Through Subcomandante Marcos’ voice speaks the voice of the Zapatista National Liberation Army. This is a sentiment repeated time and time again throughout chapters, and it harkens back to a conversation we had at the beginning of the year that relates to the dead and the weak talking through someone else. Marcos himself is an anonymous figure, one with only a name as a public figure. In this way, he can be compared to Votán Zapata, the one for who the Zapatista National Liberation Army is named after, who “took a name in [their] being nameless, [and] took a face in [their] being faceless”. Zapata is considered everything and nothing, the guardian and heart of the people, and Marcos conducts himself in a way that reflects his want to continue this sort of leadership and legacy.

Well that’s cool and all, great, he wants to lead the people to democracy and is doing so in a Batman vigilante secret hero way. Fantastic. What’s new?

In the prologue of Our Word is Our Weapon, writer Jose Saramago describes how when Marcos originally travelled to Chiapa, he had very little success communicating with the Indigenous people of the area because they did not understand him. He wanted to launch a proletariat revolution, but the Chiapanecans saw land not as property, but as the heart, and had a different opinion from him. Still Marcos, not Mayan himself, came to be the leader of the Mayan revolution, and it is said he “penetrated the mist, learned to listen, and was able to speak.”

This asks a plethora of questions about Indigenous voice, as these books always do, but I think that it’s especially interesting in comparison to our conversation in class last week, in which we theorized that maybe there is not such a thing as pure and impossibly perfect Indigenous voice, as our hearing it fundamentally guarantees its non-existence. Marcos, whether Indigenous or not, pioneered the Zapatista uprising in Southern Mexico, and while his identity remained masked (ha.ha.), it was more important to acknowledge that he had an entire community in support behind him, choosing him as their spokesperson.

Marcos himself has something to say about this, commenting on the struggle of the rebellion: “But the colour of the skin does not define the Indigenous person: dignity and the constant struggle to be better define him. Those who struggle together are brothers and sisters, regardless of the color of our skin or the language we learned as children.” Is this where he finds the reasoning behind using the “we” pronoun in his speeches?

If this is how Marcos sees himself, as a member of the constant struggle to be better, it would make sense that he steps into Zapata’s shoes and aims to be a speakerphone for the Zapatista National Liberation Army. Even if he admits he knows he “should not have been [there]”, but instead it should have been the Indigenous people who were oppressed, he wants to act as a mirror to look towards tomorrow.