“Our Word is Our Weapon” reads like a treatise rather than a novel. As the pages detail the injustices the Mexican state imposes upon the Mayan population, I am reminded of all of the political theory I had to absorb early on in my studies- though, Subcomandante Marcos’ writing is certainly more digestible than Enlightenment-era philosophers. I understand why he was chosen to represent “the people”- his tone is clear and collected/ive. However, this representation is also complex in its own way. Marcos, the chosen speaker for the disenfranchised Indigenous people of Mexico, especially the Maya in Chiapas, is not himself Maya. How do we reconcile this? How does he? How can a collective identity speak in one voice?
Subcomandante Marcos seems to recognize that his position here is delicate, and the people that chose him as their speaker seem to see this as well. I suppose (?) that Marcos’ is a more direct representation compared to Guaman Poma’s First New Chronicle and Good Government, wherein Guaman Poma self-assigns as the spokesperson for the Indigenous population of the Spanish-occupied Andes. At least there is somewhat of a consensus and acceptance of Marcos as the voice of the movement. Something else that was similar to the Guaman Poma text was the inclusion of roles/lives of others. Guaman Poma spends a considerable amount of time detailing the experiences of individuals, which Marcos does as well. Particularly, Marcos goes into detail about the lives of some of the Zapatista women in the first section of this book. While this follows a long tradition of women participating in revolutionary activity in Mexico, women’s roles in times of conflict have largely been ignored or represented as negative. (Take many of the cultural depictions of the Soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution, which portray these women as either mothers or whores, a binary which erases a plethora of complex lived experience). Marcos describes these women as important, instrumental, even integral to the work of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). This, to me, was reminiscent of how Menchú described the women who took up arms in Guatemala. Given Marcos’ own relationship to identity (the ever-present mask, for example), the whole of this text seems imbued with questions of how we relate to and identify with each other. The EZLN itself uses Marcos’ (ironically secret) identity as their own to form a larger movement and mobilize, yet Marcos is also co-opting a sort of identity by being the voice and masked face of the movement.
I also find the text to be similar to Guama Poma in the sense that they are both ranting about the injustices of their people and all that.
I find it also interesting comparing Guaman Poma’s voice to that of Marcos. In addition to what you mentioned of Poma concluding he shall be the spokesperson for the Inca, he also concluded that his findings equate him with the ability to also foresee and prescribe the solutions. Comparatively, Marcos in conveying messages to a broader audience, done so eloquently by him listening to the Indigenous themselves, which tell the tale of injustices to which practical solutions, such as democratic due processes and the foregoing of NAFTA, are proposed on the basis of transnational complicitness and/or solidarity, understanding that it is everybody who can part of this solution.