THE INSURGENT MICROPHONE:

SONIC POLITICS AND THE EZLN

by

Jeremy Oldfield

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in American Studies

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

May 6,2005 Acknowledgements

My name stands alone on the title page. jE~toes una rnentira enovrne! Each one of these people should be listed alongside:

Cass Cleghorn, my advisor, for inviting me to take some serious literary risks; for meeting at the oddest hours to casually restructure the entire thing; for yelling "jDeja de pintav la Mona!"; for her infectious curiosity; and for sharing her tunes.

My brother Ben, for flying to with me last January, and for telling me to chill out and start this thing.

Sergio Beltrhn, for his stories - and that shot of mezcal.

Bryan Garman, my high school history teacher, for attuning my ears to the power hiding in things that rock.

The 2003 International Honors Program "Indigenous Perspectives" crew.

Tracey, for enduring my frustrated rants; for editing my introduction and suggesting, in vain, that I remove a questionably appropriate sentence; and for bringing me food that last week, when I became a hairy, unruly hermit.

Payson, for barging in so often to call me boring, and for filling the hallway with banjo riffs at 4am.

Gene Bell-Villada, my sophomore year Spanish professor, for sending this scared, ill-prepared, young gringo to Guatemala two years ago.

My dad, for playing me Richard Farifia's "Pack Up Your Sorrows" on the dulcimer eighteen years ago. It was the first song that gave me goose bumps.

My mom, for reminding me, amidst my adventures and wanderings, that I still have a solid, undisputed home. Table of Contents

Introduction: Cheesy Riffs .

Chapter 1: The Geographer and la Mentira .

Chapter 2: An Impression of Emanations .

Chapter 3: From Stage to el Sup or Tuna Cans, Stiletto Heels, and Guitarras .

Chapter 4: First Impressions .

Coda .

Appendix I: "A: Los musiqueros de todo el mundo" .

Appendix 11: Canciones Insurgentes Track List .

Bibliography . Perhaps what happened is there was a meeting.

There were words that met, but, above all, there were, and are, feelings that met. qthere are songs

from these groups that could easily appear to be

communique's, and if there are communique's that

could be lines to songs, it is not by virtue of who is writing them, it is because they are saying the same

thing, they are reflecting the same thing, that

underground "other," which, by being diferent,

organizes itselfin order to resist, in order to exist.

Subcomandante Marcos, October, 1999.

What does it mean, at the end of the twentieth

century, to speak . . . of a native land?

James Clifford Introduction:

Cheesy Riffs

Our vans reached Oventik on November 29". A gate of vertical black bars separating the town's grey concrete road from the muddy mountain pass stood ajar before us. Dense mountain clouds covered the lush, steep pastures, masking the town in an opaque fog. I could barely see twenty feet ahead. It was hard to take pictures. Behind us, a handmade billboard read in black letters:

PARA TODOS TODO, NADA PARA NOSOTROS. JUNTA DE BUEN GOBIERNO Corazdn Ce'ntrico de 10s Zapatistas Delante del Mundo Zona ~ltos'

A large, dark thumbprint, doctored to look like a ski mask with eye and mouth openings, gazed out from the middle of the sign. Past it stood a large barn, now a boot-making workshop specializing in combat footwear.

Twenty-six students, four professors, and a hired activist ambassador huddled together amidst visible puffs of breath in the mountains of southeast . We were a collage of academics representing four Native American tribes (Mashpee, Lakota-

In this thesis, translations will be in italics. Un-translated Spanish and indigenous languages will also be marked by italics. I'm dealing with people for whom the translation, interplay, and juxtaposition of languages carry rich significance. For this reason, I will refrain from translating every word of Spanish. Every so often, English fails to capture the effect of a Spanish word. In these cases, I will leave bits of Spanish in my translations. Dakota, Miskogee, and Navajo), New Zealand, India, Bolivia, Hawaii, and Sicily. Many, too, were progressive, well-off, soul-searching, white American students. Hours of uneven mountain roads dotted with villages, churches, farmland, and federal army checkpoints had led us here. I was armed with a folded piece of paper in one hand and a pencil in the other. A camera sat cocked in my hip pocket next to a wad of folded pesitos. I had a sub-zero sleeping bag for protection, along with my dental floss, face wash, and quilted toilet paper.

Oventik was our final excursion in a U.S.-based study abroad program - an international, comparative examination of "Indigenous Perspectives." The past three months had led us through a Mashpee Indian reservation on Martha's Vineyard, three adivasi villages in Maharashtra, India, five Maori maraes in New Zealand, and two autonomous rural municipalities in Oaxaca, Mexico. Now we were in Chaipas, Mexico's southernmost state, waiting to meet with a delegation of faceless peasants whose battle cry - iya basta! - began its international echo ten years ago. For the fourth time that fall, we scrambled for our passports.

A few men dressed in flannel button-downs and jeans greeted us in shaky Spanish and led us to the customs office. The building doubled as the Che' Guevara Cooperativa, a sort of radical tourist shop, so we browsed as women in red bandanas took down our documentation. The place was an activist buyer's dream: piles of t-shirts featuring red stars, armed peasants peering stoically through ski masks, and ivzvA ~PATA!/VIVA EL

EZLN! lay on wooden shelves. Locally woven scarves, tapestries and placemats showed signature phrases: NO NECESZTAMOS PEDZR PERMISO PARA SER LZBRES, QUEREMOS UN

MUNDO DONDE QUEPAN MUCHOS MUNDOS, iYA BASTA! Mugs and postcards displayed photos and drawings of a certain : a masked man bearing

fatigues, ammunition bands, and an automatic rifle, gazed beyond the camera. The

subcommander flicked off the camera in some. From one mug, a cartoon of a masked

guy with a gigantic nose looked goofily out at you. He was smoking a pipe, completely naked, behind a carefully placed black sensor box. You could even buy your own black ski mask.

One wall was covered with pirated CDs and cassettes. Xeroxed copies of covers representing a broad spectrum of Latin America's leftist music - Chile's Victor

Jara . . . Venezuela's Soledad Bravo . . . Mexico's Oscar Chavez . . . - stood in plastic jewel cases. Then there was a set of higher quality discs, each recorded under the same label: "PROD UCCIONES RADIOINSURGENTE: La Voz Official del EZLN." Its logo was a 1930s-style microphone (again, drawn like a ski mask) growing fi-om - or peering through - a jungle plant.

I didn't get it. Weren't those curved lines supposed to be directed the other way? A microphone emanating ripples of sound? As though, in listening, one can generate noise?

A woman returned our passports. We were in. She opened the door and led us through the frigid mist to meet the delegates. Oventik's only cement road, thoroughly ridged for traction, glistened beneath our feet. Concrete houses with corrugated tin roofs emerged and vanished in the fog, mothers and children peered suspiciously at us over bandanas, a man in a ski mask and winter jacket unloaded boxes from an unmarked truck. Every few seconds, a cloud of breath would stream from the black fabric hiding his mouth. Next, a white, wooden house about the size of a tool shed appeared with a red star painted over the door. On one side, black letters read:

SNAIL TZOBOMBAZL YU'LN LEKZL JAMTELETZK TAO'LOL YO ON ZAPATZSTA TA STLK'ZL SAT TELOB SJUNUL BALUMZL

On the other:

CASA DE LA JUNTA DE BUEN GOBZERNO

Then a two-story health clinic under heavy renovation appeared to our left. It was clad in colorful murals of masked men, women and children emerging from cornfields, arming themselves, attending to fallen soldiers, constructing a village - socialist realism, meet

Mayan mythology.

I had come to Oventik under the guise of ethnography. Our group had connections to a non-governmental organization that acts as an ambassador between the

Zapatistas and "civil society." Anyone may pay to take a combi van to the village, but without an ambassador, the experience is different. A year later, back in nearby San

Cristbbal, I met a couple from Chapel Hill who had just spent a short afternoon there.

"NO one was in the street," they said. "It was like a ghost town." After walking aimlessly among closed doors and suspicious looks from windows, they found a group of children playing on a porch, and snapped a photo. The kids' faces weren't covered. In

Oventik, visitors must ask to take pictures of masked Zapatistas. A tourist pointing her camera at a naked face is equated with assault. A woman rushed out, yelling at them in a language that wasn't Spanish. "We almost got chased out of the village," the guy said.

"We barely had enough time to buy a few CDs."

Further down there was a barn. A brilliant, ten-foot high mural of Emiliano

Zapata - his head haloed in a colossal, ominous sombrero - glared at us from the front wall. The whites of his eyes burned through the fog, illuminating an intense frown. His eyebrows spread with the span of eagle's wings, and a thick, dark moustache covered his mouth. Hundreds of armed peasants stood behind him, awaiting the order that was about to boil over on the man's face. I was shivering with cold.

But then a tune came from the barn's doorway: synthesized circus music, with a ranchero twist. The bobbing waltz of the former found the latter's acoustic strumming and strong melodic line. Standing there in the icy fog, stopped before a doorway that loomed like some sort of epic threshold, staring at Emiliano stare at me staring at him under the grey afternoon light, I couldn't help but crack up at the music. Inside, hay was scattered over the dry ground and a few bulbs lit the rafters with warm incandescent glow. Hundreds of colorful vinyl cutouts of UFOs dangled from the rafters. Light from outside poured in between the barn's planks, striping the walls and the floor. Eight older figures wearing black ski masks stood waiting to meet us. They were members of the

Junta de Buen Gobierno, ready to tell us what they were all about. Most wore heavy jackets and boots. One old woman wore a long dress and slipper-like shoes. Two guys wore cowboy hats over their ski masks, and one wore a baseball cap. The delegates had hard hands and warm eyes. Each thanked me for coming as I made the rounds. I responded with characteristically weak and muffled Spanish. One elderly man held on to

my hand and asked how the trip up had been. "Bien, gracias, " I got out. "Mucho lodo. " "Si, muchissimo lodo," he laughed. Further back, two masked men were jamming to carnival music on a stage. One played a guitar - the other, an electric synthesizer.

I had not expected this. I had been preparing myself for a slightly ominous encounter between gringos and indigenous revolutionaries. I figured I would either run home crying or buy a ski mask and join the ranks. The dramatic score that had been playing in my head in anticipation of such a reality-shattering encounter rubbed against the carnival sounds being played. The goofy warmth of the music contradicted it. This wasn't the soundtrack of El Norte's subversive pickers' meeting; this was more like a birthday party.

The music stopped as we took our seats in a semicircle around their bench. One by one, we stood to introduce ourselves. After each introduction, the musicians jumped in with a short, cheesy riff, often bending the final chord to mimic a record player losing speed.

The delegates took turns speaking to us.

*68*

On January lst, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, an army of masked indigenous peasants descended from the Selva Lacandona and took over six of the state's major municipalities. Invoking the charismatic peasant leader of Mexico's 1910 revolution, the group called itself the Zapatista Army of

National Liberation (EZLN), or simply, the "Zapatistas." Speaking on megaphones from the windows of occupied government offices, they declared war on the one-party

Mexican government, whose history of institutional racism, corruption, and allegiance to international capital was systematically destroying the integrity of the democracy it represented, as well as the livelihoods of the nation's indigenous communities. "We are a product of five hundred years of struggle,"2 began their First Declaration of the

Lacandbn Jungle,

first against slavery; then in the insurgent-led war of Independence against ; later in the fight to avoid being absorbed by North American expansion; next to proclaim our Constitution and expel the French from our soil; and finally, after the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz refused to fairly apply the reform laws, in the rebellion where the people created their own leaders. In that rebellion Villa and Zapata emerged - poor men, like us. (Marcos, 51)

This introduction re-defines Mexican identity as a process of national rebellion against foreign imposition (a process under which a rejection of NAFTA will surely fit), and then places the EZLN as the newest agents in this legacy. "We are the heirs of the people who truly forged our nation," the Declaration continues,

and we call on all of our brothers and sisters to join us on the only path that will allow us to escape a starvation caused by the insatiable ambition of a seventy-year-old dictatorship, led by a small inner clique of traitors who represent ultra-conservative groups ready to sell out our country. (Marcos, 52)

This clever use of language flipped government-propagated nationalism on its head. The

Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), a conservative party that took power following the 1910-1918 Revolution, held control of Mexico for seventy-one consecutive years.3

We are the nation, it says; today's PRZsta leaders are a "clique." jBasta! has echoed throughout Mexican history, and we are incidentally the most recent bearers of this torch.

This is a telling example of the power of the national megaphone: the marginalized are marginalizing their "marginalizors" before their newfound civilian audience.

Subco~nandanteMarcos' words will remain in plain type. This streak ended on July 2,2000, when Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) won the presidency. Unlike Mexico's Marxist guerrilla groups in the 1970s, the Zapatistas do not seek state power. They are not challenging the parties in power as much as the structure of national power itself. "What would be a victory for a political-military organization of the 1960s or 1970s, like those that came on the scene as national liberation movements, for us would be failure," says the movement's spokesman, ostensible leader, and only known mestizo, Subcommandante Marcos - known locally as "el Sup." "We have seen that the victories these movements achieved turned out to be masks for their own defeat because what was left unresolved was the place for the people, for civil society."4 They avoid seeking an inclusive nation through an exclusive process. They urge el pueblo not to be swayed by the homogenizing forces of vanguards, and openly advertise their own lack of an all-encompassing political blueprint:

The EZLN has neither the desire nor the capacity to bring together all the Mexican people around its own project. But it has the capacity and the desire to add its weight to the national force that inspires the people of our country to fight for justice, democracy, and freedom. (Marcos, 84)

"We made ourselves soldiers," Marcos says, "so that one day soldiers would no longer be necessary." We exist, he says, so that one day we won't have to. 5

Rather than imposing a national vision upon Mexico, the EZLN's political platform centers around a faith that a force called "civil society" generates its own power outside of representative party politics. How does this expression differ from the notion of the "masses"? Mexican intellectual Gustavo Esteva offers an explanation of this post- cold war term:

Pombo, Roberto and Gabriel Garcia Mtirquez. "Subcornandante Marcos: The Punch Card and the Hourglass." New Left Review. (2001) May-June.

Marcos' relative success as a leader springs from his ability to engage this popular force.

Through published communiquCs, he praises civil society, confides in it, humors it, challenges it, and belittles himself next to it. In 1985, the first time the Zapatista army took over a small Chiapan village, Marcos sheepishly admits that "when we arrived we found the villagers had already gathered in the middle of town." His guerrilla operation was met with a welcoming applause. Civilians had beaten him to it. (Marcos, 241)

What's more, when federal troops, tanks, and jets responded ruthlessly to the January lst uprising with bombings and ambushes, Mexican society and pockets of international organizations conducted such massive demonstrations in solidarity with the EZLN that the government signed a peace treaty on January 12~~.Civil society thus became an interactive audience in a Zapatista festival of jBasta! At times listening intently, at times demanding that the show continue, at times becoming the show itself, Mexican sympathizers have been Zapatistas in all but name - and ski mask.

The EZLN's pursuit of local autonomy over state power has frustrated traditional political theorists and excited others. Grassroots Post-Modernism, a political analysis written in the legacy of Mexican-based radical Ivan Illich and his challenges to the development paradigm, gives ample focus to this aspect of the EZLN's political imagination. Authors Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Prakash quote "an old Mexican politician" early in the book: "What resists, supports." That is, by taking its enemy seriously and acknowledging dependence upon it, a reactionary movement always affirms the legitimacy of its adversaries. (EstevafPrakash, 30) Replacing resistance with indifference, reaction with construction, the Zapatistas threaten to become a successful example of one such crutch calling it quits. Thus, they may have dealt a stealthy blow to the entire nation-state system.

On the other hand, the EZLN9sdisregard for the Mexican state should not be confused with disinterest. The group emphasizes that its armed action is rooted in, not plotted against, Mexico's "Magna Carta." (Marcos, 52) In their January 2nd~eclaration, they proclaim that

as a last hope we invoke that same document, our Constitution, Article 39, which says: National sovereignty resides, essentially and originally, in the people. All public power emanates from the people, and is constituted for the benefit of the same. The people have, at all times, the inalienable right to alter or modify the form of their government. (Marcos, 52)

In contrast, the Mexican government is altering this Constitution. In 1992, as a precursor to the signing of NAFTA, the Salinas administration reformed Article 27 of the Mexican

Constitution, stating that communal ejidos once guaranteed to indigenous communities by the Mexican government were now subject to foreign investment. National heroes

"Zapata and [General RubCn] Jaramillo die in the Salinas revision of Article 27 of the

Constitution," the EZLN stated in an April 10, 1994 communiquC. (Marcos, 204) After witnessing el presidente compromise national politics for international finances, the

EZLN essentially demands that this antique system of political organization adapt itself to these brave new economic times before its legitimacy is chewed out from under it. As national economy, utilities, health care, education, and even laws are slowly handed over from governments to private companies, the nation-state's reason for existence becomes questionable. When twenty-first century asks us if it is still worthwhile to speak of nations, the Zapatistas invite us to explore the popular empowerment brewing in a yet untapped, radically inclusive national identity.

What fascinates me about this revolutionary movement is the combination of its unorthodox roots and its unexpected methods. The EZLN's political imagination was not born from political and economic theory, but from literature. In an interview with

Gabriel Garcia MBrquez, Marcos spoke of growing up in the Mexican provinces, where his parents surrounded him with fiction. "We didn't get to know the world through a newswire but through a novel, an essay, or a poem," he said.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was meant to explain what the province was in those days and The Death of Artemio Cruz was to explain what had happened to the Revolution. Days to Save was to explain what was happening to the middle class . . . Don Quixote is the best book out there on political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. There is no better way to understand the tragedy and the comedy of the Mexican political system than Hamlet, Macbeth, and Don Quixote. They're much better than any column of political analysis. (Garcia MBrquez interview)

After a youth of fiction, Marcos recalled, "by the time we got to Marx and Engels we were very contaminated by the sarcasm and humor of literature."

This begins to explain the Subcommander's literary relationship with civil society. His communiqu6s are at once analytical, poetical, and comical. Political declarations and commentaries are illuminated by mythical and often hilarious stories.

