, state officials claimed this woman was an impostor.120 While the origins of this false claim are uncertain, Ross accuses Zedillo’s camp of spreading this rumor, which serves as a form of counter-insurgency waged in the press.121

114 Ibid.

115 John Ross, The War Against Oblivion: The Zapatista Chronicles (Monroe: Common Courage Press, 2000), 102.

116 Ross, The War Against Oblivion, 102.

117 Ibid.

118 Ibid.

119 Ibid.

120 Ibid.

121 Ibid.

305 Similar to Bellinghausen, Navarro’s article invokes the specter of Ix Chel, fashioning

Ramona as an embodiment of the warring deity who weaves and creates: “Her career shows how history is made every day by those from below. The skillful hands of a humble woman were able to embroider the invisible fabric of hope for the liberation of the people.”122 Such analogy encodes her with mythic status, the embodiment of ancestral beings.

Figure 10 (left): Moon Goddess with bird. Illustration. Available in Stephen Houston et al., The Memory of Bones: Body, Being and Experience among the Maya. https://elespejohumeante.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/the-memory-of-bones.pdf (accessed July 10, 2010); Figure 11 (right): Rocha, Proceso, January 15, 2006. In “Zapatista Poetry and a Postscript to Marcos,” published in the January 15, 2006

edition of Proceso, Mexican poet and novelist Javier Sicilia dedicates a lengthy essay to

Ramona, which focuses heavily on Subcomandante Marcos, whom Sicilia compares to

Gandhi. 123 After praising the Zapatista movement and linking its ideologies to those espoused in

122 Luis Hernandez Navarro “Ramona: The Invisible Weaver of Hope,” La Jornada, January 10, 2006, 21.

123 Javier Sicilia, “Zapatista Poetry and a Postscript to Marcos,” Proceso, January 15, 2006, 56-57.

306 Gandhi’s work, Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule),124 Sicilia then presents an homage to Ramona, just before a postscript addressed directly to Marcos. In these few sentences, he recalls the potency and “beauty”125 of her image, which “disarm[ed]” 126 and exposed the “falsehoods”127 of the Mexican state. Sicilia comments:

[O]ne of its most moving metaphors was the arrival of the Comandanta Ramona to the National Indian Congress, held in 1996 in Mexico City. When the arrogance of the powerful banned, under pain of imprisonment, the presence of the EZLN, the Zapatistas sent the now deceased Ramona, a small, poor and ill Indian. Nobody dared stop it. That beautiful figure embodied the great paradox of the strength of weakness of poverty. In front of her, not only the rifles bowed, but the powerful were silenced in shame.128

Rather than Sicilia’s analysis, Rocha’s caricature of Ramona, which accompanies the article,

proffers, perhaps, a far more meaningful and revealing narrative (Figure 11).129

Rocha portrays Ramona holding a rose and reaching towards a dove with an olive branch.

As discussed in chapter five, the rose evokes the imagery and mythology of the Virgin of

Guadalupe, linking Ramona with the divine maternal. Further, the symbol of the dove appears in

Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the supposed site of Christ’s crucifixion,130 thus

identifying her as a sacrificial martyr. There is, however, another subtext in Rocha’s illustration

that Stephen Houston et al. discuss in The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience

among the Classic Maya. In this work, the historians argue that birds are a central motif in Maya

124 Sicilia, “Poetry and a Postscript to Marcos,” 56-57.

125 Ibid.

126 Ibid.

127 Ibid.

128 Ibid., 56-57.

129 Rocha, Proceso, January 15, 2006.

130 Robert Ousterhout, “Architecture as Relic and the Construction of Sanctity: The Stones of the Holy Sepulchre." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 62, no. 1 (2003): 4-23.

307 images from the Preclassic to Postclassic period,131 depicted with, for example, the Moon

Goddess in the Dresden Codex (Figure 10).132 In these pictorial works, birds mark the presence of deity figures: “gods as messengers in bird form; and, second, human messengers who overlap in meaning with avian ones.”133 They assert:

Such messengers did not operate casually but embodied high and terrible portents. They were, in a word, oracles that pierced the membrane between different worlds, underworld and ‘above world,’ divine and human. The cross-cultural linkage of birds or winged deities with messages does not require much of a stretch. Birds, much like messengers, move with swift resolve. They dart through the air like speech scrolls but communicate beyond the normal projection of human lungs.134

Following this analysis, Rocha’s caricature of Ramona serves as another syncretic narrative that reifies—albeit, perhaps, unintentionally—Maya iconography and symbology that recalls the power of Ix Chel.

