Himno Zapatista (video)
Himno Zapatista, Zapatist anthem
Himno Zapatista
1. Ya se mira el horizonte
Combatiente zapatista
El camino marcará
A los que vienen atrás
Chorus:
Vamos, vamos, vamos, vamos adelante
Para que salgamos en la lucha avante
Porque nuestra Patria grita y necesita
De todo el esfuerzo de los zapatistas
2. Hombres, niños y mujeres
El esfuerzo siempre haremos
Campesinos, los obreros
Todos juntos con el pueblo
Chorus:
3. Nuestro pueblo dice ya
Acabar la explotación
Nuestra historia exige ya
Lucha de liberación
Chorus:
4. Ejemplares hay que ser
Y seguir nuestra consigna
Que vivamos por la patria
O morir por la libertad
Chorus:
English Translation:
1. Now we can see the horizon
Zapatista combatants
The change will mark
Those who come after us.
Chorus:
Forward, forward, forward we go
To take part in the struggle ahead
Because our country cries out for
All of the efforts of the Zapatistas
2. Men, children and women
We will always make the effort
Peasants and workers
All together with the people.
Chorus:
3. Our people demand an end
To exploitation, now!
Our history says: Now!
To the struggle for freedom.
Chorus:
4. Unity has to remain
And we follow our slogan
That we live for the Fatherland
Or to die for freedom
Chorus:
Historical Background:
The Himno Zapatista is the anthem of the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional - Zapatist National Liberation Army), a political group which launched a rebellion in the southern state of Chiapas on 1st January 1994.
The organisation derives its name from Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919), one of the leaders of the Mexican revolution of 1910 against the dictator Porfirio Diaz. Although Diaz was overthrown and replaced by Francisco Madero, Zapata continued his rebellion and went to the South, where he found the support of the impoverished peasants. When Madero was assassinated in 1913, he was replaced by the unpopular Victoriano Huerta. Zapata formed an alliance with Francisco "Pancho" Villa, who was commander of the guerillas in the North. But soon their alliance broke to pieces, and they fought against each other and against the nominal commander of the guerilla movement, Venustiano Carranza, who became President of Mexico in 1915, though not recognised by all combatants of the civil war (from this period also dates the famous Mexican folk song "La Cucaracha", which originally was a marching song of Villa's troops, mocking about Carranza as a cockroach - cucaracha in Spanish). After Carranza had defeated Villa's army, Zapata continued the revolt in the South, thus making the EZLN (also known as the "modern Zapatists") regarding themselves as his successors.
The EZLN characterizes itself as a lobby for the indigenous peasants and considers neo-liberalism and globalization as the reasons for the impoverishment of peasants and workers in the Southern hemisphere. According to their statements, they do not intend to seize power in Mexico nor do they want to split off the state of Chiapas or the whole South from Mexico, but they seek international attention for the problems caused by the internationalization of economical relations and they demand a right of self-determination for the local population.
To point out the non-separatist character of the movement, the Himno Zapatista is usually sung together with the national anthem of Mexico.
When asked about his first days in Chiapas in the documentary A Place Called Chiapas, Marcos said:
"Imagine a person who comes from an urban culture. One of the world’s biggest cities, with a university education, accustomed to city life. It’s like landing on another planet. The language, the surroundings are new. You’re seen as an alien from outer space. Everything tells you: “Leave. This is a mistake. You don’t belong in this place.” And it’s said in a foreign tongue. But they let you know, the people, the way they act; the weather, the way it rains; the sunshine; the earth, the way it turns to mud; the diseases; the insects; homesickness. You’re being told. “You don’t belong here.” If that’s not a nightmare, what is?"
http://www.radioinsurgente.org/
Our word is our weapon: photo montage -
narration in english by subcomandante Marcos
Another excellent EZLN video
Gabriel Garci'a Ma'rquez interviews Subcomandante Marcos
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The Nation, July 2, 2001
A Zapatista Reading List
by Gabriel Garci'a Ma'rquez &Subcomandante Marcos
The following remarks are excerpted from a longer interview between Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garci'a Ma'rquez, representing the Mexican magazine Cambio, and the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos. The full text appeared in Cambio earlier this year.
Garci'a Ma'rquez/Cambio: Do you still have time to read in the middle of all this mess?
Marcos: Yes, because if not...what would we do? In the armies that came before us, soldiers took the time to clean their weapons and rally themselves. In this case, our weapons are our words, so we have to depend on our arsenal all the time.
Garci'a Ma'rquez/Cambio: Everything you say--in terms of form and content--demonstrates a serious literary background on your part. Where does this come from and how did you achieve it?