Some were purportedly related to el Sup during his ten year period in the mountains by a wise Mayan elder, El Viejo Don Antonio. In "The Story of the Colors," ancient gods in a black and white world "decided to make more colors, so that walking and making love would be more pleasurable." (Lebn, 373) Anxious to save their creations, they rubbed every color they had made into the feathers of the macaw. Today, the macaw "strolls around in case men and women forget that there are many colors and ways of thinking in the world." (375) (Marcos has also been known to send mock telegrams to the public like: "THE GRAYS HOPE TO WIN. STOP. RAINBOW NEEDED URGENTLY" (Klein,

117)) Other tales are told through a haughty, uncompromising, revolutionary beetle,

"Don Durito. " These, too, resonate with the inclusive politics of what Marcos calls

Zapatismo. Take "The Story of the Bean-brown Horse," for example, sent out in

January, 1996:

There once was a brown horse that was brown like a bean, and he lived in the home of a very poor farmer. And the poor farmer had a very poor wife, and they had a very thin chicken and a lame little pig. And so, once day the very poor farmer's wife said: 'We have nothing more to eat because we are very poor, so we must eat the very thin chicken.' So they killed the very thin chicken and made a thin soup and ate it. And so, for a while, they were fine; but the hunger returned and the very poor farmer told his very poor wife: 'We have nothing more to eat because we are so poor, so we must eat the lame little pig.' And so the lame little pig's turn came and they killed it and they made a lame soup and ate it. And then it was the bean- brown horse's turn. But the bean-brown horse did not wait for the story to end; it just ran away and went to another story. (Ledn, 314-15)

Nine months later, after three more stories appeared in his regular political communiquCs,

Marcos offered "The Story of the Live Person and the Dead Person."

Once there was a live person and a dead person. And the dead person said to the live person: 'My, I envy your restlessness.' And then the live person said to the dead person: 'My, I envy your tranquility.' And there they were, envying each other, when suddenly, a bean- brown horse went by at full gallop. (321)

Marcos doesn't just tell us to transcend modern political framework; he shows us this transcendence, stripped of any righteous rhetoric and brimming with humor. Writing with language and ideas that are understood by young children, he builds the foundations for a collective memory of myth and values with these stories. Like the songs I will

discuss in this paper, these stories bring wholeness and endurance to the Zapatista

movement. Their struggle exists in the mountains, courts, military checkpoints, and government negotiation tables, but is also told around the dinner table, sung around the fire, read before bed. It is a battle that allows its warriors abundant room to be human.

And yet, Marcos transcends the pages of the book even as he writes. The

Zapatista movement has become a sort of real-life theatrical amalgamation of the lessons, the ironies, the tragedies and humors found in these stories. "We are going to have to throw our books into the sea," Garcia Mirquez is reported to have said to Carlos Fuentes in reference to Mexico's political situation early in 1995. "We've been totally defeated by reality." (Nugent, 355) There is an interesting symmetry to Marcos' generation of fiction and revolution. The direction of movement between the two worlds - whether the

Zapatistas translate fiction into revolution or the other way around - is unclear. "Our age no longer has to write poetic orders," wrote Guy Debord in 1963, "but to carry them out." (McDonough, 158) For Marcos and the EZLN, this transition from word to action is not so simple. They seem to sway to and fro between the writing and the enacting, propelled by the conversation which develops between the two.

I did not see a single television or computer in the Chiapan mountains. The area lacks both infrastructure and monetary wealth to receive its news that way. It does, however, have the infrastructure for battery-powered radios. I heard them playing on front porches where women held their babies and de-kernelled corn, in fields where families picked beans and squash, in the boot-making workshop where young apprentices cut leather and rubber, in the women's weaving cooperative with its colorful embroideries of snails and flowers, in solitary pickup trucks trudging sacks of grain down steep roads, and in the hands of the women and men walking alongside. The area is peppered with radios. Its remote, mountainous landscape - where many were forced to relocate following Spanish occupation of the fertile lowlands - blocks many mainstream stations in the region. What has marginalized these villages politically and economically has actually protected them sonically.

Radio Znsurgente (la voz de 10s sin voz) has been independently in the Chiapan highlands since early 2002. You can find it on 97.9 FM in the Zona Altos and the Zona Selva Froneriza, on 89.3 FM in the Zona Selva Tzeltal, on 102.1 FM in the

Zona Norte, and on 92.9 FM in the Zona Zotz Choj. "The official voice of the National

Zapatista Liberation Army," the station is "the media through which the zapatista communities spread their own music, words and thoughts." Broadcast in indigenous tongues of tzotzil, tzeltal, chol, and tojolabal (in addition to Spanish) "the program mixes local, national, and international news with music, educational and political messages, short stories and radio- novel^."^ Chiapan airwaves, in addition to promoting homegrown music, have become a vehicle for el Sup to share his fiction orally. In Pedagogy of the

Oppressed, Paolo Freire focuses on a process, conscientiza~a"~,in which people recognize the contamination of their reality by political, economic, and social inequalities, and use this recognition to take action against their oppressors. (Freire, 19)

Chiapas - ironically, home to Mexico's most literate movement - is the nation's least literate state. The majority of its existing literacy is concentrated in urban areas, and is

Source:

with the outside world, orality - specifically, the orality of local language - is crucial for consciousness raising within the communities themselves. Brian Street defines literacy as an "active process of consciousness" rather than the acquisition of "fixed content."

(Street, 186) In Zapatista communities, this active process - the generation of conscientiza@o free from federal imposition of fixed content - takes place to a considerable extent between ears and radio speakers.

But 's broadcasts are not limited to the Chiapan highlands. The station runs a weekly shortwave program in Spanish on the frequency 6.0 MHz, 49-meter band, which can be heard internationally. The same type of radio waves the CIA shot into Eastern , Guatemala, Cuba, and practically every Latin American republic during the Cold War are today being fired back at the U.S. capitalist establishment from the mountains of Mexico's poorest state. Influential technology is not leaking from the hands of power holders to the global grassroots without a sense of irony.

The station's weekly shows are also broadcast internationally on its website, radioinsurgente.org. On its home page, a Zapatista introduces the station as and the Radio Bemba Sound System play in the background. The site is mainly in

Spanish, except for introductory pages in English, Italian, Dutch, or French, and certain audio mensajes in tzotzil and tzeltal. This idea of web radio raises interesting questions about the ubiquity of a small station in the mountains. The internet is so often associated with text and image, its radical capabilities of delivering speech and music have gone largely unrealized. What plays locally on a muddy, handheld radio in the mountains can be heard internationally in bedrooms, libraries, coffeehouses, basements, universities, independent media centers, public kiosks.. . of the "first world." Subcomandante Marcos

may weave urgent politics with poetics, self-deprecation, and a hilarious swagger, but

however close to the struggle reading his communiquCs makes us feel, it cannot capture

the texture of a local woman's voice, the shyness of a local kid telling a story, or the

bounce of a local guitarrbn's bass strings. Radio Insurgente's weekly program lets its

listener experience bits of the dignity that el Sup can only describe to his reader. There is

nice interplay here, similar to Marcos' balance of fiction and revolution: text influences

and enters the broadcasts, the broadcasts gain their own sonic autonomy, and text rushes

to interpret this autonomy.

The EZLN's autonomous distribution of sound is an essential part of two of its

visions. Maintaining direct communication with Mexican and international civil society through internet and shortwave radio, it circumvents attempts to misrepresent the

movement by government and conservative media. Radioinsurgente.org features more of

Marcos' stories, speeches by Zapatista authorities, and every communiqu6 released by

the EZLN. There are no copyrights; these resources are free for listening and redistribution. The website makes its invitation clear: "Retransmission is free as long as the content aren't changed."

But it gets deeper than radio. In the misty, agrarian villages of the Selva

Lacandona, a digital recording studio has sprouted - the entity behind the jungle microphone icon I saw in Oventik. "With PRODUCCIONES RADIO INSURGENTE, for the first time, indigenous musical groups and zapatistas have the opportunity to record their music, thus giving a wider diffusion of traditional music of the communities and zapatista ballads," brags its web~ite.~The label's discs and cassettes are sold locally; I bought one in Oventik and three more at stands in San Crist6ba1, a nearby tourist city.

The discs cost seventy pesos apiece (about seven bucks), a middle ground between the hundred-fifty you would pay for a shrink-wrapped disc in a record store and the twenty you'd pay for a burned copy in the street.

The I bought in San Crist6bal were from a small store arranged a lot like

Oventik's cooperativa: t-shirts, mugs, pens, postcards, lighters, journals, even cigars bearing references to the EZLN lined the shelves and rotating displays. I don't know how much of the store's profits go directly to Zapatista communities. Since 1994, San

Crist6bal has become an international activist mecca, and the local economy has adapted to catch the eye of this new buyer. Anthropologist Pierre van den Berghe calls this radical consumer the "ethnic tourist" - a "tourist [who] searches for authentic encounters with the other," and who "makes anthropology the ultimate form of tourism." (van den

Berghe, 8) Indigenous women who once sold scarves and tapestries in the streets now offer dolls of el Sup and other armed Zapatistas, some even bearing key chain rings. One dangles from the rear view mirror of my friend's new, leather interior, Subaru Outback.

I saw many white tourists buying EZLN apparel, but few wore them in public.

Perhaps, like me, they did not feel comfortable wearing purchased solidarity with the

Zapatistas until they got back to their own neighborhoods, where the sight of a Westerner wearing a radical poem or an image of a masked rebel on his shirt is a little more mysterious and a bit less ridiculous. The EZLN does not deny its wave of style that has stormed San Crist6bal; Marcos himself has posed for fashion magazines, embracing both the hype and the irony of his international popularity. Octavio Paz, a Zapatista supporter,

is wary of the fashion bound up in the EZLN's movement. Its Commandantes, he predicts, "await the Great Yawn, anonymous and universal, which is the Apocalypse and

Final judgment of the society of spectacle." (Paz, 31) Does music offer the Zapatistas a means of enduring such a fallout?

One album I got is by Grupo Liberacibn, a local troop of Zapatista musicians. As

Marcos assumes a celebrity icon status, vulnerable to the applauds and yawns of an international audience, these guys play traditional tunes to a more stable, local crowd.

Grupo's label is printed in dark, slightly offset reds and blacks that bleed into the folded printer paper with the aesthetics of an old communist pamphlet. Seven musicians masked with bandanas stand at attention on the cover photo. They are facing forward, holding their nortefio and mariachi instruments across their chests like rifles. The group is intergenerational; a boy who looks about ten holds a five stringed, short necked vihuela in front, while an older man who could be his father holds a giant guitarro'n behind him.

A thought bubble reads on the cover: La lucha contra el enemigo tambie'n se hace cantando.

Thirteen tracks are listed in red ink on the back. Two of them - "MUME

VJOK'ZLANBA'TZK' and "C'OTEMXA YORAZL" - are written in tzotzil or tletzal. The rest are in Spanish. Their titles present touchstones for a brief history lesson on the

Zapatista cause: "Mafianitas a 10s Caracoles," referring to the EZLN's most recent step toward organized self-governance; "19 de Deciembre," a day in 1994 when the EZLN broke through military encirclement and expanded its control of the highlands; "La

Tomba de Zapata," invoking the radical and charismatic peasant leader of the 1910 Revolution; "Ruben Jaramillo," peasant leader in the 1940s and 50s who organized followers of the late , continuing the latter's cause of radical land reform;

" a1 Che," paying respects to the popular revolutionary hero. Grupo Liberacidn's track list reads like a history book: it frames the EZLN' s recent history - the Caracoles,

December 19th- in a larger history of Mexican and Latin American peasant uprising -

Zapata, Jaramillo, and Che. Albums like this one, compiled and recorded at the grassroots by PRODUCCZONES RADIO ZNSURGENTE, may be the clearest example to date of the Zapatistas' empowerment through ownership of their history. These processes of presentation add such transcendence to the EZLN: its ability to portray its history in song, to explain its theory in fiction.

Grupo's first track, "Zntroduccidn," is a short speech by a band member. A male voice greets the listener in Spanish:

Compaiieros, compaiieras, support bases of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation: We are here today on September 29th,2003. As usual, we are here with you, with the rest of our comrades, ready to fight. But the battle is not only waged on one level; rather, it's possible to wage the struggle against the enemy on diferent levels. We are here, we want to fight, but like this - by way of songs, singing and playing with our companions. Wherever the signal of our voice reaches, we want you to listen to us. For this reason, here we are, presente. To those who can listen to us: indeed, please listen, companions. Whether you are Zapatista or no, this is for everyone. Revolutionary songs are not only for Zapatistas, but for everyone: the poor indigenous people of the entire country and the world. This is all.

Then he repeats the speech in an indigenous tongue.

His words resonate with the album's cover photograph of musicians standing at attention, armed with instruments, and confirm the EZLN's faith in the political potency of music. They also reveal the intended audience of this album: he says the album "es para todos," by which he means "10s pobres indigenas de todo el pais y el mundo. " Although I bought the album at an activist tourist shop in San Crist6ba1, foreigners fascinated with the styles and languages of a marginalized other aren't addressed in this introduction. Self-consciously, at least, Grupo Liberacio'n targets a local, indigenous audience (though that very trait makes them more enticing to the "ethnic tourist"). While

the group may be informing gringos like me of its history, its main goal is to educate and reinforce a certain framework within the villages themselves.

The album ends with "." I was sitting at a table outside a local store, sipping a shot of mezcal, when I first heard this song. Santa Maria Yavesia, an indigenous municipality a few hours outside Oaxaca City, had opened its gates to a handful of us for one week. The town sits in a narrow valley between two mountain ridges; the tumultuous dirt road that feeds into it will nearly destroy the axles of any vehicle braving the trip. From morning until evening, mariachi and ranchero tunes stream out of two loudspeakers on telephone polls, creating a sort of soundtrack to the village's daily life. The loudspeakers also announce calls received on the village's only telephone. More than three quarters of Yavesia's men are working in the United States, so these calls come frequently. "Monsarat, tienes una llamada," a voice interrupts the flow of music. Whoever's on the other end has made a short warning call. Monsa has three minutes to navigate the steep, damp concrete path down the mountain before he calls back.

On this particular afternoon, our guide Sergio Beltran invited me to have a drink of lo bueno with him. This was not commercial mezcal, made industrially from cultivated rows of agave; this was local stuff, poured from an unmarked bottle, distilled in small batches from wild jungle agave, which gives the drink a hallucinogenic kick. As

we slowly took our shots down, I learned that Yavesia had been a haven for Zapatista

Commandantes passing through Oaxaca during their 2001 march to Mexico A

local man who hosted them said they had politely asked him to leave the kitchen as they

removed their ski masks to eat. Our conversation turned to the EZLN, and Sergio told

me they've got an alternative , the "Himno Zapatista." A bit drunk, the

guy we're talking to raises his head and sings gruffly. Sergio lifts his shot glass and joins in:

Vamos, vamos, VAMOS, vamos adelante para que salgamos en la lucha avante porque nuestra patria grita y necesita de todo el esfuerzo do 10s Zapatistas!

Having a popular anthem is powerful. Large amounts of people may hear the

Himno long before they are introduced to its elusive theoretical platform. From a group that refuses to be pinned down by any specific ideology, that drifts between the local and the global, that uses fiction to relate theory, we might expect an anthem consisting of dissonant free jazz. But the Zapatistas keep it traditional; their himno bobs with the tempered bass of a norteiio waltz, which the verse hugs before swelling into the wails of a ranchero chorus. The song is replete with patriotism, featuring lines like "Our country cries out for and needs/ every effort of the Zapatistas, " "Our history says 'NOW'/to the struggle for freedom, " and "Let us live for the Fatherland or die for freedom. " It becomes a musical manifesto of what the Zapatistas are fighting for: namely, the Mexico that got away - Zapata's betrayed articulations of inclusion and wealth redistribution.

In February, 2001, the Zapatista Cornandancia began a caravana from Chaipas to Mexico City, demanding that the Fox administration comply with the 1994 San Andr6s Peace Accords. They arrived in Mexico City's Zdcalo on March 11, greeted by a crowd of 250,000. Without the Zapatista references, I might confuse this song for the Mexican national

anthem itself.

*4P9

On August 9thof 2003, Oventik was named one of five Zapatista caracoles

(snails),centers of dialogue between the autonomous communities and the outside world.

"This caracol," one delegate told us, "is a door where anyone can come through, a base

where we can communicate to the world. By conzing here," he said, "you are doing more

than reading a communique'; you have come to look, listen, share. This caracol is an

exchange." It is also home to the area's Junta de Buen Gobierno, a center of alternative

government available to indigenous residents of seven neighboring municipalities. Each

of these municipalities elects two representatives to the Junta, which mediates conflicts

that occur within the autonomous communities. If one farmer accuses another of stealing

his plow, he now has two choices: he can take it to state court, whose bureaucracy is

glacially slow and whose main concern is urban affairs, or he can take it to the Junta in

Oventik. The fourteen rotating delegates also promote community-based development

projects, report human rights violations in their area, watch over civil society groups like

mine, and keep their area aware of events surrounding the EZLN. (Ramirez, 248) "Here,

in our Junta, " one delegate told us, "those who command, command obeying. "

The notes I took during the meeting are fleeting and erratic. "Brothers, sisters,

coman'eros, compan'eras . . . this is a space that allows us to listen and exchange experiences, ideas, thoughts . . . this struggle is national and international . . . we will continue with or without support from others . .. there are 5,300 displaced people in this district, a result of the military's presence in the mountains . . . the Red Cross can no longer support our displaced, due to the war in Iraq . . . the rich and powerful have taught women to stay home; in our communities, women have joined the struggle . . . today is

going to bring many problems, tomorrow is going to bring many problems . . . we don't

need government scraps; we'll govern our own communities in our own ways .. . health

project .. . economic project . . . autonomous education project .. . we did not take up arms

for charity . . .part of my vision is to meet all of my halves . ..we are teaching ourselves that we have the capacity to keep changing, keep fighting . . . may you struggle, may you organize . . . you are making us stronger on our path . .. if you come again, we'll be here waiting for you."

When the talk ended, it was dark outside, and rain was falling hard against the corrugated tin roof of the barn. A makeshift gutter system had been installed halfway down the roof, so long, bright drops, illuminated by the barn's light, fell slowly into a hanging channel of tin. I had to pee real bad.

Then the two musicians, who had been silent throughout the conversation, entered the twilit circle. One carried a guitar, the other brought a notebook and a flashlight.

They played a small set of acoustic songs and ballads, each of which dealt with the uprising differently. One told of el malgobierno's greed, its usurpation of mountain land and its shame of Mexico's indigenous heritage. Its chorus swelled into a bellowing ranchero affirmation of the EZLN's struggle. In another, a poor, lovesick Zapatista, lamenting his disempowerment, sought a woman with whom to endure the hardships of the mountains. The shadows of our group swayed with the shadows of the delegates.

Students got up and took pictures of the musicians mid-song, their camera flashes blinding everyone in the dim space. I fidgeted in my seat, embarrassed by our persistence to be tourists even as such intimate bridges were being built. Before the set

was through, though, I had stood up and taken one of my own.

Music became the bookends of my time with the EZLN. I was received with a

wall of subversive recordings (and wound up buying seven albums), was made to relax

with the soundtrack of our introductions, and was sent on my way with our discussion's

dessert of ballads. That day, a group of armed indigenous peasants found common

ground with middle-class Americans through a musical mockery of synthesized game

show riffs.