131 Stephen Houston et al., The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 232.

132 Moon Goddess (Ix Chel) with bird, Dresden Codex.

133 Stephen Houston et al., The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic, 234.

134 Ibid.

308

Figure 12: Yuriria Pantoja Millán, La Jornada (Ojarasca), January 16, 2006, 5.

In the coverage of Ramona’s death and life, Gloria Muñoz Ramírez’s feature article,

“Ramona, Comandanta,” reaches, arguably, the pinnacle of all martyrial narratives. Published in

the January 16, 2006 edition of Ojarasca, a monthly supplement of La Jornada,135 Muñoz

Ramírez suggests that photojournalist Yuriria Pantoja Millán’s closely cropped, black and white portrait of the leader glimpses “the most fearsome weapon of the EZLN”136 (Figure 12). La

Comandanta epitomizes, moreover, the core of Zapatismo, representing the:

coherence and consequence of the movement. Its perseverance, tenderness, anger, permanent rebellion…. [S]he alone, before tens of thousands of Indians, workers, peasants, students, and, above all, women of the countryside and the city…made Zapatismo a symbol of their own struggle, a mirror of their own rebellion.137

135 Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, “Ramona, Comandanta,” La Jornada (Ojarasca), January 16, 2006, 56.

136 Muñoz Ramírez, “Ramona, Comandanta,” 56.

137 Ibid.

309 Further, Muñoz Ramírez uses language and references that evoke both pre-Hispanic and

Christian imagery to apotheosize the leader as a divine being.

Referring to Ramona as “an embroiderer of looms and dreams” 138 with “magical”139 hands, the journalist comments that Ramona emerged from the “mist” 140 of Chiapas’ Highlands

like a mystical apparition. Muñoz Ramírez further analogizes Ramona with Guadalupe,

inscribing rich and layered mythopoesis into the article. According to Muñoz Ramírez:

That night of October of 1996, she closed her fatigued eyes. In her small and austere room inside the cathedral of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, comandanta Ramona did not understand why there were so many people outside cheering and serenading, bringing her flowers all night…. The images of the saints of the cathedral were covered with blankets. The smell of candles and incense covered the site of the first peace negotiations….141

Like the shrouded saints, Ramona’s mask also covers her face, associating her with divinity and

canonizing her as a warrior goddess. If, as Muñoz Ramírez suggests, La Comandanta is the

Virgin Mary, Ramona also becomes all the pre-Hispanic deities the virgin conflates, exhibiting a

syncretic melding of Christian and Indigenous forms and iconographies that maintain and reify

the survival of Indigenous philosophies, mythologies, and rituals.

Conclusion

Along with journalists, supporters, celebrities, and dignitaries who narrativize Ramona as

a martyr and as a folk saint, La Comandanta continues to spin her story after death, creating a

138 Ibid.

139 Ibid.

140 Ibid.

141 Ibid.

310 confounding and perplexing tapestry that unravels certainties and determinations. Here, factual criteria fail to determine and detain. Contrary to Marisol López-Menéndez’s argument, then, La

Comandante’s mystification remains intact. 142 Hence, Ramona’s death gives rise to a labyrinth of imagined or real identities, which confound, evade, and enigmatize. The absence of factual information allows Ramona to claim authorship of her own narrativization. From the grave she weaves her story, asserting herself as protagonist—an unreliable narrator who steers her own martyrial construction, concealing and obscuring details of her identity, remaining unwieldy and resistant in death.

142 López-Menéndez, Miguel Pro: Martyrdom, Politics, and Society in Twentieth-Century Mexico, xii.

311 Chapter Eight

Conclusion

In Mexico’s revolutionary canon, Zapatista leader La Comandanta Ramona exists as an enigmatic figure in a pantheon replete with hypermasculine heroes and virile icons. Despite making significant contributions to the Zapatista resistance movement, her outlier status not only accords her a positioning of indiscernibility, but also confines her to archetypal renderings, which diminish her subjectivity and obfuscate greater contexts motivating her politicization.

