The Fire and the Word
For a book on the Zapatista movement to be called its most comprehensive history by insurgent leader Subcomandante Marcos, a work must be exceptionally meaningful. Yet amid a sea of writings on the Zapatistas, one book, composed by an author with intimate knowledge of the struggle, stands alone as just that text.
This week, we examine The Fire and the Word: A History of the Zapatista Movement by Gloria Munoz Ramirez.
In 1997, the author, a journalist for such publications as La Jornada, left the life she knew to spend seven years living among members of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, a revolutionary campaign based in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Zapatistas came into the popular consciousness in 1994, when troops took over seven municipal seats in Chiapas and declared war against the country’s elites with demands for land, housing, food, education and independence. Although the flames that sparked the first clamor have long been tempered by peace talks, community efforts and new initatives, the Zapatistas still capture the imagination by recalling familiar social justice refrains and the defiance of the group’s namesake, agrarian and outlaw Emiliano Zapata.
In The Fire and the Word — a book originally published in Mexico, but now reprinted in the United States with updates — Munoz traces the Zapatistas’ roots to the organization’s founding in 1983, as well as the years after the historic New Years Day uprising in the mid-1990s. The pre-upheaval period, as told from the perspective of the instigators from the early days, is the most seductive, because so few books tell the story so completely. In addition, the book is accompanied by dozens of illustrations and photographs, many of which provide a confidential glimpse into the Zapatistas’ world and the players themselves.
From the 1994 action and beyond, Munoz writes with sympathy of the courage of Indian peasants in facing down the Mexican army, and of the Zapatistas’ dynamic role in changing the political dialogue of a nation. A purely academic book it is not, nor should it be. The Fire and the Word should be considered a touchstone in telling the tale of a crusade that, as Zapata long before, soldiers on for dignity and freedom.