Refer back to Marcos' speech about the interplay of songs and communiqu6s in

the epigraph of this thesis. Marcos said those words over satellite image feed, speaking

to a group of rockers at a roundtable called "From Underground Culture to the Culture of

Resistance." A guitar sat next to him on the television screen. He didn't play it; "as far

as music goes I'm just do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti, and I still get it wrong," he acknowledged.

(Marcos, Underground, 302) He used it as a symbol of the following day's rock concert in Mexico City's university Sports Palace, where groups like Rage Against the Machine, Aztlhn Underground, and Tijuana No would play in solidarity with the

Chiapan rebels. During his speech, el Sup pointed out that rock and Zapatismo share common ground: like the EZLN, music "seeks its own space, and, at the same time, a space of meeting. The punks don't go around on a campaign demanding that all young people be punks, nor do the , or the Goths, or the metal heads, or the thrashers, or the rappers, or, certainly, the indigenous." (Reader, 303) All the while, he was careful not to make a superstructure out of music, or to place it in the EZLN's political wake: "If we say that Zapatismo rebounded in rock groups and in that way produced its other and different effect, I believe we would be being unfair. We are talking about groups with a long tradition of social commitment and professional independence." (Reader, 302)

Rather, he insists upon a coexistence of rock and Zapatismo that much resembles the coexistence of author and political leader in himself.

How do the politics of sound - and music in particular - operate through us and upon us in today's cacophonous social organization? Have the political and economic sensibilities of our postmodern world entered a realm that can best be expressed through music? To what extent do the playing fields of power overflow into the pastures of music, and what does this mean for political movements trying to change the tune of international society? What does this mean in terms of our own ability to manipulate, and susceptibility to be manipulated by, power? In terns of our potential to carve out and express uncompromised personal autonomy?

This paper draws upon the EZLN, postmodern theory, radio, fiction, newspaper, personal accounts, interview, and specific albums to flesh out how and why broadcasting and music are so important to a successful modern movement. Chapter 1 presents a framework of postmodern theory and explores this framework's overlap and interaction with music, drawing upon David Harvey, Theodoro Adorno, and rocker Manu Chao.

Chapter 2 explores the politics of broadcast and music in theory and literature, juxtaposing pertinent works of fiction with meditations on music by economist Jacques

Attali. Chapter 3 tells the story of oaxaquefio Sergio Beltrhn's personal interaction with the EZLN. It presents an activist's journey from Mexico City rock shows to the Chiapan I mountains, and uses Subcornandante Marcos to echo the musical connect between the two places. Chapter 4 takes on the idea of "musical journalism," comparing newspaper

and song, exploring the global presence of Manu Chao.

Chapter 1:

The Geographer and la Mentira

In the summer of 1996, Oventik's cloudy pastures swelled with several thousand visitors who arrived to discuss civil society's role in confronting neoliberalism. The

Zapatistas named the event the first Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and Against

Neoliberalism. Delegations came from Italy, Brazil, Great Britain, Paraguay, Chile, the

Philippines, Germany, Peru, , Austria, Uruguay, Guatemala, Belgium,

Venezuela, Iran, Denmark, Nicaragua, Zaire, France, Haiti, Ecuador, Greece, Japan,

Kurdistan, Ireland, Costa Rica, Cuba, Sweden, the Netherlands, South Africa,

Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, the United States, Turkey, the Basque country, Canada,

Puerto Rico, Bolivia, Australia, Mauritania, Norway, Colombia, and Mexico. In order to collectively meditate upon the wedge that global capitalism forces between them and the spaces they value, they traveled to a village where people and place are bound more intimately: they came to a place to discuss placelessness. Amy Ray and Emily Sailers of the Indigo Girls remember taking a 20-hour bus trip to cover the 200 miles of mountain roads separating airport and village. They slept in tents and sleeping bags outside

Oventik's muraled school house, ate tortillas, eggs, and coffee "served in simple bowls and mismatched cups," bought sodas, batteries, and chips at the Che' Guevara Cooperativa, sat about round tables "under the big tree by the river" in "tiny chairs from the schoolroom," and listened as position papers on women's issues were presented, translated, and retranslated. At night, they shared songs with a local group in the

Emiliano Zapata barn as "men and women began to move in the shadows, dancing."9

The event - so successful, it was repeated in 1999 - attempted to give some tangibility to the harmony the EZLN seeks between the universal and the other. It observed the essential diversity of its attendees, while simultaneously assembling them in a unified rejection of global capitalism. Esteva calls this approach the "politics of 'no"'

(Esteva, 1998); Naomi Klein calls it a "movement of one 'no' and many 'yesses."'

(Klein, 119) As thousands of unmasked groups from cities around the world ascended the hills of the Selva Lacandona, it was as though the echo of the EZLN's 1994 descent from the mountains to the towns was finally bouncing back. An "intercontinental web of resistance" was born out of the meeting, one that "would have neither organized structure, a central decision maker, central command, nor hierarchy." (Ramirez, 126)

After a week of dialogue, Subcomandante Marcos officially closed the Encuentro with a lyrical oration meant to capture the heart of this elusive global network. The metaphor he chose was sound.

Let it be an echo that breaks barriers and re-echoes. Let it be an echo of our own smallness, of the local and particular, which reverberates in an echo of our own greatness, the intercontinental and galactic. An echo that turns itself into many voices, into a network of voices that, before Power's deafiess, opts to speak to itselj knowing itself to be one and many, acknowledging itself to be equal in its desire to listen and be listened to, recognizing itself as diverse in the tones and levels of voice forming it. (Leo'n,114)

Source: www.indigogirls.coml~orresp/1997/1997-chiapas-e.html. Reporter Ana Carrigan calls the Zapatista rebellion "the first postmodern revolution." (Carrigan, 417) What does she mean? That the EZLN's goals are essentially postmodern? That this is the first movement to operate successfully in a postmodern environment? This phrase is so common in academic circles, its legitimacy has been worn away. Postmodern theorist and local Baltimore activist David Harvey is helpful in understanding the complexities and contradictions of Carrigan's statement.

Harvey is a unique scholar - a geographer who studies placelessness. Many geographers use sub-categories to specify their field: "cultural geographers" or "political geographers." But Harvey sticks with the blanket label, and for good reason: his studies include both culture and physical space, focusing on their relationship with each other.

Indeed, an obsession with "spaciotemporality," with our relationships to time and space

(and the limits accompanying these relationships), weaves its way through his Spaces of

Hope and The Condition of Postmodernity. He insists that any meaningful pursuit of radical social change must start from a vantage point that takes these relationships into account. Since 1972, he posits, "there has been a sea-change in cultural as well as in political-economic practices" that may or may not constitute a major paradigm shift.

(Harvey, 1990, vii)

The experience of time and space has changed, the confidence in the association between scientific and moral judgments has collapsed, aesthetics has triumphed over ethics as a prime focus of social and intellectual concern, images dominate narratives, ephemerality and fragmentation take precedence over eternal truths and unified politics, and explanations have shifted from the realm of material and political- economic groundings towards a consideration of autonomous and political practices. (328) The days of "meta-narratives," of grandiose claims on social organization based in science and prescribed as solutions for all society, are over. With them went the days of

"historical continuity and memory." (54) Today, historical images and anecdotes are arranged in collage form, stripped of contextual meaning and detached from any sense of chronological evolution. "Fragmentation, indeterminacy, and intense distrust of all universal or 'totalizing' discourses," as well as "the reemergence of concern in ethics, politics, and anthropology for the validity and dignity of 'the other'" are the dominating traits of this new landscape. (9)

An effect of this fragmentation upon spatio-temporal relationships, says Harvey, has been a general shift from the rootedness of place to a more deracinated, mathematical notion of space. "The diminution of spatial barriers" that have traditionally qualified areas with the uniqueness and character of place, "ends up producing what Boyer (1988) calls a 'recursive' and 'serial' monotony, 'producing from already known patterns or molds places almost identical in ambience from city to city."' (295) In a spiral that feeds upon itself, this international homogenization results in increased "fragmentation, insecurity, and ephemeral uneven development within a highly unified global space economy of capital flows," and creates an environment in which "regions of maximum churning and fragmentation are also regions that seem best set to survive the traumas of devaluation in the long run." (296) The Zapatistas find much of their rhetorical strength in their self-proclaimed abdication from this process. Their history in the margins, which

Marcos spelled out above in the First Declaration from the , has spared them from this rampant homogenization, raising them up on an international pedestal of "otherness." Their "situatedness" in the Chaipan mountains and Mayan tradition, then, poses the greatest threat to the homogenization that postmodern society feeds upon.

Harvey is admittedly impressed by the Zapatistas' ability to put modem technology to internationally subversive use. (Harvey, 2000, 173) The infrastructure of global interconnection, constructed in pursuit of more effective commerce, presents the left with a landscape of huge organizational potential: "What now becomes clear is that the contradictions and paradoxes of globalization offer opportunities for an alternative progressive politics. Contemporary globalization offers a rather special and unique set of conditions for radical change." (91) Harvey credits the Zapatistas as trailblazers for the left in exploring the means of this change. (73) He also praises them for avoiding a slippery deconstructionist slope that can destroy the potential of constructive political action. The Zapatistas, he writes, "appeal repeatedly and powerfully to the concept of

'dignity' and the universal right to be treated with respect. . . . To turn our backs on such universals at this stage in our history, however fraught or even tainted, is to turn our backs on all manner of prospects for progressive political action." (88 & 94)

But the explicit situatedness of the EZLN worries Harvey. He is wary of the

Zapatistas' "'romance' of marginality, of a supposedly 'authentic otherness,"' which he believes "falls precisely into the trap of separating off 'culture' from 'political economy' and rejecting the globalism and universality of the latter for the essentialism, specificity, and particularity of the former." (74) The Zapatistas' project does not address global political realities, for at the end of the day, few of their supporters are marginalized indigenous peasants involved in alternative, autonomous initiatives. Neither does their global network of resistance represent any formal alternative to the infrastructures generating the inequality they are struggling against, Harvey argues. Missing in the

EZLN's discourse "is an understanding of the forces constructing historical-geographical legacies, cultural forms, and distinctive ways of life," he submits, "forces that are omnipresent within but not confined to the long history of capitalist commodity culture and its spatio-temporal dynamics." (74) Their flexible platform, he implies, presents a new political escapism to a disillusioned left eager to diversify the cold war's dichotomous framework. "'Otherness' and 'difference,"' Harvey writes, "become important to us precisely because they are of less and less practical relevance within the contemporary political economy." (84) Combating the homogenizing effects of globalization with a radical affirmation of "the other" is important, he posits, (74) but this affirmation alone does not represent a coherent road map of political and economic action.

Harvey's analysis may help explain the popularity of the Zapatistas' emphasis on the marginalized; however, it does not explain - in fact, it runs contrary to - the EZLN's successful, ongoing pursuit of the universal through the local. Behind the group's self- proclaimed marginality stands a profound confidence in the commonality of its cause (the success of the Intercontinental Encuentros) and clear historical framing of its struggle

(citing Mexico's Constitution abundantly and invoking national hero Emiliano Zapata).

The Zapatistas' faith in universal truths (each communiquC ends with "Libertad!

Democracia! Justicia!) grounds their unorthodox lack of interest in state power in a discourse of traditional political values. Postmodernism denies the hope of constructive organization, argues a frustrated Harvey, "by concentrating upon the schizophrenic circumstances induced by the fragmentation and all those instabilities . . .that prevent us [from] even picturing coherently, let alone devising strategies to produce, some radically different future." (Harvey, 1990, 54) Later, he lets it go: "postmodernism,"

with its emphasis upon the ephemerality of jouissance, its insistence upon the impenetrability of the other, its concentration on the text rather than the work, its penchant for deconstruction bordering on nihilism, its preference for aesthetics over ethics, takes matters too far. It takes them beyond the point where any coherent politics are left.. . (116)

The Zapatistas bring a twist to these politically neutering aspects of postmodern thought. They question, first of all, whether "coherent politics" necessarily means state power. Their experience with federal and state governments has been marked over the last five centuries has been one of marked incoherence, marginalization, and violence.

Oventik's Junta de Buen Gobierno was founded primarily to give rural farmers with legal disputes an alternative to the inaccessible and endlessly bureaucratic national legal system. The EZLN's "insistence upon the impenetrability of the other" co-exists with its organization of two international Encuentros in its communities. As stated earlier,

Marcos' "concentration on the text" mirrors and perpetuates "the work" in Zapatista communities, which is more of an antidote than a symptom of "nihilism." The Chiapan mountains are not full of disillusioned French intellectuals pondering suicide as they lament the failure of all forms of social organization. The Zapatistas are decidedly traditional in their own governance: they use a customary cargo system, where land is shared communally in exchange for participation in rotating two-year public service shifts. Their promotion of a unified movement advocating fragmentation, their utilization of modem technology and the small-world psychology of neoliberalism, their delivery of an anti-meta-theory meta-theory, all take this traditionalism into a new realm - one that is not contained by the limits of Harvey's definition of postmodernism. The co-authors of Grassroots Post-Modernism, would argue that Harvey's

criticism of locality has fallen into a trap - namely, "the myth of global thinking, the

intellectual counterpart of the global economy." (EstevdPrakash, 9-10) "'Alternative'

global thinkers9' like Harvey, those who have faith in combating global capitalism at its

own transnational level, "forget that Goliath did in fact meet his match in David," they

argue. (23) Neoliberal hubs like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank "are unbeatable at the abstract level," claims Esteva; "to struggle against them at that level

tends to strengthen them." (31) Harvey is unsatisfied with the local scale at which the

Zapatistas seek alternatives; Esteva argues that this locality is exactly what makes them threatening. Although he's a radical articulator of popular empowerment, Harvey still advocates solutions at a huge, modern scale. This scale, asserts Esteva, is by nature disempowering: "No challenge to the proliferating experiences of people's powerlessness succeeds when conceived and implemented inside the institutional and intellectual framework which produced it." (20) By constructing political alternatives like the Juntas at a local level, the Zapatistas transcend national disempowerment more effectively than requests for government alms ever allowed them to. Ironically, their open resignation from the national power structure bestowed them with more international influence than they could have imagined. Compared to the EZLN, even the most radical revolutionary vanguard, in seeking state takeover, becomes yet another tool of state-like reform.

Despite their egalitarian politics, such movements ultimately bow to existing presumptions of national power and, subsequently, disempowerment. What has always been at stake for the EZLN is the structure, not the topic, of conversation. Harvey laments the recent trend of social dissociation from place for its

augmentation of social inequalities - or what he calls "uneven geographical developments" - but in it he also finds some hope regarding our ability to construct an enduringly better future. (Harvey, 2000, 73) He argues that utopian visions bound to place are inherently "sclerotic" - that once revolutionary communities are demarcated spatially, their ideological fluidity and openness begin to harden into institutions and eventually fall victim to the same rebellious processes that bore them. Ultimately, he posits, these communities "preserve and sustain the existing system, even as they deepen some of its internal contradictions, ecologically, politically, and economically." (239) An effective revolutionary community, Harvey concludes, "should be viewed as a delicate relation between fluid processes and relatively permanent rules of belonging and association," a negotiation that requires "a translation to a different scale from that of the embodied political person." (240)

What would such an approach look like in practice? How does one navigate global capitalism's winds of fragmentation without overcompensating with sclerotic settlement's un-weighable anchor? We need a guide to lead us through these treacherous postmodern waters; a translator - someone who can generate a sense of place that will not become stagnant, who can work with radical processes rather than radical establishments. We need someone who can live up to Harvey's claim that "the re- making and re-imagining of 'community' will work in progressive directions only if it is connected en route to a more generalized radical insurgent politics." (240) We need

Manu Chao. e68* Born in France to Spanish refugees, Manu Chao made a name for himself in

Europe playing with the eclectic post-punk band Mano Negra. The band's interest in

Latin American politics led to their Cargo Tour, a series of concerts they played from the deck of a freighter in port towns down the Central and South American coast. (Kun)

Shortly after playing before the EZLN's Commandancia in La Realidad, Chiapas, Mano

Negra broke up. Chao dropped out off the public map for several years, supposedly roaming nameless through Latin America, Europe, and Africa. If not a "global citizen"

(a term lacking the subversive credit he deserves), Chao embodies what Harvey calls a

"porosity in relation to the world of socio-ecological change." (Harvey, 2000,236)

In 1998, Chao resurfaced, dedicating his first solo album, , to the

Zapatistas. "They are a little light on this planet that I believe in," he told writer and deejay Josh Kun. (Kun, 341) Speeches by el Sup are sampled throughout the album.

Chao's lyrics tell the story of global capitalism's refugee - the wandering migrant

"perdido en el siglo veinte." ("Clandestino") He laid down the album during his intercontinental travels, which focused especially on Tijuana and Gibraltar, the

"connective nodes" between the first and third world (the "two central points of the planet's fever"). (335) He records on a portable eight-track he carries along with him, which, he says, "allows me to work when it's hot. The idea is there, I record it. It's in the moment." (343) For all its fluidity, this recording process captures a unique locality at each site. In fact, Chao says that his situations should get most of the credit for his songs: "I'm not the boss. The boss is the moment. My job is to catch that moment, that instant." (343) That instant is like an audible snapshot of place. His tracks flow seamlessly between genres - to cumbia to dance to rap to ska - and become a collage of musical worlds. He sings in French, Spanish, , and

English, often changing languages within single songs. Indeed, Kun argues that Chao is the epitome of "an artist who participates in the workings of global capitalism . . . as a vehicle of giving voice to globalization's underbelly." (337) Chao's music sprouts "from the vernacular, everyday sphere of grassroots transnational multiculturalism," he says,

"where differences are performed and negotiated through cultural exchange, conflict, and encounter within, not outside of, the global capitalist apparatus." (337) He manages to shed what Harvey calls today's "already-achieved spatiotemporal order" of "private property and inheritance, market exchange, commodification and monetization, the organization of economic security and social power," all the while maintaining a reverence for the sacredness of place. (Harvey, 200,236)

As we drift between Chao's musical genres, languages, and narrators, as we listen to him hold a sonic mirror to the "churning and fragmentation" of global capitalism, we aren't being subsumed by placelessness - we're experiencing place. Pirated radio station broadcasts, noise-maker key chains, desert wind, voice mails, and the EZLN's

Comandancia drift in and out of the background of Clandestine, situating us in a dusty border town . . . in an Argentine apartment . . . in the Chiapan mountains . . . in the north

African desert. As Chao himself roams, each song springs from unique locality, from place. His tracks begin to carve out place for the seemingly placeless crossing points he writes from, and for the self-consciously placeless people who inhabit them. In such a way, Chao turns into an artisan of emplacement, of using song to locate those who see themselves as un-locatable. Woven together, these localities become a musical wandering. Traditional Latin

guitar, French pop, dub, experimental rock, cumbia, techno, ska and rock & roll weave

their way through its sixteen tracks. Chao navigates this gauntlet of genres with uncanny

serenity: relaxed cumbia verses will seamlessly flow into quick reggae choruses, a fast

ranchero beat will flow into a slow techno rhythm nearly unnoticed. Languages will

change just as quickly. The lyrics to "Welcome to Tijuana9'switch between English and

Spanish nearly every line. Chao leads his listener from the known to the unknown and

back again throughout the record. I'll "wake up" in the middle of a French pop song and

realize it's like nothing I've heard before. Chao's transitions make this alienation gentle

at times. At other times, he throws us head-first across musical borders with the

abruptness of an INS agent.

