“𝗘𝗻𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝗻𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵!”

"I HAVE ALMOST finished writing this when someone arrives . . .

Doña Juanita. After Old Don Antonio dies, Doña Juanita allows her life to slow down to the gentle pace she uses when preparing coffee. Physically strong, Doña Juanita has announced she will die. “Don’t be silly, grandmother,” I say, refusing to meet her eyes. “Look, you,” she answers. “If we must die in order to live, nothing will keep me from dying, much less a young brat like yourself,” says and scolds Doña Juanita, Old Don Antonio’s woman, a rebel woman all her life, and apparently, a rebel even in response to her death.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the blockade, she appears.

She. Has no military rank, no uniform, no weapon. Only she knows she is a Zapatista. Much like the Zapatistas, she has no face or name. She struggles for democracy, liberty, and justice, just like the Zapatistas. She is part of what the EZLN calls “civil society”—a people without a political party, who do not belong to “political society,” made up of leaders of political parties. Rather, she is a part of that amorphous yet solid part of society that says, day after day, “Enough is enough!”

At first she is surprised at her own words. But over time, through the strength of repeating them, and above all living them, she stops being afraid of these words, stops being afraid of herself. She is now a Zapatista; she has joined her destiny with the new delirium of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, which so terrorizes political parties and Power’s intellectuals. She has already fought against everyone—against her husband, her lover, her boyfriend, her children, her friend, her brother, her father, her grandfather. “You are insane,” they say. She leaves a great deal behind. What she renounces, if one is talking about size, is much greater than what the empty-handed rebels leave behind. Her everything, her world, demands she forget “those crazy Zapatistas,” while conformity calls her to sit down in the comfortable indifference that lives and worries only about itself. She leaves everything behind. She says nothing. Early one dawn she sharpens the tender point of hope and begins to emulate many times in one day, at least 364 times a year, the January 1 of her sister Zapatistas.

She smiles. Once she merely admired the Zapatistas, but no longer. Her admiration ended the moment she understood that they are a mirror of her rebellion, of her hope.

She discovers that she is born on January 1, 1994. From then on she feels that her life—and what was always said to be a dream and a utopia—might actually be a truth.

In silence and without pay, side by side with other men and women, she begins to knit that complex dream that some call hope: “Everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves.”

She meets March 8 with her face erased, and her name hidden. With her come thousands of women. More and more arrive. Dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of women who remember all over the world that there is much to be done and remember that there is still much to fight for. It appears that dignity is contagious, and it is the women who are more likely to become infected with this uncomfortable ill . . .

This March 8 is a good time to remember and to give their rightful place to the insurgent Zapatistas, to the women who are armed and unarmed.

To remember the rebels and those uncomfortable Mexican women now bent over knitting that history which, without them, is nothing more than a badly made fable."

- Subcommandante Marcos, 𝘖𝘶𝘳 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘪𝘴 𝘖𝘶𝘳 𝘞𝘦𝘢𝘱𝘰𝘯

[photo credit - B. Cymry]