I really enjoyed the first parts of this book. The writing style is engaging and easy to understand, and feels very conversational. There are a lot of questions asked to communicate information, and the writing is clear without being overly filled with jargon or too academic. I also appreciated how this tone was taken in different sections with different audiences, because I felt like it painted a broader picture by including those perspectives. I thought the sections written in the second person were especially interesting, where the author walks you through Chiapas and other areas of Southeastern Mexico as if you are there to try to illustrate the poor living conditions there. This is also an impactful section given its placement directly after the one that details how imperialism and capitalism suck all the resources out of Mexico by force, because it gives the reader a sense of the irony and injustice that results from these resources being extracted and exploited. The goods and materials that Chiapas loses would greatly enhance the quality of life within the area itself, but because of systems set up by neoliberalism, capitalism, and imperialism, these materials and resources are exported at extremely high percentages.

Another thing I found interesting was the sentiment in the first few chapters about the individual and the collective. I was intrigued by the idea of names and anonymity. This is a theme that has come up a lot in previous texts, with names being a very important sign of respect and recognition, so I thought it was interesting that a lot of the Zapatistas were referred to as nameless in the revolution. This made a bit more sense to me with the quote “everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves.” I interpreted this idea as a nod to the importance of the collective over the individual. Each person is nameless, but the revolution as a whole movement has its own identity. This seems reminiscent of schools of thought like Marxism, and also definitely anti-capitalistic. While the text explicitly mentions anticapitalist sentiments several times, this idea in the quote also contributes to that notion. It denies the foundation of property ownership and entitlement that capitalism rests upon, and also demonstrates the dream of a society where people have not just a fair or equal amount of resources, but enough to sustain the collective society. Everyone has enough, and everything goes to everyone, where everyone is the people of Mexico rather than multinational corporations that currently control a lot of the exports and raw materials.