And so Chao becomes more than a guide in this postmodern landscape; he

intervenes in it. He is now what Harvey calls "the insurgent architect," "able to translate

political aspirations across the incredible variety and heterogeneity of socio-ecological

and political-economic conditions." (Harvey, 2000, 244) Harvey makes good use of the

work of James Boyd White, who defines "translation" as

confronting unbridgeable discontinuities between texts, between languages, and between people. As such it has an ethical as well as an intellectual dimension. It recognizes the other - the composer of the original text - as a center of meaning apart from oneself. It requires one to discover both the value of the other's language and the limits of one's own... It is a word for a set of practices by which we learn to live with difference, with the fluidity of culture and with the instability of the self. (244)

The experience of translation, White offers, is "at once radical and felicitous: radical, for it throws into question our sense of ourselves, our languages, of others; felicitous, for it releases us momentarily from the prison of our own ways of thinking and being." (245) "Our task," in this fragmented postmodern environment, sounds much like Chao's and the EZLN's:

to be distinctively ourselves in a world of others: to create a frame that includes both self and other, neither dominant, in an image of fundamental equality. This is true of us as individuals in our relations with others, and true of us as a culture too, as we face the diversity of our world.. . (245)

Chao keeps from translating his lyrics. His scattershot of languages is disorienting; we're not sure what he would translate it all to if he were to try. Rather, his version of translation is found in juxtaposition, in his ability to place, then keep replacing, his listener - creating a musical frame that includes both the listener and the unknown.

There is power hidden in Chao's style of perpetual musical relocation. Harvey offers that our situatedness, our vantage point on the world, profoundly shapes the horizons of our political imagination. "Positionality," he says, "defines who or what we are," and "provides much of the grist for our consciousness and our imaginary." (Harvey,

2000,236) "'Where we learn it from,"' he argues, "may then become just as, if not more, important as 'what we can see from where we see it from,"' so that "I, as a political person, can change my politics by changing my positionality and shifting my spatiotemporal horizon." (238) Clandestino narrates tales of dislocation: as "el viento se vdpor la frontera," a migrant worker follows his hunger across the border, where he becomes "illegal" - a "desaparecido" who exists neither at home nor up north, but in both worlds. Lyrically, the album attempts to orient us within this overlapping positionality of global capitalism's refugees.

Yet, Chao's art of changing - then re-changing - the location of his listener takes us further than repositioning takes Harvey. As the latter changes his positionality, he gains distance from his former political consciousness. But as we shift continuously in Chao's musical juxtaposition, we gain distance from our spatiotemporal horizon itself.

The narration of "Desaparecido," if it successfully alters our sense of place, may affect our political imaginations. But the pace of Clandestino's musical wandering becomes overwhelming: we are situated in Tijuana, then in a French apartment, then in the North

African desert. Our experiences of relocation pile up upon themselves; they become comparative. We begin to notice trends in this game; shifting position becomes a pattern we can examine, allowing us to develop an analytic relationship with relocation.

Eventually, perspective itself becomes a mentira, a set of lenses we can consciously drift through. The entire process of changing positionality, and the political ramifications of this process, become apparent to us (or, realistically, to those of us listening for it). Chao now becomes a theorist, one who can perform for his listener what Harvey writes to his reader. But at the same time, he remains an artist, able to delve into the experience of these abstractions as he illuminates them.

We must be wary here of getting caught up in Harvey's methodological avoidance of detail. Loolung deeply at Clandestino's fifth track, "Mentira," may help illuminate what it means to be resituated by Chao's music. e689

"Mentira" begins busily. Without any sort of introduction or lead-in, we go from one moment of silence to a collection of instruments playing a progression that never changes throughout the song. Two electric guitars play the song's signature riff, a simple one of two measures that sort of jumps from note to note through quick slides. The bass note of the riff fluctuates up and down a whole step halfway through each loop. Beneath the riff, a bass plays simple, bending notes. These bends mirror the jumps and slides of the guitars, giving the music a slippery, elusive feel. In Manu's song about "the lie," this

riff is our one constant; despite its fluctuations, it serves as a base in which we can

attempt to ground ourselves and brace ourselves for the entrances, flutterings, and exits of

voice, instruments and sound bites throughout the song.

Above the guitars and bass, (I discovered upon my nth listen) a third guitar plays a

pattern of high notes which ring with the tonal and rhythmic inconsistency of a wind

chime. These notes are difficult to pick out by themselves; they are just loud enough to give you the feel something slightly chaotic is happening without lending you a clear scapegoat. But the chaos is not born from this third guitar alone. Above all four instruments floats a mysterious, highly textured effect. It sounds like someone running a stick upon a washboard. No, it sounds like someone strumming an autoharp with all the mutes held down. No, it sounds like someone dragging a stone across muted harp strings.

Shit, what is that? Whatever it may be (Manu doesn't mention the instrument in his liner notes, and trying to find it on the internet is a baffling, circular process involving many languages), this effect tip-toes along the boarder between rhythm and chaos. At moments we'll look at the speakers, wondering if the CD is skipping, only to discover an instant later that this sound has an uncanny ability to find (and define) the beat. In the absence of any sort of traditional percussion, we don't know whether to trust this sound as a stand-in or not. Combined with the wind chime guitar, does this sound draw us into the song and give us something to bob our heads to, or does it add complexity and distract us? Manu gives us twenty-five seconds worth of this chaos-cloaked riff to dwell on before the vocals come in. By that point, I have given up my search for a true beat, and hang instead onto the guitar riff, hoping it won't become an illusion as well. Then two voices come in, toeing their own border between talking and singing:

what is said is a lie what is given is a lie what is done is a lie what goes is a lie (English translation)

He forgot "what is played is a lie." By this point, after experiencing a good half minute of Manu's foggy, shadowy musical landscape, we are almost willing to agree with him.

Between each short verse, a distant, slightly distorted voice shouts "jmentira!" as though through a loud speaker. Is this call a response to Manu's lyrics? Is it driving his point home? After a couple verses, though, this distant voice combines with one of the singers, and they sing two lines together. The three voices begin trading off chaotically, and the verses loose their four-line structure. First one line is knocked off:

the sadness is a lie when the lie begins it doesn't leave

Then two lines:

the lie is a lie the truth is a lie.

These voices never seem to come in at the beginning of the repeating riff. One verse may start a moment too soon, the next, an instant too late. They fluctuate about a rhythm structure that is itself fluctuating. But like the rhythm, we experience moments where the planets align, and every sound coming out of our speakers is part of a coherent whole. These moments become islands of clarity in a chaotic sea; however, each time one has passed, and we're back in the fog, we can't fully trust that it came at all.

After seven verses comes a harp solo, unorthodox in both rhythm and scale. The near frantic tempo of its hollow, echoing plucks seem far too fast for the relaxed pace of the song's guitar riff. When you listen with headphones, this solo travels back and forth from left ear to right ear (at this point, I can't keep my eyes from shooting left to right as they try to figure out what's going on). Placed right in the middle, this solo is like the song's Shakespearean climax. Things aren't the same after it.

For one, a sort of vocal chorus immediately follows it:

everything in this world is a lie everything's a lie, it's so true. everything's a lie, I tell myselJ; everything's a lie, why will it be?

Like the guitar riff, this chorus becomes one of the only things I can remember about this song after it's over. "You know that song 'Mentira?' You know, 'todo es mentira . . . "'

Its repetition offers us a calming break from the fleeting verses and instruments, even though the words being repeated may grate against this calmness. What's more, the chorus' presence cues a trombone, which finds its niche in the elusive background riff and adds a clearer structure to the repetition. A traditional Spanish female voice comes in, singing about a corazo'n, and is accompanied by a distant chorus. Are we transitioning into a more concrete song structure?

The female voice ends dramatically, and after a few riffs news radio sound bites come in, all in Spanish. The first describes a global conference in regarding the emissions of carbon gas, pointing out that the United States, which produces more than a quarter of the world's carbon gas, "no es un modelo de referencia." Then a businessman's voice comes in, justifying the global quest for progress and development.

Then another voice does the same. All the while, the riff plays in the background, and the voices are mixed in just loud enough to barely understand them. These voices are followed by an incomprehensible sound bite of a conversation between a man and a woman. The riff cuts out just before the final words of this dialogue, and the song is over.

What can we make of these final sound bites? Combined with the mixed voices, the harp solo, the chorus, and the female solo, do they lead us somewhere we weren't at when the song began? The reference to the United States brings a political element to the metaphysical feel of Manu's lyrics. And the businessmen, who are apparently lying about the rewards of their common cause of global development, give the song even more ideological focus. We are left, then, with some examples of mentirosos in this song, "Mentira." Is Manu suggesting that they are ultimately responsible for the world of lies he experiences? Harvey quotes Marx's Capital, saying "that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality . . . He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose." (Harvey, 2000,

200) Is Chao running this process in reverse, constructing an elusive, imaginary landscape of music to mirror the slippery global landscape he sees raised before him?

Does this "realize a purpose" similar to the one Marx describes?

Clandestine's CD jacket is an eclectic collage of drawings, colorful bar codes, and doctored photographs Chao has collected on his global travels. On the back of the jacket, "GRABADO EN EL ESTUDIO CLANDESTINO" glows in bold turquoise letters.

Below, fine print in an alternative font reads "Legislation in effect ordains harsh penalties for the unauthorized reproduction, distribution and digital transmission of this CD." This illuminates a paradox that is central to Manu Chao: his decision to distribute his subversive message by buying into the mainstream. His three albums were all released under the entertainment giant Virgin Records. Virgin, one can argue, is part of an international corporate system whose unequal distribution of wealth uproots third world populations and exploits them for cheap labor. The same entity generating massive social dislocation is also circulating - and profiting from - Clandestine.

Does Chao's inadvertent participation in the workings of global capitalism speak louder than his music? Theodor Adorno would say: I don't care what you're singing about or who's positionality you're representing - you bought into Virgin's corporate pop music game, and that's the bottom line. In his 1941 essay "On Popular Music," the articulate socialist lays out a searing and uncompromising critique of popular music's production of apathy. The standardized structure of all popular music, he argues, both creates and caters to an unimaginative audience that is easily controlled. This audience is deceived by small stylistic differences into believing it can choose between many inherently different types of music, when in fact these differences are as illusory and ineffective as their attempts to improve their society without challenging larger systemic structures. No matter how radical the lyrics, or how innovative the riff, the song's adherence to a "pre-expected" structure neuters its ability to create significant social change. Can Manu Chao's elusive musical style survive Adorno's critique of the inherent impotency of popular music?

Popular music, argues Adorno, is necessarily standardized. It is music trapped in a system of predefined structural laws. Tease these laws it might, but it cannot break them. "The whole is pre-given and pre-expected before the actual experience of the music starts," Adorno writes, painting a picture in which both artist and listener partake in this stifling, self-perpetuating process of reluctance toward radical change. (Adorno, 302) "Regardless of what aberrations occur," he argues, "the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced." (302)

Oh, artists and record companies will try and convince you of novelty, warns

Adorno, but every improvisation or stylistic breakthrough is tethered fast to the same general structure. He calls this the "subservience of improvisation to standardization."

(308) Regarding the potential for detail to challenge this ubiquitous formula, Adorno's words have little hope:

The detail has no bearing on the whole, which appears as an extraneous framework. Thus, the whole is never altered by the individual event and therefore remains, as it were, aloof, imperturbable, and unnoticed throughout the piece. At the same time, the detail is mutilated by a device which it can never influence and alter, so that the detail remains inconsequential. A musical detail which is not permitted to develop becomes a caricature of its own potentialities. (304)

These details seem not only ineffective, but dangerous. They are the only thing standing between the listener and her realization that she has become a slave to a formula. They keep her convinced that she is surrounded by new ideas when in fact she is stifling in routine - and that routine keeps her mindlessly content with the structural makeup of her society.

Adorno's critique of improvisations also apply to lyrics. To him, lyrics fall under the "detail" category - a limited form of expression that is finally leashed to the standardized structure of the song. He cites an example of lyrical impotency: a

"communist youth organization adapted the melody of 'Alexander's Ragtime Band' to its own lyrics." (312) Using popular mediums to voice radical demands is tempting, for the artist - or in this case, youth group - is already on the same page as the public. But familiarity is a double-edged sword, claims Adorno. In the case of the youth organization, "those who ask for a song of social significance ask for it through a medium which deprives it of social significance. The uses of the inexorable popular musical media is repressive per se." (312, my emphasis) Sing whatever you want, he's saying, but if you sing it to ragtime, people will only remember the ragtime. You are taking something that is inherently threatening - that is only effective in its ability to challenge the status quo - and putting a warm and fuzzy frame around it.

So, would Adorno say that Chao's lyrics are undercut by the structure of his songs? The better question, I think, is: Where are the styles he uses familiar? I know this question is worded awkwardly. I must be concise, though, if I'm going to take on

Theodoro. I would argue that the eclectic diversity of Chao's music structures - reggae, cumbia, dance, rap, ska - ensures that few listeners will be familiar with every genre.

The progression of Clandestino essentially enacts a dislocation. This is an interesting twist Chao is offering Adorno: the "uses of inexorable popular music" may be

66repressive per se," but what about the uses of popular musics juxtaposed against each other? It is this juxtaposition that throws the listener back into a realm of unfamiliarity, that does structural justice to the "social significance" asked for in the song, that allows the message to realize its potential to threaten.

Chao's "aberrations" from popular music's "familiar experience" are not superficial riffs of originality; rather, his style is structurally significant. Adorno might dismiss "Mentira" as a piece that toys with new ideas of rhythm and instrumentation, that juxtaposes a couple voices, and that has a bit of fun with sampling, but that, in the end, can only fill our need for a four-minute head-bobber. Chao, he would say, is an accomplice in the culture industry's generation of that need. But how would he react to its placement alongside "Je Ne T'aime Plus," a reggae-dance fusion sung in French, and its transition into the dance-hall beat of "Lagrimas de Oro" that follows it? How would he account for the harsh rock guitar of "Malegria" morphing into the trancelike notes floating above a slow "La Vie a 2"? Janice Radway argues that "mass-culture methodology" like Adorno's assumes that producers "control not only how (songs, in this case) are perceived and understood but how they are used." (Radway, 11) This viewpoint strips the listener (and even Chao himself, since he is clearly a listener and rearranger of styles) of agency in the face of the mammoth capitalist apparatus. Radway points out that, ironically, Adorno's methodology "reproduces the reification so characteristic of late capitalism in the very set of procedures designed to unmask that reification in the aesthetic realm." (11)

Chao has in fact created something "fundamentally novel" in Clandestino, not in his unorthodox stylistic decisions but in his arrangement of the entire album. He has taken experiences that are both familiar (simple, recognizable genres paired with lyrics in a single language) and less familiar (the musical elusiveness of "Mentira," changing languages mid-song) and juxtaposed them into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Josh Kun describes the album's tracks as "songs that are fragments of a larger whole, like short chapters in an ongoing novel." (Kun, 343)

Oddly enough, this sounds like Adorno's consideration of "serious music."

(Adorno, 302) In works like Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, he posits, "every detail derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece which, in turn, consists of the life relationship of the details and never of a mere enforcement of a musical scheme."

(303) If we view Clandestino as Adorno would an entire symphony, and view individual tracks as movements and themes, we may find that he has been on Chao's side all along.

Each of the disc's sixteen tracks have more than enough musical integrity to stand by themselves. But album, taken in its entirety - as an album where many albums may exist

- may be a piece of work that satisfies Adorno's dreams of transcending standardization, that breaks through the illusory independence of "pseudo-individualization" - a work that may achieve structural novelty. (308)

Is Chao's decision to sign with Virgin actually a leash tying him to the capitalist system he claims to oppose? Chao is certainly conscious of his decision, admitting that

"We live in a world where rebellion is such a weapon of marketing that now I want to be careful." (Kun, 345) Harvey would applaud Manu for using the infrastructure he was born into for his own subversive ends: "We architects all exercise the will to create but do so under conditions not chosen or created by ourselves.'' (Harvey, 2000,231) He points out that insurgent architects can never control public perception of their creations. Using the writing of Karatani, he counters Adorno's dismissal of any subversive action that draws upon the existing capitalist system with the notion of contingency:

Architecture is an event par excellence in the sense that it is a making or a becoming that exceeds the maker's control . . . Contingency insures that no architect is able to determine a design free from the relationship with the "other". . . All architects face this other. Architecture is thus a form of communication conditioned to occur without common rules - it is a communication with the other, who, by definition, does not follow the same set of rules. (230)

We live in a world where information and ideas can be spread to such an broad foreign audience that perhaps the insurgent architect should incorporate this infrastructure into her set of tools, admitting that she cannot control how, nor to what effect, her work will be received. Just as the EZLN coexists with the Mexican government, Chao coexists with Virgin. He and the Zapatistas advocate un mundo donde quepan muchos rnundos, then serve as starter crystals in this process by proving they can stand on their own beside these political and commercial giants. <- , ...... P? qe:. , :;:-,$ < - ,-.p.. . . "I . >, A'. 2:. 2:. . $+: . .c.-. -. ;>': ;>': . p..!'* ,. , .-: . 2,-.,. 2,.- -..- .q &:-e:~4 - "&., #$ ; e::: Chapter 2:

An Impression of Emanations

In March, 1954, the CIA launched a "clandestine radio campaign" in Guatemala as a form of psychological warfare against the administration of democratically elected

Jacobo ~rbenz.A powerful radio transmitter was erected in Nicaragua to invade

Guatemala's short wave radios with "disinforrnation." (Schlesinger, 114, 167-68) The agents named their clandestine station "Voz de Liberaci6n," and advertised it in

Guatemalan newspapers, promising "a galaxy of Latin stars," comics, and musicians.

