“Asking we walk” Reading notes on the book “Mandar obeying”: the political lessons of Mexican neozapatismo, by Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas

Abstract

“Let's look in silence, let's learn to listen, maybe then, finally, we'll be able to understand”, once said the famous writer José Saramago about the different lessons that the neozapatista movement bequeaths to humanity on a daily basis, since its armed uprising on January 1, 1994, in the state of Chiapas, the poorest in an equally poor Mexico. The neo-zapatista experience, the fruit of the meeting of indigenous wisdom and resistance with a small group of activists trained in the rich environment of renewal of Marxism and of the entire Mexican left, resulting from the Mexican student-popular movement active in the struggles of 1968, launched a breath of hope and rejuvenation to those committed to a fairer world, sharing valuable examples and practical conduct for the entire spectrum of anti-systemic social movements. These experiences are drawn from his search for a daily construction of a new and very different world, non-capitalist, constituted from below and to the left.