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 Chiapas 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 Mexico. 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 Subcomandante Marcos: 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 album 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.