(168) Citizens tuned in; a voice apologized for the lie, then proceeded to broadcast regular propaganda campaigns urging women, soldiers, workers and youth to join the puppet Castillo Armas Liberation movement. In one instance, radio agents asked retired

Guatemalan Air Force Colonel Mendoza Azurdia to broadcast counter-revolutionary demands to his former colleagues. The Colonel refused, citing that his family still lived in Guatemala City. That night, agent Jos6 Tor6n Barrios, known as Pepe, brought the

Colonel a bottle of scotch.

The pilot was a good aviator and a poor drinker. He became expansive, verbose. Pepe refilled his glass frequently . . . "If you did broadcast a plea to your air force friends," Pepe asked, "what would you say?" The pilot was eloquent and fiery in the best Latin tradition as he delivered a hypothetical speech to his friends persuading them to defect with their planes and to join Castillo Armas and his rebels . . . Pepe removed the tape recorder they had hidden in the sofa cushions. It was only an hour's work to cut up the tape, then splice it together again so that only the voice of the pilot . . . remained in an impassioned request to his flying friends to join the winners. The tape was broadcast the next day. (169)

Seven weeks later, a U.S.-led coup successfully toppled the ~rbenzadministration.

On July 4th,1950, Radio Free Europe (RFE) broadcast its first program into

Czechoslovakia. With its headquarters in New York, the station penetrated Eastern

Europe's Iron Curtain with shortwave radio transmissions for the duration of the Cold

War, airing voices of exiled leaders, capitalist propaganda, and lessons in political subversion. (Cone) Thirty-five years later, on May 20, 1985, Radio Marti, RFE's

Caribbean cousin, began broadcasting similar material from a transmitter in Marathon

Key, Florida, into 's Cuba. In November, 2001, the U.S. dropped two 500 pound bombs on the offices of A1 Jazeera news network in Kabul, Afghanistan; in April of 2003, U.S. missiles hit Al Jazeera's Baghdad offices.

The conspiracy Oedipa Maas stumbled upon in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of

Lot 49 is sonic in nature. Like an intelligence agency centralized through a short wave station, the Tristero mystery scrambles time and place, eludes detection, ignores borders

- at once ubiquitous and nonexistent, romantic and devastating. As detective, "Oedipa played the voyeur and listener." (Pynchon, 100)

She walked in on soft, elegant chaos, an impression of emanations, mutually interfering, from the stub-antennas of everybody's exposed nerve endings. (60)

Her suspects, her accomplices, herself - all become walking radio transmitters and receptors. Oedipa's pursuit of truth, then, in the Tristero's flippant, schizophrenic labyrinth (which may be merely a paranoid and coincidental mirage in her head) is essentially a desperate search to find a signal in the cacophonous noise of postmodern

America.

Desperate for the one, rational signal that would pierce this noise, find her antenna, make sense of the chaos,

she thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother's pocket radio; of other squatters who . . . daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman's tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages. She remembered drifters she had listened to, Americans speaking their language carefully, scholarly . . . And the voices before and after the dead man's that had phoned at random during the darkest, slowest hours, searching ceaseless among the dial's ten million possibilities for that magical Other who would reveal herself out of the roar of relays, monotone litanies of insult, filth, fantasy, love whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word. (180)

The book's "thousands of unheard messages" may be as "soft" and "elegant" as

"emanations," as loud and clamorous as a jet propelled hair spray can, as unsubtle as throbbing as a surfer-dude's love song, as confusing as the concept of live electronic music, or as ostensibly disastrous as a dance floor full of deaf-mute couples. "There would have to be collisions," thought Oedipa. "The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined." (131) Pynchon's novel says that music is the only order with enough disorder to encompass the chaos; music alone has the potential stretch as wide as the amorphous idea of the Tuisteuo.

"All music, any organization of sounds," posits Jacques Attali, is "a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality. It is what links a power center to its subjects." (Attali, 6) This music theorist is, of all things, an economist. A professor of economic theory at the University of , Attali served as Special Counsellor to

France's first socialist president, Fran~oisMitterrand. His radical reinterpretations of

Western music in Noise: The Political Economy of Music "jar cacophonously against the neat ordering of institutionalized music scholarship, especially as it is practiced in the

United States," writes musicologist Susan McClary. (149) Unlike Hegel, Weber, and

Adorno, Attali's account of music's politics is the first written in the Marxian tradition to suggest "the possibility of a superstructure to anticipate historical developments, to foreshadow new social formations in a prophetic and annunciatory way." (xi) In doing so, he represents a break from "positivistic musicology and pseudoscientific music theory, both of which depend upon and reinforce the concept that music is autonomous, unrelated to the turbulence of the outside, social world." (149) Present throughout his meditations is a fervent hope for the creation of a "new music - controlled neither by academic institutions nor by the entertainmentlrecording industry" - which would spearhead a "liberating mode of production" in modern society. (149, xi)

Attali begins his book with a declaration: "the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible." (3) In a society whose political, economic, and cultural lives revolve around "abstraction, nonsense, and silence," Attali stresses that today "we must learn to judge a society more by its sounds, by its art, and by its festivals, than by its statistics." (3) Music is not "an automatic indicator of the economic infrastructure," but such cut-and-dry indicators, he argues, are becoming increasingly irrelevant in their ability to represent new politico-economic frontiers.

Today, no theorizing accomplished through language or mathematics can suffice any longer; it is incapable of accounting for what is essential in time; the qualitative and the fluid, threats and violence. In the face of the growing ambiguity of the signs being used and exchanged, the most well- established concepts are crumbling and every theory is wavering. The available representations of the economy, trapped within frameworks erected in the seventeenth century or, at latest, toward 1850, can neither predict, describe, nor even express what awaits us. It is thus necessary to imagine radically new theoretical forms, in order to speak to new realities. Music, the organization of noise, is one such fonn. It reflects the manufacture society; it constitutes the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society. (4)

We would be wise, urges Attali, to begin considering alternative theoretical frameworks - ones that transcend our classical, "literal" political and economic discourse.

There is urgency to this argument - traditional frameworks aren't flexing to accommodate the "new realities" we find ourselves in. Our intellectual toolbox is precariously ill-equipped to repair new social and ideological breakdowns. But music,

"tied to the impossibility of a general definition, to a fundamental ambiguity," echoes

Harvey's descriptions of postmodernism. (9) Does this deem music better equipped than

"language or mathematics" to frame contemporary political discourse? Attali advises his readers to get lost in "the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society" in order to find a more useful discourse to frame (post)modern life; he gives his reader a radical, perhaps uncomfortable, "call to theoretical indiscipline, with an ear to sound matter as the herald of society." (5) Only through this process, he maintains, will a vibrant, more effective discourse be born. Attali does not ask this discourse to include music; he demands that it become musical itself. His goal is "not only to theorize about music, but to theorize through music." (4)

We have been too quick, Attali stresses, to associate Guy Debord's "society of the spectacle" with images alone. Music, he argues, "is a credible metaphor of the real." (7)

As we pay strict attention to the power dynamics of what we see, the political potency of noise sneaks in through the back door, undetected. "The entire history of tonal music, like that of classical political economy, amounts to an attempt to make people believe in a consensual representation of the world," writes Attali. "In order to etch in their minds the image of the ultimate social cohesion, achieved though commercial exchange and the progress of rational knowledge." (46)

Make people Forget, make them Believe, Silence them. In all three cases, music is a tool of power: of ritual power when it is a question of making people forget the fever of violence; of representative power when it is a question of making them believe in order and harmony; and of bureaucratic power when it is a question of silencing those who oppose it. (19)

A stealthy and subtle medium for power relations, yes; but today, when visual forms of political coercion are extremely unpopular, audio coercion lives on. Attali describes a moment in the late eighteenth century - after music in Western society had become a protected, autonomous act - where "it was no longer necessary to carry out ritual murder to dominate. The enactment of order in noise was enough." (57) This is where we find ourselves today.

David Hickey is unapologetic in his articulation of music criticism's weaknesses.

A music critique "is the written equivalent of air guitar," he argues,

flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the music. It produces no knowledge, states no facts, and never stands alone. It neither saves the things we love (as we would wish them saved) nor ruins the things we hate. (Hickey, 163)

Translating the experience of music into some sort of authoritative, autonomous piece of writing is as impossible as it is ostentatious. Furthermore, calling criticism a box or a cage is giving it too much significance. "The artifact itself," or in our case, the song, "is always newer and more extensive than any word ever written about it - newer and more extensive, even, than the visual [or tonal] codes incorporated into it, because whether we like it or not, we always confront works of art as part of that selfless, otherless, unwritable instant of ordinary experience." (166) Art and criticism inhabit different worlds: they are created in profoundly different ways for quite different reasons, aimed at different audiences, and even abide by different qualities of time. Hickey takes us step by step down the path of the critic:

I see the object. I translate that seeing into vision. I encode that vision into language, and append whatever speculations and special pleadings I deem appropriate to the occasion. At this point, whatever I have written departs. It enters the historical past, perpetually absent from the present, and only represented there in type, while the visible artifact remains in the present moment - positively there, visually available for the length of its existence regardless of its antiquity, perpetually re-created by the novelty of its experiential context. As a consequence, what I write and what I have written about diverge from the moment of their confluence and never meet again." (166)

"Even the best writing," he insists, "invariably suppresses and displaces the greater and more intimate part of any experience that it seeks to express." (164) But this dilemma of verbal failure - even verbal misrepresentation - is endurable, Hickey reassures us, for critiques are essentially feeble tagalongs propped up by the bolder and more permanent works of art they dissect. Thus, Hickey doesn't lay awake at night sweating over the tainting nature of his criticism. "Even though my writing might momentarily intervene between some object and its beholders," he admits,

the words would wash away, and the writing, if it was written successfully into its historical instant, could never actually replace the work or banish it into the realm of knowledge. If the work survived, the writing would simply bob after it, like a dinghy in the wake of a yacht. If the work sank from sight? Well, too bad. The writing could disappear after it into the bubbles. (165) One reason for the lack of synchronicity between word and sound, ventures

Hickey, is that critics are tethered to an orthodox style of musical description, rarely leaping into the unknown, the experimental, with their written explications. "We write about what can be written about," he admits. "We decipher that which lends itself to cipher and discard the rest as surplus." (166) To write criticism worthy of standing alongside art, one must bring the bold inventiveness of an artist to the academic page.

"In the act of writing about art," he explains, "you press language to the point of fracture and try to do what writing cannot do: account for the experience. Otherwise, you elide the essential mystery, which is the reason for writing anything at all." (167)

In the absence of this passionate, verbal pursuit,

the practice of criticism is transformed into a kind of Protestant civil service dedicated to translating art-language into a word-language that neutralizes its power in the interest of public order. The writer's pathological need to control and reconstitute the fluid universe of not- writing is fortuitously disguised by this stratagem.. . (167)

Hickey finds redemption for art criticism "precisely in its limitations, in the fact that the critic's fragile, linguistic tryst with the visible object is always momentary, ephemeral, and local to its context." (165) If this is so - if our words can only, at best, strive to illuminate hyper-subjective, transitory moments between musician and writer, during which artistic intentions and analytic interpretations likely find little overlap - what might an effective, honest depiction of this fleeting relationship look like?

Maybe the narrator of James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" achieves this when he explains:

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours. (Baldwin, 54)

He is a human failure in verbal communication, particularly with his brother Sonny, who peeks frequently from the inevitable Harlem gutters at the transcendent ecstasy of music, the devastating ecstasy of heroine. The narrator tries the logic of a worried mother to exorcise Sonny of both habits, which he can't separate in his mind. These conversations end horribly; he meets his brother's eloquent articulations of misery, struggle, "stink" and hope with dead, meaningless words. "Alright," he answers Sonny's invitational warning that his descent into heroine may resurface, "So it can come again. Alright." (52)

But it's the final scene, with Sonny at the piano keys, when Baldwin's narrator finally hears it. Himself a math teacher (think Attali), he winnows an undulating narration of significances from the blues on stage. "Sonny began to play," goes his play- by-play,

The dry, low, black man said something awful on the drums, Creole answered, and the drums talked back. Then the horn insisted, sweet and high, slightly detached perhaps, and Creole listened, commenting now and then, dry, and driving, beautiful and calm and old . . . and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat about the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness. (55) With the surgical genius of blues, these guys rip the swollen, infected appendix out of

Harlem's burning body and throw it, squirming, out on the sidewalk in front of the audience. "I saw my mother's face again," the narrator tells us,

and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father's brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it. I saw my little girl again . . . and I felt my own tears begin to rise. (56)

They (who are listening) face this toxic organ; they examine it, dance with it, feel what it's like to breathe without it . . . and just maybe, if everyone saw it lying there in the tonal daylight of the night club and learned its shape and felt its fleeting distance from them, maybe it wouldn't find its way back to their collective body.

Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. (55)

If I could simply insert that sentence into the liner notes of a Zapatista album and turn it in as a thesis, I think I would.

But how does Baldwin's literary re-presentation of Sonny's musical performance function, and to what end? Does he want to make a listener out of the reader? Does he want his story to stand in for Sonny's song? After he packages an experience of music in words, can we then unpack it and hear the song? In writing about music, are we, as

Roland Barthes asks, "condemned to the adjective? Are we reduced to the dilemma of either the predicable or the ineffable?" (Barthes, 294) Or can our verbal accounts of music transcend these pitfalls just as music transcends these accounts? Are we after a technical language that will hopefully trigger musical memory in the reader, presuming, in Hickey's words, "that works of art are already utterances in art-language that need only be translated into a better language to achieve perfect transparency"? (Hickey, 167)

Here we might tum to Kerouac's technique of bending phonetics and hyphens until they play their own literary tune. In On the Road, Dean and Sal find "the pit and prune-juice of poor beat life itself' in the San Francisco tenorman's "Baugh"~,t beep"^, "EE-de-lee- yahVs,and "ta-tup-EE-da-de-dera-RWs. (Kerouac, 195,6,9; 202) Or, like Barthes, are we after "the grain" of the music, "something which is directly the cantor's body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages.. ." (Barthes, 295) Do we strive for the "spectrum analysis" exhibited by Wendell "Mucho" Maas in The Crying of Lot 49? "'I can break down chords,"' he tells Oedipa,

'and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once . . . I don't know how it works, but lately I can do it with people talking too. Say "rich, chocolaty goodness." 'Rich, chocolaty, goodness,' said Oedipa. 'Yes,' said Mucho, and fell silent. (Pynchon, 142)

Or would such a process lend itself to over-dissecting, stripping music of its essential goodness for the sake of explication, leaving us as whacked-out as Mucho? Should we shoot to the other side of the spectrum and join Nick Homsby, who frankly states in his

Songbook that "mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when other people don't like them as much as I do"? (Hornsby, 6) To be fair, Hornsby does plenty more than proclaim he loves the thirty-one songs he treats in his book; he uses all his verbal virtuosity to get us to hear these songs, framing them historically and personally, narrating to us (like Baldwin) the deep swells they invoke in him and why. Baldwin finds emancipation from Barthe's adjective in the verb. We are not hearing the blues; rather, we're reading a conversation going on between musician and instrument, musician and musician, musician and audience, audience and reader.

Baldwin's decision to deliver the narrator's own "personal, private, vanishing evocations" of the music in the form of a storyline - "the drums talked back," "the horn insisted,'? Creole's fiddle "commenting now and then" - is more effective than descriptive realism. He seems to wrestle with Barthes' questions, "am I alone in perceiving it? am I hearing voices within the voice?" (Barthes, 296)' and emerge with a faith that what music stirs in him may be familiar - even communicable.

In this sense, Baldwin offers fiction as an antidote to what we might call Hickey's

"dinghy syndrome" of impotent musical description. Unlike the latter's criticism, which

"never stands alone," Baldwin's story is ultimately autonomous. Instead of bobbing in the wake of Sonny's music, "Sonny's Blues" is a work of art unto itself that references another, that finds inspiration in another. "It neither hardens into dogma nor decays into chaos as it disperses," to borrow from Hickey. "It creates new images and makes new images out of old ones, with new constituencies around them. It is a discourse of experiential consequences, not disembodied causes." (Hickey, 170) Baldwin's words and

Sonny's piano become two independent boats crossing in the night. We don't need to literally hear a piano recording to round out Baldwin's piece. Indeed, by diving into the narrator's subjective experience of the overpoweringly subjective blues - by circumnavigating the entire possibility of objectivity - Baldwin handles the job with an honesty that let us relax and retranslate his translation in our mental ear. We add the water of our own musical memory to Baldwin's distillation of meaning, and we begin to hear.

*6e*

Today's power holders are extremely aware of music's relationship to social control. This awareness, according to Attali, "is turning the modern state into a gigantic, monopolizing noise emitter, and at the same time, a generalized eavesdropping device."

(Attali, 7) The conservative Clear Channel corporation, which owns and operates more than 1,200 radio stations in the United States, is one example of such a "noise emitter."

"Everywhere we look," Attali writes, "the monopolization of the broadcast of messages, the control of noise, and the institutionalization of the silence of others assure the durability of power." (8) We also see - or hear - or DON'T hear - an increase in the

United States' government's ability to eavesdrop. Section 214 of the Patriot Act profoundly broadens federal ability to install wiretaps on citizens' phone lines.

"Eavesdropping, censorship, recording, and surveillance are weapons of power," reiterates Attali. "The technology of listening in on, ordering, transmitting, and recording noise is at the heart of this apparatus." (7) Attali does not paint this dismal landscape of audio authority to create a sense of sonic powerlessness in his reader. Rather, he offers his "listener" a key out: "With music is born power and its opposite: subversion." (6)

*6e*

Simply removing one's voice from the framework of verbal discussion - itself a landscape of rhetorical traps and loopholes, of allegorical Houdinis and magic hats, in which argumentative virtuosity can dwarf principle and belief - and redirecting it to another forum of expression can be quite radical. "As a philosopher," Ivan Illich "know[s] that there are compelling reasons for refusing to be drawn into a direct argument about certain topics." (Illich, 29) "Public argument," he posits, "especially in today's media-dominated society, cannot help but be hierarchical." (30) To him, silence is a precious right, a key that offers us some escape from society's weighted verbal dice.

In the winter of 1982, he stood on a street comer in Germany carrying a sign which stated: "I am silent because I have nothing to say about nuclear destruction." (27) The political decibels of this act, the "untouchability" of his credence, invited violent verbal reactions towards him from both sides of the debate.

Illich had expected as much; his transcendence of the nuclear arms argument invoked fear because he didn't compromise the potency of his statement for the sake of entering the dispute. "I can speak of the atomic bomb" he explains,

only with arguments which prove that it is a genocidal machine. However, as soon as this is proven, I cannot use the concept any longer without dehumanizing my status as a speaker. Not even for the sake of discussion can I join in an argument in which the threat of genocide, however cautiously uttered, is considered. (30)

Silence allows him to maintain personal autonomy over the entire table of discussion, not simply his side on the table. "1 am aware that silence threatens to introduce anarchy," he writes. "He who remains silent is ungovernable." (3 1)

I offer that music occupies a similar space in public discourse - impenetrable and autonomous - in which uncompromising political articulation may be generated. The landscape of rhythm, tone, melody.. . declares sovereignty from the overt manipulative powers as well as the expressive limits of the written word. The best lawyer in America could successfully defend a laundering CEO with speech, but never with an instrument.