Marcos: It has to do with my childhood. In my family, words had a very special value. The way we went out into the world was through language. We didn't learn to read in school but by reading newspapers. My mother and father made us read books that rapidly permitted us to approach new things. Some way or another, we acquired a consciousness of language not as a way of communicating with each other but as a way of building something. As if it were more of a pleasure than a duty or assignment. When the age of catacombs arrives, the word is not highly valued for the intellectual bourgeoisie. It is relegated to a secondary level. It's when we are in the indigenous communities that language is like a catapult. You realize that words fail you to express certain things, and this obliges you to work on your language skills, to go over and over words to arm and disarm them.
Garci'a Ma'rquez/Cambio: Couldn't it be the other way around? Couldn't it be this control over language that permits this new era?
Marcos: It's like a blender. You don't know what is thrown in first, and what you end up with is a cocktail.
Garci'a Ma'rquez/Cambio: Can we talk about this family?
Marcos: It was a middle-class family. My father, the head of the family, was a rural teacher in the days of [La'zaro] Ca'rdenas when, according to him, they cut off teachers' ears for being communists. My mother, also a rural teacher, finally moved, and we became a middle-class family, I mean, a family without any real difficulties. All of this in the provinces, where the cultural horizon is the society pages of the local newspaper. The world outside, or the great city, Mexico City, was the great attraction because of its bookstores. Finally, there were book fairs out in the provinces, and there we could get some books. Garci'a Ma'rquez, Fuentes, Monsiva'is, Vargas Llosa--independently of how he thinks--just to mention a few, they all came through my parents. They made us read them. One Hundred Years of Solitude was meant to explain what the province was in those days, and The Death of Artemio Cruz was to explain what had happened to the Revolutio'n. [Carlos Monsiva'is's] Dias de Guardar to explain what was happening to the middle class. To some extent, although naked, our portrait was The City and the Dogs. All those things were there. We were coming out into the world in the same way we were coming to know literature. And this shaped us, I believe. We didn't get to know the world through a newswire but through a novel, an essay or a poem. And this made us very different. This was the looking glass that our parents gave us, as others might use the mass media as a looking glass or just an opaque glass so that no one can see what is going on.
Garci'a Ma'rquez/Cambio: Where was Don Quixote in the middle of all these readings?
Marcos: They gave me a beautiful book when I was 12--a hardcover. It was Don Quixote de la Mancha. I had already read it but in these juvenile editions. It was an expensive book, a very special present that I was waiting for. Shakespeare arrived after that. But if I could say the order in which the books arrived, it would first be the "boom" literature of Latin America, then Cervantes, then Garci'a Lorca, then there was a time of all poetry. Thus, you [pointing to Garci'a Ma'rquez] are partly responsible for this.
Garci'a Ma'rquez/Cambio: Did the existen-tialists and Sartre come into all this?
Marcos: No. We arrived late to that. Explicitly existentialist and, before that, revolutionary literature we arrived at already very "molded"--as the orthodox would say. So that by the time we got to Marx and Engels, we were already very contaminated by the sarcasm and humor of literature.
Garci'a Ma'rquez/Cambio: There were no readings of political theory?
Marcos: In the first stage, no. From our ABCs we went on to literature and then on to theoretical and political texts about the time we got to high school.
Garci'a Ma'rquez/Cambio: Did your schoolmates think you were, or could be, a communist?
Marcos: No, I don't think so. The most they ever said to me was that I was a radish--red on the outside and white on the inside.
Garci'a Ma'rquez/Cambio: What are you reading now?
Marcos: I have Don Quixote by the bedside, and I regularly carry around Romancero gitano, by Garci'a Lorca. Don Quixote is the best book out there on political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. There is no better way to understand the tragedy and the comedy of the Mexican political system than Hamlet, Macbeth and Don Quixote. They're much better than any column of political analysis.
Garci'a Ma'rquez/Cambio: Do you write by hand or on the computer?
Marcos: On computer. Only on the march I had to write by hand because I had no time to work. I write a rough draft, then another and another. You think I'm joking, but it's like the seventh draft by the time I'm done.
Garci'a Ma'rquez/Cambio: What book are you working on?
Marcos: What I was trying to write about was absurd, it was an attempt to explain ourselves to ourselves, which is almost impossible. We have to realize that we are a paradox, because a revolutionary army doesn't propose to seize power... All the paradoxes we have encountered: that we have grown and become strong in a sector completely alienated from cultural channels.
Garci'a Ma'rquez/Cambio: If everyone knows who you are, why the ski mask?
Marcos: A bit of leftover coquetry. They don't know who I am, and they don't care. What's in play here is what Subcomandante Marcos is, and not what he was.
