The Other Campaign in Oaxaca, Mexico: A Realist In A China Shop

In the weeks leading up to the arrival of the Zapatista Otra Campaña I am ambling around the city as usual, looking for people to speak to about Delegado Zero, Marcos. As you may imagine, a city is not a place to find campesinos, unless you count the woman who sits on the sidewalk at the corner of Porfirio Diaz with a small display of onions, zucchinis and chiles laid out on the pavement in front of her. I asked if she knew of any such person as Marcos. She had not. Nor the Zapatistas.     An elderly “orphan” comes into the city from the Mixteca, to beg. She says the people in her town are mean; my guess is, she’s mentally unwell. She told me she has no mother, no father, no aunts nor uncles, no husband, and nobody will giver her water. She’s illiterate, to boot. She wept. That did not encourage me to ask her about the Otra Camapña.
    Nor can you find  many indigenes in the city, unless you mean any brown-skinned person, or the women vendors in their huipiles of bright red stripes. I spoke to an old aproned woman from whom I bought a supper of memalotes at the Christmas Fair, and she seemed to have maybe heard of the Zapatistas, but most definitely was familiar with the poor, of which she is one. She yearns for some relief, but had no particular thoughts beyond the daily misery of hot frying oil and her impoverished existence.
    I finally met someone who had indeed heard of both Marcos and the Zapatistas. He’s  a man who shines shoes in the zocalo, Sundays only – both he and his wife work during the week. They have three young children, and making a living is difficult. Yes, he heard the Otra Campaña is coming. But he also heard that the government of Oaxaca State is giving money to the Zapatistas. Where did he hear that? Maybe on television. Why would the government give them money? His reply hinted vaguely at an unknowable corruption.

    I also heard from another man that the Zapatistas are receiving money from the government. My guess is that people confuse the receipt of money from the PRI operatives, in towns both here and in Chiapas, by people who are indeed poor; and my informants could not distinguish clearly (or at all) between the Zapatistas, the indigenous, and the poor. Hey, how should they?
    In addition to lack of information and misinformation, some people I spoke to asked, what is their program? Do they have a program? Is Marcos going to try to be president?
    The idea that the Otra Camapña is to gather information or build a civil movement on the left, is simply not on their radar. The idea that a “leader” would not have a ready-to-hand program is equally foreign, a “leader” is definitely supposed to have a program. And what’s the difference between a spokesperson and a leader? There is none! They can’t make heads or tails of what is going on.
    Clearly, the Zapatistas are aware of this problem – but how they will approach solutions, I don’t know. The idea that “civil society” will somehow respond, seems to me to come up against the middle-class elitism of this very civil society – i.e., people who work, salaried, for non-profits. They are the educated, the ones with parents and aunts and uncles, the ones who can read.  

    Therefore I conclude the campaign will find as its natural base those who are campesinos in rural towns where they practice communalidad. Whether one says Magonista, Zapatista, Communalista, or all three combined, much hope rests on arousing people who already have the habit of communal interaction.
    The urban poor have no-one to educate them and nowhere to go for reinforcement. The closest resource is the church, and one might suppose that institution provides a community base. But I doubt it. For one thing, many Catholics have disassociated by conversion, and focus more on sin than on (social) redemption. The drink-free dance-free evangelist community assures each member that they are worthless and damned – too bad. The Catholic community, which I fondly recall as adhering to Liberation Theology, has dwindled. A saint’s calenda, which should be accompanied not only by monos and a marching band but by a few hundred faithful, is now passing through the streets with twenty people – the elders and the grandchildren. I asked a bystander native Oaxaqueña, For which Virgin is this calenda? She didn’t know. In a few minutes came back to me to report, and damn but I’ve forgotten which Virgin it was. So it goes.

    I hope, as we wait for news of meetings, (probably through CIPO-RFM) that the campaign will affect ordinary urban people. What percent of the Oaxaca State population can be reached, given the distances – both physical and psychological – between mountain pueblos and the concentration of anomic poor in the city? Between those tied to the land and those tied to daily urban wage labor? That is an unanswered question.
    At the moment, it seems that large swaths of the nation’s poor remain outside the reach of the Other Campaign – and yet, they are a natural base for any leftward movement. Taking a clue from how organizing took place in Venezuela, for example, the urban poor live in specific neighborhoods, with problems specific to their barrios, and were energized around their own reality, in their own streets. That will have to be the case in Oaxaca, too, and even more so in Mexico DF and other larger urban areas.
    Surely the Zapatistas, rural in their history and methods, are wrestling with the challenge.