Conversely, Haile Selassie's meditations on the inherent racism of the United Nations could not have reached such a global audience had not put them to music in the song "War." Illich approaches this similarity between silence and music in his work.

"Paradoxically, screaming is closer to silence than words," he argues. "Similar to tears, or the syllable 'OHM', certain ways of wailing and screaming lie, just as silence does, outside the realm of language. Yet these forms of expression speak louder and more accurately than words." (30)

Illich spent his youth on the Dalmatian coast, in a small village on the Island of

Brac. Before his birth, Brac existed in a sort of virginal sonic democracy: "history still flowed slowly, imperceptibly," "most of the environment was in the commons," and people "could depend on their own voices when they wanted to speak up." (52) The year he was born, the island acquired its first loudspeaker. Illich describes the vocal hierarchy that spawned from this technology:

Up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change. Henceforth the access to the microphone would determine whose voice shall be magnified. Silence now ceased to be in the commons; it became a resource for which loudspeakers compete . . . Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you are silenced. (53)

The domination, imposition, and stratification of sound in Brac paralleled - no, created - similar social impositions and stratifications. Sound and centralized power grew together.

Language itself was transformed thereby from a local commons into a national resource for communication. As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. (53) And so Brac becomes an informal case study regarding the deep social ramifications of sonic inequality. For Illich, the day the loudspeaker arrived, democracy died. Is this always be true? Do the technologies of sound always level egalitarianism and communality, or in this ostensibly irreversible whirlwind of newer and better loudspeakers, can we find hope of building such community?

Indeed, the circumstance of power holders controlling our noise does not preclude potent challenges by grassroots voices and musics. There are noise wars being fought on invisible battlefields throughout the world, and the resistance has adopted guerrilla tactics. Attali posits that "it is necessary to ban subversive noise because it betokens demands for cultural autonomy" and "support for differences or marginality," and that these prospects are extremely threatening to modern hierarchies. (Attali, 7) Music, in particular, can either be a crutch reinforcing power or a "herald" of times to come (or the latter dressed like the former):

It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future. For this reason musicians, even when officially recognized, are dangerous, disturbing, and subversive .. . Poet laureate of power, herald of freedom - the musician is at the same time within society, which protects, purchases, and finances him, and outside it, when he threatens it with his visions. Courtier and revolutionary: for those who care to hear the irony beneath the praise, his stage presence conceals a break. (11)

As the modern music industry continues to incorporate rebellion into sales, this "praise" is less apparent. In today's popular music, our challenge is sometimes flipped: we must find the praise beneath the irony, decode the artist's gainful participation in the system he or she is slandering. Nevertheless, Attali7spoint that music does not compromise potency - but rather gains power - by entering the sphere it critiques can certainly apply

to an artist like Manu Chao, and explain his ability to effectively stir up the neocolonial

establishment from inside the pot.

"Change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society," Attali continues.

(5) "Every major social rupture has been preceded by an essential mutation in the codes of music, in its modes of audition, and in its economy." (10) "If it is deceptive to conceptualize a succession of musical codes corresponding to a succession of economic and political relations," he warns, "it is because time traverses music and music gives meaning to time." (19) He cites Mozart and Bach as capturing "the bourgeoisie's dream of harmony better than and prior to the whole of nineteenth-century political theory," and argues that "Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, and Jimmy Hendrix say more about the liberatory dream of the 1960s than any theory of crisis." (5-6) Music, he explains,

is a mirror, because as a mode of immaterial production it relates to the structuring of theoretical paradigms, far ahead of concrete production. It is thus an immaterial recording surface for human works, the mark of something missing, a shred of utopia to decipher, information in negative, a collective memory allowing those who hear it to record their own personalized, specified, modeled meanings, affirmed in time with the beat - a collective memory of order and genealogies, the repository of the word and the social score. (9)

The migrant farmers in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath construct this

"collective memory" each night on the Highway 66 roadside. They set up fleeting communities, "worlds" in which "twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream." (Steinbeck, 264) In these worlds, musical nights eased the hard traveling of the day. And perhaps a man brought out his guitar to the front of his tent. And he sat on a box to play, and everyone in the camp moved slowly in toward him, drawn in toward him. Many men can chord a guitar, but perhaps this man was a picker. There you have something - the deep chords beating, beating, while the melody runs on the strings like little footsteps. Heavy hard fingers marching on the frets. The man played and the people moved slowly in on him until the circle was closed and tight and then he sang "Ten-Cent Cotton and Forty-Cent Meat." And the circle sang softly with him. And he sang "Why Do You Cut Your Hair, Girls?" And the circle sang. He wailed the song, "I'm Leaving Old Texas," that eerie song that was sung before the Spaniards came, only the words were in Indian then. (272)

White Oakies singing Injun songs? This hardly makes sense coming from a group whose grandfathers "took up the land in Okalahoma and "had to kill the Indians and drive them away." (45) One would expect them to come together around ballads about holding your ground. But here, music offers these migrants historical transcendence; it begins to swirl popular settler narratives with indigenous experiences that predated them - a sort of musical revisionist history.

And by relocating the uprooted families into a historical continuum of a foreign past, music led them to sway to a newly imagined future. It served as a kind of rehearsal for the political and cultural shape of this future: Specifically, music becomes what Ernst

Bloch calls a process of "anticipatory illumination" to the migrants. Their collective dream of a bright Californian future "is moved through anticipatory illumination to a realizable future that is reachable no matter how far away." (Bloch, xxxv)

And now the group was welded to one thing, one unit, so that in the dark the eyes of the people were inward, and their minds played in other times, and their sadness was like rest, like sleep. He sang the "McAlester Blues" and then, to make up for it to the older people, he sang "Jesus Calls Me to His Side." The children drowsed with the music and went into the tents to sleep, and the singing came into their dreams. (Steinbeck, 272) Here we see music as both therapy, translating pain into reflection, and as Bloch's

"presentiment." The echoing songs become "the meaning for that which paves the way ahead" in Steinbeck's story. "If the presentiment is productive," Bloch submits, "it will connect itself with the imagination, particularly with the imagination of that which is objectively possible." (Bloch, xxxii) Thus the "dreams," the "inward" eyes.

But in this passage we also witness a gathering that is essentially political forming around a musician, not a politician. The therapeutic comforts of the guitar deliver "an anticipatory illumination that can specifically be depicted in aesthetically immanent terms," drawing a crowd that no leftist speechwriter could conjure at this point in the struggle. In the words of Bloch, "this anticipatory illumination becomes attainable precisely because art drives its material to an end, in characters, situations, plots, landscapes, and brings them to a stated resolution in suffering, happiness and meaning."

This process, born out of the intangible character of music, is poised for deliberately tangible results. "This thorough formation remains illusion, even as anticipatory illumination," writes Bloch, "but it does not remain illusive. Instead, everything that appears in the artistic image is sharpened or condensed to a decisiveness that the reality of the experience in fact only seldom shows, but that is most definitely inherent in the subjects." (Bloch, xxxiv, my emphasis) California's communal government camp, the massive fruit pickers' strike, Preacher Casey's death, Ma's resilience, Tom's culminating speech, Rose of Sharon's ultimate nurturing act - all become movements in Steinbeck's makeshift migrant score.

Chapter 3:

From Stage to el Sup or Tuna Cans, Stiletto Heels, and Guitarras

When the Zapatistas emerged in 1994, Sergio Beltran was attending Mexico

City's Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), a mammoth school of nearly one million students. At the time, he was an active member of the largest student council on campus, the Consejo Estudantil Universitario (CEU). Founded in 1986, the council hosted representatives from other national universities, and served as an umbrella organization defending the rights of students and the autonomy of student groups throughout Mexico.

UNAM was on holiday break when the Zapatistas emerged. Sergio was vacationing on the coast when his father called and gave the news. "'In Chiapas?' I cried, 'and they don't want state power?' Who was this Marcos guy? My friends and I were amazed."1° When the university reopened six days later, Sergio said "the whole campus knew about the Zapatistas." The EZLN's January 2ndDeclaration of War! was published in national papers La Jorneda, El Financiero, and Proceso. Mexico's progressive youth, disillusioned by the dogma and corruption of the 1960s and 70s guerrilla wars, listened curiously to clips of Marcos' speech in the zo'calo of San

BeltrBn, Sergio. Personal interview. January 13,2004. Crist6bal. On January 8", the CEU had a four-hour meeting to discuss its involvement in

the struggle. "We discovered in fifteen minutes that every school wanted to support the

movement." The rest of the meeting was spent discussing how UNAM's network of

campuses could show its solidarity. "We should make brigades . . . for people to get army

instruction," said some of the more radical councilmen, "and they can go become

guerillas." No, decided the council, "we will have a civil profile. We will support the

communities - not the army - with aid." But how to bring the university and Mexico

City's civil society together in peaceful support?

"On January says Sergio, "we made the first massive concert." Las Islas,

the university park, "can hold close to a million people." It was overflowing. "Almost every rock band that was living in the city at that time played." Santa Sabina, Cafe

Tacuba, Jugete Rabioso, Victimas del Doctor, Kaifanes ("that was before they changed their name, like, three times"), Kenny and the Electrics... Sergio listed off big name artists in Mexico and L.A. who played that day. "It was the most massive concert inside the university I have ever seen," he told me, and "probably the most important strategy for us to collect support." The event turned into eight hours of free rock and roll. "We only asked the people to bring a lulo of corn, or a lulo of beans, or a kilo of rice to support [Zapatista communities]." They collected eighteen tons of food and medicine.

The CEU ran eight large concerts at UNAM in 1994, and seven smaller barrio gigs throughout Mexico City. Less than thirty years after the October, 1968, massacre of hundreds of student demonstrators in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas, students and citizens rediscovered the audacity to gather in huge numbers in support of political subversion.

The shows became safe, legal spaces for Mexicans in solidarity with the Zapatistas to come together. Music became a reason for assembly, an excuse for the physical discovery of a dissident community. Without the stage, without drum sets pounding

Attali's "social rupture," basses throbbing with a new "collective memory," guitars blaring "a shred of utopia to decipher," and miked voices howling "prophesy," these gatherings would be called riots. But they weren't; they were called concerts. Attali echoes: "Music, the quintessential mass activity, like the crowd, is simultaneously a threat and a necessary source of legitimacy." (Attali, 14) Today, as political solidarity is subject to the lure of technological individualism, as town meetings dissolve into national interest groups, as online activist networks fill the urge for physical assembly, live music still motivates us to step out and find communities that share in our political imaginations.

Fans brought material aid to each show. To get the food and medicine to Chiapas, the CEU and other universities organized Caravana Ricardo Posas, named after the first

Mexican anthropologist to work with the state's tzotziles (more organic presence of academia in this activism). For a year and a half, the Caravana made the eighteen-hour trek down the Carretera Panamericana connecting Mexico City and Chiapas.

On February 19th,one day before official peace talks began between the EZLN and the federal government in San Cristbbal, Sergio set out in the Caravana for the ejido

Moriela in Altamirano, Chiapas. He, Inti Mufios, Alejandra Fregoso, and Aimee

Robinson - collectively representing UNAM's departments of Science, Political Science, and Philosophy and Letters - led a group of 24 students in a bus that followed the aid truck from one of their shows. They brought five national reporters (including acclaimed journalist German Bellinghausen from La Jomeda), two German reporters, and six Catholic nuns. The following is his account of his trip from a university rock concert to

Subcornandante Marcos himself:

Days before, a commission from this caravan (where I did not participate)

arrived at the ejido Moreila with 500 kilos of beans, the same day that American Watch

delivered a report stating that the bones found in the jungle near the community belonged to humans -probably indigenous men from the region, and almost certainly from the five

Zapatista compaiieros that were found missing since the first days of January, when the army entered the community and took them by force. Until this moment, the government had denied the facts and was arguing that the bones and hair were from animals -

'berhaps from a dog," they said - as they denied again and again that the army had detained the disappeared Zapatista compaiieros. The disappeared were not young soldiers from the EZLN; rather they were the most respected elders of the community - people who were in some way the leaders of the commons.

The impact of this news was strong - I remember that night when the compaiieros told us the reaction of the people in the village, how they hid the rest of their leaders, that all of the bones together fit into two wooden boxes, smaller than a normal cofin for one person. Even today, more than ten years later, it fills my eyes with tears just remembering the rage and the impotency we all felt for not being able to do anything more than "to carry" food for the living, without having anything to say for the dead, without anything that we could say or do to give solace to the people ofthe ejido Moriela, who, despite everything, maintainedfirm and dignified caring for their dead. Because of this rage, because ofthis lesson in dignity that we learned from the Tojobalan farmers, we decided to return three days after, despite the recommendations. One of the things that the Zapatista villages asked for the most during this time, much more important for

them than food or medicine that we could bring, was that we wouldn't abandon them.

That we would not allow the news that the government was diffusing to be believed by

Mexican society, that we would be able to inform society about the dead, that the bones

were from their people, that they weren't from dogs, that they had been killed by the army

- because of this we brought the reporters and our own video camera (the tapes from that day must be somewhere. I haven't viewed them since then, but I think that I'll look to see who kept the cassettes. Thanks to you, I think that the time has arrived to not forget, to tell what happened so that no one forgets what we saw.)

At 11 in the morning we arrived at the military control post of the Mexican army at the entrance to Altamirano. Here was the first signal that something was wrong, but we didn't realize what to make of it at that moment. They retained us for one hour,

reviewing the credentials and taking pictures of everyone and of the two trucks (un torton of cargo of three tons that brought the food and a bus from the Dept. of Philosophy and

Letters, my school, that brought the people). We covertly recorded the soldiers and the camp from within the bus, which was prohibited, but we also did it to have examples of the aggression of the revisions in general. Now I know, I am sure, that while we remained detained in the control post, the PRIstas were organizing themselves in the town for what would happen next - that is, the kidnapping.

When we were finally able to pass, we made our way to the hospital that held the nuns of the town, having been assaulted by the PRIstas days before, who accused them of being Zapatistas, of concealing weapons and I don't know how many other things. Here we left half of the cargo, and some students also stayed here to help in the hospital. We left the bus, because the road wasn'tfit for driving it. With the help of a nun, we translated into Tojolabal the message of solidarity and support that the students had written one night before for the compaiieros of the ejidoi Moriela, especially directed towards the families of the dead.

Upon leaving the hospital, everyone riding in the cargo truck, we headed for the road that led to the ejido Moriela. But in the town plaza, just in front of PRI's municipal oflices, stood a barricade of drunk men, drinking and armed with poles. They detained us and demanded we descend from the truck. In the confusion, the chaufleur of the truck who was from the dio'sesis, and who spoke Tojolabal disappeared into the crowd. No one saw him again until the end of the day, when they freed us. This detail is important, for they had already demanded many times that we move the truck away from the center, where there were fewer people and they could do worse things with us.

They began to talk, always speaking on behalf of Constantino Carter, the PRI leader in the municipality and a well-known cattleman of Chiapas (one of the biggest in the country - it's said he doesn't even know how many cows there are on his ranch).

They took a mike and a megaphone from the PRI ofice. They began telling the people, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in Tojolabal, that we were Zapatistas, that we were the ones who brought weapons so that the Zapatistas could invade their town, that we were communists, that we were gringos who were only taught about "poor Indians" in the universities. After a few hours, they let us speak into the mike. We tried to explain that we were only bringing food, that we were against the war, that we were not Zapatistas, but that it seemed to us that solidarity with the CIVILIANS of the Zapatista zones was urgent and that it aid could not be denied to anyone. They said that there were also needy people here, that some were refugees, that the Zapatistas had driven them ofltheir

land and that it would be better to leave the food with them.

For this moment, German and other reporters that had been staying in the

hospital were back with us, and between them was a camera from TV UNAM, the

university station (the majority of students in the caravan were studying television).

Upon seeing the cameras, the PRIstas, drunk enough, became frightened and began to

tell us to move the truck, that it was obstructing the middle of the town, and I don't know

how many more things (they went to look for some chains and wanted to move it with a

tractor, because the chaufleur was not appearing from anywhere and he had the keys).

We were able to negotiate that they would let us bring the women to the hospital with the

nuns. In exchange, we would let them make a public examination of our cargo, to

demonstrate that we had no weapons. The idea for the women to be led away was

German Bellinghausen's. He called me apart so that we could focus the negotiation in

this spirit. We still thought that we were going to be able to convince them to let us pass,

to be able to get to the ejido Moriela. He made me see that we were not going to pass

and that, with luck, they would allow us to leave. We brought the women away and they

called Bishop Samuel Ruiz from the hospital, who then called Camacho Solis, the

government commissioner for the peace talks.

While this was occurring, we were deep in the examination of the truck. This was

perhaps the most diflicult part - it gives me shudders remembering it. Three judges from the state of Chiapas, together with two PRI leaders, were going to climb into the truck to check that we didn't have weapons. I don't know why, but an inner voice told one of us that we ought to check them before they began - that they might be able to plant weapons in the truck and say they were ours. The truth is that the people who had surrounded the truck were already very angry with us and quite drunk (alcohol ran freely among them -

I don't know who bought it or who gave it to them, but I'm almost certain it was the same

PRZstas). And so, before letting them into the truck, Adolfo Llubere and Z checked them.

We didn't really know how to do it, but as we hadpassed various military checkpoints in the last few months, we did what the soldiers (and, for certain, the Zapatistas, too) did to check us every time we passed through. And as you could imagine, each was carrying more than two pistols within his clothing. We made them leave the guns below before they entered the truck - somehow we deactivated their plan of accusing us of bringing these pistols to the Zapatistas.

While they checked the truck, some went to let Constantino Carter know that someone from the government was calling him on the phone - someone important, because his aides looked worried. This someone was Camacho Solis. Carter returned, furious, to ask us who the crybaby clown was that called the government. Luckily,

Camacho had made Carter see the huge problem that would be created if something happened to a group of students, some from private universities, just one day before the peace talks - that they could spoil the entire dialogue and who knows how many more things.