Indeed, this dissertation provides evidence that discursive representations of Ramona in

Mexico’s national press cast the leader within bifurcated constructs that reproduce dominant ideologies in textual and visual news sources. Although such imaginings attempt to weaken her political agency, Ramona ruptures the ideological weight of mediated determinations, defining herself, instead, as a dissident agent in the counter-archive of women’s insurgency.

As part of my investigation, I surveyed news stories and visual texts in four national newspapers located in Mexico City from January, 1994, the date of the uprising, to January

2006, the date of Ramona’s death. In this twelve-year timeframe, I identified specific periods in which Ramona emerges in the national press, which then allowed me to construct a narrative arc that structured my investigation. Using Sallie Hughes’ and Chappell H. Lawson’s research on

Mexico’s print media as a framework, I selected Excélsior, La Reforma, El Universal, La

Jornada, along with its investigative magazine, Proceso, based on the following rationale: 1) political orientation; 2) ideological position; and, 3) standing (circulation and readership) in the national press. In addition to gathering news stories and images related to Ramona, I collected data from three other categories for relational context. These areas included the Zapatista resistance movement; Indigenous peoples; and, Chiapas.

312 I locate my study within three substantive areas: women’s insurgency in anticolonial

movements; revolutionary women in Mexican history; and, works examining Ramona’s

portrayal in the Zapatista movement. This literature suggests that narratives about women’s

insurgency in resistance movements are not only subjugated and sidelined, but also, as Gadant,

Ponzanesi, Del Zotto, and Struckman—along with others—argue, demonstrate patterns of gendered coverage that reproduce archetypal representations, such as the suffering mother or the traitorous whore—regardless of region, culture, or conflict.

For my methodology, which is undergirded by frame analysis, I draw upon Critical

Discourse Analysis (CDA), a qualitative method that mines meaning from visual and linguistic texts and that considers how broader historical, socio-cultural, and political contexts influence meaning. CDA also interrogates how language reveals power and ideology and that language influences, inscribes, and shapes dominant imaginings and narratives. At the same time, CDA also explores moments of representational rupture: fractures or eruptions that contest power and domination. In addition to using CDA, I employ Foucauldian theory, which identifies and critiques conflicting forces and factions that make and unmake meaning. This model further analyzes discursive collisions in which resistance confronts subjugation. My theoretical framework compliments this methodology, as anticolonial feminist analysis also interrogates power and investigates resistance.

In terms of visual methodologies, I combine Gillian Rose’s discourse analysis I and discourse analysis II. I use discourse analysis I for it focus on discourse formations and intertextuality; and, discourse analysis II for its focus on institutional power and representational regimes. Rose argues that images are cultural constructs and that visual meaning derives from broader socio-cultural, historical, and political contexts. In my research, this includes: pre-

313 Hispanic philosophies, performances and rituals of resistance along with mythologies; Spanish colonial conquest, strategies of syncretism, and Catholic iconography; indigenismo; and,

Mexican cultural narratives, such as La Malinche and La Llorona.

My research confirms that news stories and visual texts in the Mexican national press produce gendered tropes and archetypes in relation to Ramona. At the same time, this study demonstrates how discursive ruptures subvert the power of these imaginings, refuting bifurcated representation. Such ruptures unhinge and remake, proffering new imaginings that redeem and vindicate. In this respect, I have contributed original research to an important area of study, which shifts understandings or theories that these archetypes are deterministic strangleholds. In

Chapter Six, for example, the Mater Dolorosa transforms into a fierce Desmadre.

My research has also added weight to areas of scholarship focusing on women’s insurgency. Specifically, by interrogating how historical mythologies relating to Ramona’s resistance re-surface in this contemporary resistance movement, I argue—in alignment with the works of Gaspar de Alba, Grisel Gomez-Cano, along with Past, Bakbolom and Ernandes, that the examination of myth offers rich investigative paths, which present valuable insight and understanding into resistance and reclamation. The imprinting of these intertexts in my research serves as a form of decolonization—a returning to and the restoring of matriarchal gynocentric models of power and authority. Further, I suggest that subjugated narratives about dissident women—or, rather, those revisioned to accommodate patriarchal worldviews—are never fully expunged or censored; they resist erasure.

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