So they decided to let us go. By then it was already seven in the evening. Before we left, though, they made us take down all the food we had in the truck for the people of the town who had come together to block our way. When we finished, our chaufSeur mysteriously appeared at the steering wheel and started the motor. But they insisted that it wasn't safe to let us go, that what if the Zapatistas attacked us on the highway in the night and then blamed it on the townspeople, that they were already going to see where we were sleeping. Luckily with a bit of pressure, saying that if they didn't let us leave, the next day every newspaper would accuse them of kidnapping (and for certain, it was

La Jorneda's front page story the following day), they let us leave. Just then, a group of drunks carrying torches and ropes surrounded the truck. We thought, finally, that we would be burned alive. To me, the most anguishing part of all was seeing my companions crying out of fear, some saying that maybe our actions were evil, that if what we wanted to do was help the Indians, why were the Indians kidnapping us and doing such horrible things to us. Fear makes you think strange things - sometimes stupid things.

Upon arriving in Sun Cristobal, we were scolded severely by the NGOs, and would not even accept our accusation for the robbery of the food and the intent to kidnap. Everyone was laughing at us, except our compafieros who had been to other villages and were very worried about us. The NGOs wanted to take us out of Chiapas that very moment, and even requested that we not be allowed to participate in the human peace shields that would be formed by civilians during the dialogue. But since we were the only ones who oJjered to cover the midnight shifts, and even cover double shifts,

Bishop Samuel Ruiz told them to go fuck themselves, and the next day he called us to enter the church to meet the Zapatista commandantes who came to the dialogue. Here came the funniest anecdote of them all - when we saluted Sub Marcos, he asked one of my compafierosif we were the ones from Altamirano, the ones who couldn't get to the ejido Moriela. When we told him yes, he turned to Comandante Ramona and said:

"estos chavos si que tienen huevos. " Ha ha, I thought; if they had only seen us crying the night before, hugging each other and celebrating being alive. These commandtes, who risk their lives so that many worlds might flourish in this world, thinking that we were the valiant ones! Can you imagine?

Sergio and twenty-five members of the CEU were later invited back to Guadalupe

Tepayac to build a library for the six hundred books the rebels had been receiving as aid.

Early in 1995, following a wave of government military aggression led by newly elected

President Zedillo, EZLN headquarters moved from Guadalupe Tepayac to La Realidad.

The library CEU had helped build was burnt down, and later rebuilt to house army troops that to date are still there. Three months later, the CEU's Zapatista contacts invited five members down to Ocosingo to have a talk:

They told us, 'You know, we appreciate all the support you give us. You are one of our biggest support groups. But this is not the kind of support we need. We keep collecting the cans for you because when you come here you eat really strange things. You love tuna fish in a can; we hate it. You love vegetables in cans; we hate them. And we realize that our food sometimes makes your stomachs ache, so we keep this food for you and for the other foreigners that come and support us. But we've got enough - look at this!' And they showed us two small houses full of cans and a lot of clothing that was not useful for that kind of landscape - you know, like heels for example. 'So please stop sending these. If you want to give us real support, then stop coming here. Stay in your place and build things, change the things that have to be changed in your own places.' And that was the end of the caravan. But we kept making the concerts - not for getting food or support, but for spreading information.

Keep the music, lose the food. The Commandancia's message was sobering, but it resonated with a central message of Zapatismo. In an April 1994 communiquC to civil society, Subcomandante Marcos described what he called "the Cinderella syndrome" that plagues contemporary conceptions of solidarity. Addressing the Mexicans and foreigners pouring into Chiapas bearing material support, Marcos drew a necessary line: We are not reproaching you for anything, we know that you are risking much to come and see us and to bring aid to the civilians on this side. It is not our needs which bring us pain, it's seeing in others what others don't see, the same abandonment of liberty and democracy, the same lack of justice . . . From what our people received in benefit in this war, I saved an example of 'humanitarian aid' for the chiapaneco indigenous, which arrived a few weeks ago: a pink stiletto heel, imported, size 61.. .without its mate. I always carry it in my backpack in order to remind myself, in the midst of interviews, photo reports and attractive sexual propositions, what we are to the country after the first of January: a Cinderella . . . These good people who, sincerely, send us a pink stiletto heel, size 61, imported, without its mate.. . thinking that, poor as we are, we'll accept anything, charity and alms. How can we tell all those good people that no, we no longer want to continue living Mexico's shame. In that part that has to be prettied up so it doesn't make the rest look ugly. No, we don't want to go on living like that. "

No tuna fish, and no lonely stiletto heels. Sergio's experience and Marcos' reprimands are not just rejecting impractical gifts. They're discouraging civil society from the patronizing attitude that is sent with material support. As "useless computers, expired medicines," and "extravagant clothes" continue to pile up in Zapatista communities, the spirit of their revolt is being lost. In a communiqu6 nine years later, Marcos reminded civil society that

if the zapatista communities wanted, they could have the best standard of living in Latin America. Imagine how much the government would be willing to invest in order to secure our surrender and to take lots of pictures and make a lot of 'spots' where [President Vicente] Fox or [his wife] Martita could promote themselves, while the country fell apart in their hands . . . No. The zapatistas have received many offers to buy their consciences, and they keep up their resistance nonetheless, making their poverty (for he who learns to see) a lesson in dignity and generosity. Because we zapatistas say that 'For everyone everything, nothing for us,' and, if we say it, it is what we live. The constitutional recognition of indigenous rights and culture, and the improvement of living conditions, is for all the Indian peoples of Mexico, not just for the zapatista indigenous. The democracy, liberty and justice to which we aspire are for all Mexicans, not just for us.

11 Correspondence posted at www.dostje.org/Aguas/Besedila/25ju103.htm "The support we are demanding," Marcos finishes, "is for the building of a small part of

that world where all worlds fit. It is, then, political support, not charity." What might

this support look like? What might it sound like?

I bought another PRODUCCIONES RADIO INSURGENTE album that day in

Oventik. "Para Chiapas: Canciones a la Dignidad" is a diverse collage of international

songs written in solidarity with the Zapatistas. Beginning with the accordion twirls of the

Himno Zapatista, the album sets out on a whirlwind tour of genres, hitting upon nortefio,

techno, house, bossa nova, salsa, reggae, ranchera, rock, funk, ska, jazz, and a hip-hop-

thrash-punk fusion. The seventeen contributing artists, however, are not named. I have

no idea who they are. I know track seven, "Por el Suelo," is by Manu Chao, and track

fifteen sounds a bit like Rage Against the Machine, but I am completely in the dark with

the rest. It is as though the musicians themselves were wearing ski masks. As they come

at us, one after another, using completely different styles and voices, Para Chiapas risks

total fragmentation. But the artists' anonymity, along with their common solidarity with

the EZLN, lends this album strong coherence. It makes audible the "world where many

worlds may fit," becoming a sonic forum that mirrors the EZLN's two intercontinental

Encuentros.

On February 20, 1999, el Sup released a communiquC entitled "A 10s Musiqueros de Todo el Mundo." As usual, he began with a reference to El Viejo Don Antonio, that mythic character who bestowed indigenous wisdom upon the young sub-commander when he was still just a city boy lost in the jungle:

Old Antonio (who, if he had been a musician, would have played the blues) used to say that music opens paths that only the wise know how to walk, and which, along with dance, builds bridges which bring you close to a world which cannot even be dreamt. This all comes to mind because we have received news of concerts and shows by musicians in Mexico and in other parts of the world. Their purpose? To promote the Consulta and to be in solidarity with the Mexican indigenous and their dignified struggle. We want to express our appreciation to all of them, and to those who have had to do with those paths to peace, which criss-cross the planet from end to end, most especially, but not only, to the rhythms of rock. Nothing pleases us more than those who compose, sing and play. As well as the producers, the sound people (is that how you say it?), the lighting people, the stagehands, the drivers, the ticket people, the loaders, the artists' reps, the local owners and administrators, and all the men and women who have to do (and who, nonetheless, are not seen) with a concert or musical show (often doubly volunteering, receiving neither money nor credit). Thanks to everyone. And now that we're into the 'one, two, three, four,' we want to salute all those who musicians who, over the last five years, have played, are playing, will be playing, for the peace with justice and dignity. Everyone has called for an end to the war. Some have cut records, others have participated in concerts, or visited the indigenous communities, or spoken out in favor of the peace with justice and dignity, or protested against the Acteal killing12, or given us their instruments or dedicated one or more tours to the struggle of the Mexican indigenous. Here are some of the names (some of them escape me, but you already know how space tyrannizes the written word).13

He follows this passage with a Whitman-esque list of thirty-nine Mexican groups, seventy-nine international groups, "and not the few singer-songwriters who, in vans and buses, delight their audiences in exchange for only 'lo que sea su voluntad joven, seiiito, caballero."' (see Appendix 1)

It's as though Don Antonio and Marcos read up on Attali. "Music . . . builds bridges which bring you close to a world which cannot even be dreamt"? That first paragraph could have been taken straight out of Noise. But it wasn't; rather, here we see a revolutionary Latin American political figure affirming the French intellectual's lofty ideas about music's power of prophesy. The "political support" Marcos prefers over

l2 In December, 1997, a paramilitary group associated with the PRI party opened fire upon a church in the indigenous community of Acteal (near Oventik), killing forty-five unarmed campesinos. l3 Subcornandante Marcos, "To: Musicians of the World," e-mail communiquC, 20 February 1999. charity, "the building a small part of that world where all worlds fit," finds manifestation here in music. He is careful to acknowledge those who work behind the scenes (wearing their own, techy ski masks), and recognizes the many faces of musical solidarity, from recording albums to visiting the communities, from protesting massacres to donating instruments.

Why does Marcos give thanks for musical instruments after shunning material support? Food, clothing, heels, computers . . . each is pre-loaded with specific cultural meaning, value and function. The cans, shoes, and computers that Sergio and el Sup point to show that this cultural meaning is predominantly Western, (post)industrial, and materialistic. Such material "support" is, in effect, encouraging the same modern,

Western standards of living that the EZLN has been struggling against since it waged war on neoliberalism. Sending this kind of support to the Chiapan mountains, then, becomes a stealthy, sympathetic form of imperialism. But an instrument, although it is a product of the artistic imagination of another culture, does not impose in this way. Rather, it invites manipulation; it begs you to impress cultural meaning upon it, to narrate through it, to imagine with it. It is material support that is simultaneously immaterial. What could physically capture the Zapatistas' ideal of international solidarity based in local autonomy more honestly than an indigenous musician narrating her unique struggle through an international instrument?

Chapter 4:

First Impressions

In chapter one, I called Manu Chao an artist, a postmodern navigator, an insurgent architect, and a theorist. But Chao has his own term for himself: "musical j~urnalist."'~

How does music report differently than print journalism? Why does Chao choose song as his form of political expression? e689

In January, 1994, I was twelve. Rudolph Giuliani was being sworn in as New

York City Mayor, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat were talking peace in Gaza and

Jericho, and Kevin Bacon was helping indigenous Kenyan villagers maintain their land rights through basketball in The Air Up There. Jen Millard, the love of my sixth grade life, saw the movie with B.J. Davidson, a kid who was even worse at shedding prepubescent baby fat than I was. Finding solace in the fantasy of mine and Jen's common experience of seeing the add for the movie, I'd to turn to the Style section of

The Washington Post daily to see coach Bacon standing there, smiling, whistle around his neck, leaning against a dark Kenyan twice his height. I was too busy trudging through

l4 "Manu Chao." Weekend Edition. Reporter: Rolando Arrieta. National Public Radio. 3 April, 1999.

8 8 the swamp of my self-pity to notice that a story from southeast Mexico was quickly climbing the pages of the A Section.

The Zapatistas first appeared in the Post on Sunday, January 2nd,at the bottom- right of page A27. "Indians Rampage in Southern Mexico," read the headline. "3 Police

Officers Reportedly Killed in Storming of 4 Chiapas ~owns."'~Brief, nine paragraph article quoted a number of official sources: the Chiapas government, Notimex (the federal government news agency), a correspondent from Televisa (a privately owned mega television station). Each supported the same argument: groups of unprovoked, armed

Indians "have carried out acts of provocation and violence," killing three innocents, without clearly articulating a motive. The thirty-two Zapatistas killed in the skirmishes were not mentioned. Subcomandante Marcos' four-hour speech in San Cristbbal, outlining political objectives and explaining why the largely peaceful offence was a last resort for the marginalized Indians, was not mentioned. A "statement faxed to the news media" by the EZLN was referred to briefly, citing that the group had "declared war" on the federal army but "did not detail the grievances." The Chaipas government was quoted extensively, saying that security forces would be sent in to "try to dissuade the indigenous groups, to ask them to reconsider their attitude, to return to the legal way and to participate in the construction of solutions to their demands." By the time this article was printed, the army's response of raids and bombings in the Chiapan mountains had already killed at least 145 indigenous people. (Lebn, 447)

The next day, the EZLN made the Post's front page. "55 Killed in Fighting in

Southern Mexico," read the headline. To the left sat a photo of "bullet-riddled bodies of

l5 Associated Press. "Indians Rampage in Southeast Mexico." The Washington Post. 2 January, 1994. A27.

8 9 some of 14 men and boys in rebel garb."16 The article was essentially an expanded version of the previous day's story: death-toll statistics were paramount, the state government was quoted heavily, vague explanations of the rebels' demands were offered, and the author seemed bent on reproducing rumors that the entire group was from

Guatemala - a kind of legitimization by repetition. The EZLN9sdeclaration that it would not seek state power found no mention; in fact, it was contradicted. "We will control the entire country, including the capital," a "rebel commander" was quoted on the front page.

A report that a band of Zapatistas had been found with "their faces blown off," and

"appeared to have been shot while retreating," was buried at the end of the article.

The Post's front page story on January 4thwas similar. It quoted President Carlos

Salinas' government, the Mexican military, and State Secretary General Rafael Gonzales in the first half of the article, then presented viewpoints sympathetic to the Zapatistas in the back section (including mediator Bishop Samuel Ruiz, El Tiempo newspaper editor

Concepci6n Villafuerte, the liberal Mexico City magazine Proceso, and clearer representations of EZLN c~mmuni~u~s).'~But the paper's more virtuous editors must have noticed their exclusion of EZLN voices, for the next day (January 5th)they ran their most extensive interview with members of the EZLN. Reporter Tod Robberson questioned six rebels who had been captured and put on display in the town square of

~xchuc.'~He decided these six, with "faces . . . caked with blood from head and face wounds received during a beating by the townspeople," and facing the prospect of

l6 Robberson, Tod. "55 Killed in Fighting In Southern Mexico." The Washington Post. 3 January, 1994. Al, A15. l7 Robberson, Tod. "Bloody Indian Revolt Continues in Mexico." The Washington Post. 4 January, 1994. Al, A13. Is Robberson, Tod. "Rebels Pull Out of Towns As Mexican Army Mops Up." The Washington Post. 5 January, 1994. Al, A25. execution, would have honest, insider information on the EZLN to share with a gringo.

Their words were predictably desperate: "They said they would take my land if I didn't join them; I had no choice" . . . "I was crazy" . . . "I don't know what got into me." Rather than use the Cornandancia's press releases, the Washington Post decided to get the real story - the one they won't tell you in the communiquCs - and represent the EZLN through the accounts of these terrified captives.

On January 4, the front page of the New York Times showed a masked Indian holding an automatic weapon over a tiny blurb: "Mexican Guerrillas Wage War Against

'the ~ich.""~ he caption below reported that rebels "smashed the town hall in

Altamirano with sledgehammers," and quoted one as saying "Our thinking is that we have to build socialism." Turn to page A3, and there's an image of Jestis: a petite, masked man dressed in a collared shirt and baseball cap, chipping away at an ostensibly trivial brick wall with a sledgehammer. Below, townspeople look on, confused. "The orders we have are to knock it down," Jesds is quoted. Reporter Tim Golden continues:

"'There is no work, no land, no education,' Jestis said. 'There is no way to change that in elections,' he added, echoing the proclamations of his superiors.. ." (my emphasis) Jestis is apparently incapable of independent thought. This articulations of marginalization and political powerlessness - probably the two easiest things for a poor chiapaneco peasant to describe - were too sophisticated to have come from him. Even the limited complexity of Marxist dogma was too difficult for these rebels: "The new world they envision,"

Golden explains, is "one where things would simply be better." No mention of the six

l9 Golden, Tim. "Rebels Determined 'to Build Socialism' in Mexico." The New York Times 4 January, 1994, Al, A3. distinct political demands published in the EZLN's First Declaration of the Lacandbn

Jungle. Why did the Times, like the Post, insist upon ignoring this document?

Certain themes run throughout these periodicals' coverage of the uprising. They focus on the statistics, rather than the causes, of the struggle. Both papers quoted government and commercial agencies abundantly, satisfied with their legitimacy; neither quoted communiqu6s by the EZLN. The question of what counts as "official" is at stake here. "Official" is a state and business-based term, according to these reporters; the trust they place in such institutions is communicated along with their stories. Unsatisfied with insurgent correspondence, they deem it propaganda, and became stealthy investigators - interviewing people on the ground, trying to disclose the real Zapatista demands. As seen above, their respect toward quoted public officials revealed their condescension toward the few rebels they chose to quote. They spectacularize the revolt to fit the

American public's simplistic, even condescending, preconceptions of Latin American revolutionary drama.

This is how the Zapatistas were introduced to millions of American readers: as violent pawns to some ancient guerrilla commander buried too deep in the jungle to realize the cold war is over, promoting ideas they don't understand, ready to denounce their cause on a dime, and knocking down inconsequential buildings in remote towns for reasons unknown even to them. Both papers did go on to thoroughly outline the imbalance of power and wealth in Chiapas, give a brief history of rebellion in the area, and interview other insurgents. Allegedly, both sides of the conflict were always reported; reporters covered all the necessary bases of fair journalism. Their enactment of this ideal was, at best, formulaic - "Get me any rebel quote to throw next to the Salinas statement! (ignore the communique's)." At worst, it was conscious exclusion of pertinent information.

When the Washington Post contacted Mexican government officials, military officers, television conglomerates about rumors of an Indian uprising, it was working within its parameters. When the New York Times went all the way to Altamirano to find a sufficiently destructive spectacle of a rebel - and a sufficiently predictable quote about socialism - it was working within its parameters. I am not arguing that periodicals are essentially unable to frame the Zapatistas' struggle. Indeed, by publishing the EZLN's communiquCs, La Jorneda, El Financiero, Proceso, and many international papers helped build the global network of solidarity that demanded a cease fire in the Chiapan mountains. The Chicago Tribune also did an impressive job of representing the sophistication and urgency of the Zapatista cause, compiling interviews of insurgents,

Chiapaneco citizens, even sympathetic Mexican immigrants living in Chicago. Some of the largest centers of American news casting find journalistic legitimacy exclusively in organizations representing centers of power; the subsequent absence of involved, unprejudiced reporting in the margins creates a vacuum of representation; this vacuum may be filled by what Manu Chao calls "musical journalism."

*68*

Chao told NPR that Clandestino "is an effort to write about social and economic problems in a way that will make people listen." At the same time, he told Josh Kun "it's not a political album." (Kun, 345) Here, what seem like contradictory statements actually expose the power of Chao's style: his musical reporting is potent and accessible because he doesn't write about problems - he writes from them. His songs do not describe poverty and dislocation - they are narrated by the poor and dislocated. Unlike some

American newspapers, Chao's album includes the EZLN's word - "Luna y Sol" and "Por el Suelo" use sampling to showcase a speech by el Sup. You won't find references to global capitalism in his lyrics because his songs presuppose a landscape of global capitalism and then explore from there. Clandestino exhibits the relative strength of assuming a political reality rather than persuading us of its existence. "It would be real easy for me to make an album that was full of political things," he told Kun, "but that would stink." (345)

Before all their shows, Chao and his band hold press conferences. "But press conferences not just for press," he says, "for anyone who wants to come and talk." (Kun,

345) Everywhere they play, the questions people ask are "10 percent musical and 90 percent political or social." This trend irritates him. "It's amazing how many people come to us loolung for answers," he says. He echoes the EZLN in his response: "Don't trust us, because we're lost. I'm still lost. I'm still looking for any solutions." He is uncomfortable in conversations demanding political answers from him; in fact, he feels unsure about participating in political dialogue in general:

It's like, I'm a musician. That's the job I've chosen in my life. I want to be a musician. This kind of political thing, political responsibility, I didn't choose it. It's there and I'm gonna take it. But it's very difficult because the border between giving your ideas and demagoguery is really thin. (345)

He is conscious of a "political responsibility" to his audience, but holds back on politics in his speech. Like the EZLN, he says that attending to his own politics is a full time job.

What I always say is that the only revolution I can handle is my own revolution. My revolution is to try to radiate positive vibrations everywhere I go and give hope to people and give good energy to people and to have my kitchen clean. That's the only revolution I believe in. When they ask me about solutions, I say the only solution that I have is to have my own kitchen clean. If everyone would do the same, there would be a huge revolution, and it would be a wonderful revolution because it wouldn't be recuperable. (345)

Whether his music is a cleaning agent or a manifestation of his clean kitchen - whether it blossoms from the soil of his own revolution or is the soil itself - Chao has conviction that the energy of his sound is the most useful means of spreading this radical political experience. He and Marcos are alike in this way - they are both attuned to the effectiveness of revolution's affective components. When Chao says he "didn't choose" his "political responsibility," he's bluffing. He knows that doesn't play in a vacuum, but in a world of political action; that his music spreads Freire's conscientiza@io just as the

EZLN raised the conscientizapZo of his music. Rather than occupying a removed space - a separate, musical core - his songs are in conversation with revolutionary action. Think back to Marcos' epigraph to the thesis: "There were words that met, but, above all, there were, and are, feelings that met." (Marcos, 302) This entire Zapatista process consists of a necessary coexistence of words - information, particulars, plans - and feelings - music, literature. Chao's music, then, artistically supplements the concrete facts, analyses, and agendas of "this kind of political thing."

There's an international, underground ubiquity to Manu Chao. He is the subject of an uncanny amount of foreign sightings. "First encounters with Manu" stories lead you all over. I asked fourteen friends if they remember where they were when they first heard his tunes, and got a geographical pastiche of responses: passing through

Salamanca, Spain . . . driving to school in La Paz, Bolivia . . . visiting family in Geneva,

Switzerland . . . at a friend's house in Wilmington, North Carolina . . . on a cheap, burned CD in Oaxaca, Mexico . . . in a dorm room in Lewiston, Maine . . . raging in an underground barecillo in Mexico City . . . at a street vendor's stand in Los Angeles . . . smolung around a bonfire in a skate park in the Alsace region of France . . . in the kitchen of a youth hostel in San Cristdbal, Chiapas . . . in a Quebec City music store . . .

"somewhere in Argentina" . . . getting down at a Washington, DC, nightclub . . . delayed in the Mexico City airport. Chao's myriad musical "positionalities" reaching all these different people's ears in this collage of locations . . . it's like a sprawling, conspiratorial,

Pynchonian network that converges in an instant on Manu Chao. This metaphor is telling, for there are a few similarities between this rocker and Mr. Pynchon. Both tell the story of the invisible nomad roaming the ecstatic wasteland of postmodern fragmentation. But they each go further - they actually become this nomad, wandering the landscape undercover, living their art's narration and form. The modernists cried:

"Say it new!" Pynchon, Chao, and el Sup took their word, then added a cry of their own:

"Live it !"

-2689-

I first encountered Manu my sophomore year in college, while I was studying

Spanish in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala (known locally by its indigenous name, Xela). I was on the street, standing in front of a bootleg CD stand that almost looked like the music section in the Cooperativa. This photocopied album cover was so faint, I didn't know what the kid behind the table was trying to sell me. I brought it back to the Pop Wuj language school, and Oscar, my middle age tutor, was impressed. Chao's tunes became my soundtrack for walking the streets of Xela. Guatemala seemed to saturate the songs, so that when I played it upon my return to the Berkshires, I could almost smell the town's smoggy air. That recordable CD has made quite a journey - from some Southeast Asian factory, over to Guatemala, up to the States, then around the world with me, hitting India, New Zealand, and Mexico. Now it's here in Williamstown, and it still hasn't scratched. I'm glad - when I get restless, it feels good to throw in a disc

I know has spent its own time abroad.

Coda

"Our word is our weapon," declares the EZLN. The music I heard in Mexico compels me to amend this statement. Like Pynchon's Tristero horn, that image of an insurgent microphone peering through jungle leaves began to haunt my surroundings, attuning my ears to a landscape of sonic warfare perpetually being fought between a neocolonial status quo and the myriad faces of Zapatismo. Though they are often veiled in the contrived, neutered word "entertainment," these battles are deeply political. They are ranging, irreverent of walls and borders, and they did not cease upon my return to the

States. *fa'+

"New worlds had to be lived before they could be analyzed" declares the narrator of Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps. (Carpentier, 277) His journey from the New York music scene to the most remote and ancient reaches of human settlement in a South

American jungle becomes, both superficially and figuratively, a musical pilgrimage: his faith lost in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ("the gracious, humane philosophy of

Montaigne, the cloudless blue of Utopia, the essence of Elzevir, the voice of Voltaire raised in the Calas trial" (96)), he sets out on a commissioned quest for man's first instruments - a pursuit of the "Birth of Music." (184) During his Conradesque trip up a wild river, his Western ears are attacked by a terrifying new symphony:

The darkness trembled with fears and slithers. Somebody, somewhere, tried out the mouthpiece of an oboe. A grotesque brass set up a laugh in a hidden glade. A thousand flutes of two differently tuned notes answered each other through the leaves. And there were metal combs, saw whining through wood, harmonica reeds, the quavering stridulation of the crickets, which seemed to cover the whole earth. There were sounds like the peacock's cry, belly growls, whistles that rose and died away . . . I was on the point of surrender - of screaming my fear - for the sake of hearing human voices. (162-3)

"Shackled to the metronome," (111) to his Beethoven lenses, the narrator's process of acclimating himself to the jungle depended upon his ability to unlearn classical music's rules, to divorce himself from the fundamental framework of Western music. He uncomfortably retuned his ears to the "immutable rhythms" of the landscape. (111) This emancipatory process shook his perception of reality quite deeply, delving down into the temporal realms of his worldly experience.

I noticed in myself different values of the intervals: the prolongation of certain mornings, the frugal elaboration of a sunset, and was lost in wonder at all that could be fitted into certain tempos of this symphony which we were reading backward, from right to left, contrary to the key of G, returning to the measures of Genesis. (181)

In this tonal and metric newness, where music was still wet and warm with the mucous of its birth, the narrator ventured into "unexplored possibilities of linking words and music."

(214) He decided to never leave the jungle. He scribbled an inspired composition, the

"Threnody," on the pages of a few rare notebooks before a search plane hired by his wife found his village and lured him home.

The narrator's unfinished opus, the Threnody, achieves a tenuous balance: on the one hand, it is inspired by a radical shift in his reality, an abandonment of traditional experience; on the other, he is translating that new experience into the language of a classical orchestra. If he is really abandoning the West, why does he write a piece that can only be played in the West? Is he ultimately packaging the other for the West's entertainment, a gentle miner ravishing indigenous landscapes for an intangible ore? Or is there something about music that can in fact deliver a world to us, innocently and directly, without the prejudices inherent in written language? Julio Cortkar imagines that as it delivers worlds, music offers suggestions about how to live in those worlds.

Satchmo, he writes,

. . .brings Mexicans together with Norwegians and Russians and Spaniards, brings them back into that obscure and forgotten central flame, clumsily and badly and precariously he delivers them back to a betrayed origin, he shows them that perhaps there have been other paths and that the one they took was maybe not the only one or the best one, or that perhaps there have been other paths and that the one they took was the best, but that perhaps there were other paths that made for softer walking and that they had not taken those, or that they only took them in a halfway sort of way. (Cortizar, 70)

These suggestions are autonomous, but they thirst for translation into the lives of the listener. As they reveal titilating "could bes", they unearth the "why nots" we would rather keep hidden, showing the pasture through the prison bars. Satchmo show us

that a man is always more than a man and always less than a man, more than a man because he has in himself all that jazz suggests and lies in wait for and even anticipates, and less than a man because he has made an aesthetic and sterile game out of this liberty, a chessboard where one must be bishop or knight, a definition of liberty which is taught in school, in the very schools where the pupils are never taught ragtime rhythm or the first notes of the blues, and so forth and so on. (70-71)

The Lost Steps does not tell my story, but it haunts me as I write this long, fractalling essay. The narrator's inability to behold his foreign companions without falling into condescension worries me. His process of finding dignity in the un- sophistication, the simplicity, of the other (which becomes an affirmation of his own latent otherness, an earthquake of perception that discloses wellsprings of prolific creativity) comes replete with the same cultural arrogance and fetishization he is trying to evade. He objectifies the Indians he meets, calling them "our Indians," romanticizes them as a people "immune to the ills of the day," and decides too quickly to get on the plane for home. (Carpentier, 123) As he floats farther away from the gilded glimmer of

Western life, references to Western culture begin to populate the pages as thickly as the trees in his jungle, invading our eyes with Biblical myths, tales from The Odyssey,

Roman history, and Renaissance thought. He seems preoccupied with proving his knowledge of the West before leaving it, of buying our acknowledgement of the legitimacy of his divorce with the currency of the classics. The narrator sends us off with a passage that resonates profoundly with my own exotic there-and-back-again:

The one who made too much of an effort to understand, the one who underwent the agonies of a conversion, the one whose idea was that of renunciation when he embraced the customs of those who forged their destinies in this primaeval slime in a hand-to-hand struggle with the mountains and the trees, was vulnerable because certain forces of the world he had left behind continued to operate in him. (277)

I think of the array of roles I am self-consciously playing in the writing of this piece - those of ethnographer, anthropologist, historian, academic, but also those of well- heeled ethnic tourist, musician, disillusioned student, potential revolutionary - and my head spins with the forces of the myriad worlds continuing to operate in me as I travel and write. Trudging through the pages of this paper, I realized that I have chosen a task whose impossibility rests in my passion for the indescribable experience of music and a personal solidarity with the Zapatista vision. I can't tell if this paper is an academic essay or a devastatingly long addendum to an EZLN propaganda pamphlet, nor if there is any

difference between the two. I fear that submitting it to the academy will perpetuate the

process of essentializing and packaging the other, of homogenizing the other's difference

with the subtle oppressors of translation and presentation, that Carpentier captures so

beautifully in his narrator. Shortcomings pile up before my eyes: Why didn't I do what

the EZLN told Sergio and take on an issue more local to me? Why didn't I write music instead of writing about music - show and not tell? Have I compromised the EZLN by

writing about it, using its weapon - the word - to neutralize its potency in some way my

Western self is not conscious of?

As I try to wrap my mind around Grupo Liberacidn, Para Chiapas, and Mr.

Chao, perhaps I can only hope to mirror Dean Moriarty's art of ecstatically beholding the

San Francisco tenorman. With "his face lowered to the bell of the horn, clapping his hands, pouring sweat on the man's keys," Dean becomes "a madman who not only understood but cared and wanted to understand more and much more than there was."

(Kerouac, 198) "They began dueling," Dean equipped with his white-boy passion and the tenorman with his horn, and the latter "laughed in his horn a long quivering crazy laugh, and everybody else laughed and they rocked and rocked." (198) And maybe, if I use my words - my versions of Dean's "Yes! Yes!" "Blow, man, blow!" "Whoo!" - I could generate a sort of international duel that could enter the horn and help everybody rock and rock. Because that's what I've got in this forum: words. And so this whole paper becomes an exercise in how the word can interact with music - how it represents, drags behind, illuminates, confines, beholds, neuters, delivers, takes up arms with music.

All this is done with a desperate attempt to avoid standing in for the music - to becoming Kerouac's "white hipster fairy" who jumped on stage after the tenorman, "swaying his neck with that complacent Reichi-analyzed ecstasy that doesn't mean anything except too much tea and soft foods and goofy kicks on the cool order." (200) So I've included some

~~~~~~aTiiifipCiidix - or have written this thesis as an appendix for 5?%YiFim'u~ Now you, &I!teader, can claim some freedom from my interpretations, &in chodg iiblfb8&ett@ for secondary sources, can experience the worlds that unfold from these songs first-haneri:

and then decide if my extended liner notes-. to these tunes bear any merit. Difitala.5,A- .. '..j~@ '1 .*. , . - . .I I I . Appendix I

From Subcomandante Marcos' February 20, 1999, cornmuniqu6, "A: Los musiqueros de todo el mundo."

And now that we're into the "one, two, three, four," we want to salute all those who musicians who, over the last five years, have played, are playing, will be playing, for the peace with justice and dignity.

Everyone has called for an end to the war. Some have cut records, others have participated in concerts, or visited the indigenous communities, or spoken out in favor of the peace with justice and dignity, or protested against the Acteal lulling, or given us their instruments or dedicated one or more tours to the struggle of the Mexican indigenous. Here are some of the names (some of them escape me, but you already know how space tyrannizes the written word). Sale and vale:

In Mexico: La Bola, Santa Sabina, Panteon Rococo, Maldita Vecindad, Sekta Core, Makina, El Mastuerzo, Tijuana No, Jambo, Los de Abajo, La Nao, Trolebus, La Dosis, Resorte, Guillotina, Estramboticos, Mana, Julieta Venegas, Petroleo, Juguete Rabioso, Rotor, Funkswagen, Cafe Tacuba, Salario Minimo, El TRI, Fratta, Botellita de Jerez, Serpiente sobre Ruedas, Los Hermanos Rincon, Los Nakos, Ana de Alba, Leones de la Sierra de Xichu, Jose de Molina (QEPD), Lidia Tamayo, Arturo Marquez, Nina Galindo, Nayeli Nesme, Eugenia Leon, Hebe Rossel, the men and women from the National Music and Conservatory Schools, the raza of the CLETA, and the not few singer-songwriters who, in vans and buses, delight their audiences in exchange for only "lo que sea su voluntad joven, senito, caballero."

In France, Germany, the State of Spain, the Basque Country, Italy, Canada, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and in other parts of the world:

Negu Gorriak, Mano Negra, Hechos contra el Decoro, Color Humano, Sook and the Guay, Joaqui'n Sabina, Joan Manuel Serrat, Juan Perro, Ismael Serrano, Dut, Manu Chao, Hubert Cesarion, Ruben and Babakar, DKP, Ethnicians, Pushy!, La Huanda, Sree, Denise, P18, Ghetto 84, Radio Bemba, Banda Bassotti, Arpioni, Gang, Tupamaros, Klaxon, Radici Nel Cemento, R.D.E., Swoons, Another Fine Mess, Maltschicks, Dady Longleg, Jelly Gruel, Mundmachine, Lunchbox, Caution Sreams, Kommerzinfarkt, KJB, Deh-kadenz, Nervous, Ate Hands for Brains, The Evil Bad, Provisorium, Novotny Tv, Down The Stairs, Rubabs, Daisies, Plattrock, King Prawn, Steven Brown, Nine Rain y Tuxedo Moon, Tuxedo Moon, Paralamas, Xenreira, Planet Hemp, Fito Pa'ez, Charly Garcia, , Los Guarros, Divididos, Ilya Kuryaki anda The Valderramas, Andre's Calamaro, Lumumba, Los Tres, Mercedes Sosa, Leo'n Gieco, Daniel Viglietti, Vicente Feliu', Rhytm Activism, Rage Against The Machine, Aztla'n Underground, Indigo Girls, Quetzal, Ozomatli, Jackson Browne, Los Skarnales, King Chango', Sepultura.

We also know of groups and performers in Ireland, Greece, Nicaragua, Cuba, Canada, and many others in Italy, the United States, the State of Spain, France, Brazil, Germany and Mexico, whom we have heard about in the mountains of the Mexican southeast, but whose music has not reached us. There are many others who have spoken about us, have sung for us and who have made themselves heard for us.

Thanks to all those musicians, men and women, who, in Mexico and all over the world, have echoed the zapatista "Ya Basta!"

Once we have won, we are going to organize a super-mega-magna-hyper concert for everyone, with no time limits... and free! (You're kidding! You're going to end up playing only the San Jose marimba).

Vale. Salud,and, doesn't the morning also arrive through song?

From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos. Mexico, February of 1999. Appendix I1

Canciones Insurgentes

Track List:

1. Introducci6n (Grupo Liberacibn, Grupo Liberacidn)

2. La Selva (anonymous artist, Para Chiapas: Canciones a la Dignidad)

3. Clandestino (Manu Chao, Clandestino)

4. Desaparecido (Manu Chao, Clandestino)

5. Mentira (Manu Chao, Clandestino)

6. Lagrimas de Oro (Manu Chao, Clandestino)

7. Por el Suelo (Manu Chao, Clandestino)

8. Welcome to Tijuana (Manu Chao, Clandestino)

9. El Viento (Manu Chao, Clandestino)

10. 19 de Diciembre (Grupo LiberaciBn, Gvupo Liberacidn)

11. Los Dos Mexicos (anonymous artist, Para Chiapas: Canciones a la Dignidad)

12. Todos Somos Ramona (anonymous artist, Para Chiapas: Canciones a la Dignidad)

13. Durito y Yo (anonymous artist, Para Chiapas: Canciones a la Dignidad)

14. La Injusticia (Grupo Liberacibn, Grupo Liberacidn)

15. EZLN.. .Para Tod@S Todo... (Manu Chao and Subcomandante Marcos, Radio Bemba Sound System)

16. Himno Zapatista (anonymous artist, Para Chiapas: Canciones a la Dignidad)

17. This Is My World (Mano Negra, ) Bibliography

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