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Guillermo Bonfil put it well: “One of the most common ideas about Indian cultures is that they are conservative and reject change, even when that change might constitute a significant improvement. This is a prejudiced image within colonial ideology, which sees those colonized as causing their own colonization. Cultural resistance is a real fact, but it has a meaning very different from that attributed to it.”

As Native American activist Jimmie Durham explains, “We define a ‘traditional’ Indian as one who maintains the whole body of his people’s vision (political system) and that includes total resistance to colonization, speaking his own language, etc. So our progressives are what look like to you our ‘conservatives’.” Bullseye.

The Zapatistas are first and foremost an embodiment of the Mayan struggle for self-determination and autonomy. The Maya may or may not be a nation in a conventional European sense, but they are certainly a civilization, a people. They are a people who have lived in their ancestral territory for millennia, who have common linguistic roots and much common culture and heritage, including hundreds of years of anti-colonial struggle. At the same time, they are a people made up of peoples. There are several separate cultural groups within the Maya, most of whom also have a determined ancestral territory, separate lifeways and cultural attributes. The various Mayan languages have evolved independently to the point that they are sometimes mutually unintelligible.

Under colonialism, the Maya have faced wave after wave of painful forced migration, a fact that has put formerly isolated communities into contact and often mixed them. Maya have also been forced to deal with latino culture, which they have confronted through multiple strategies—resistance, diversion and appropriation for their own use. Today, as in the past, the Maya are defending and reinventing themselves in order to survive genocidal attacks and throw off the latest form of colonialism. This is the stage on which the EZLN is an actor.

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"There is in Chiapas a potent self-congratulatory traveler attitude, which finds in the Zapatista movement an untroubled reflection of the Western seeker’s ideals, of the traveler’s escapist fantasy. In this view the indigenous are as often as not static, romantic props, projections of imagination like shadow puppets dancing on the white walls to the giddy delight of the visitor-child, in a spectacle invented and perpetuated in negation of one’s past and one’s own sticky relationships to Chiapas’ continuing conflicts. The traveler does not suffer, is not marginalized, is not even made uncomfortable: there are all-night reggae parties to attend, and there is revolution to foment."

i wish you’d stop your manipulative ways, it really bothers me. can you please stop?

"[TW: RAPE]

I felt a sour taste in my throat, the one that immediately precedes my gag reflex, when I read the NY Times piece about an immigration official who forced a woman to perform oral sex on him in exchange for her green card.

After the 22-year-old Colombian woman, whose name has not been released, went in for an interview for her green card with immigration agent Isaac Baichu in December of 2007, she started receiving phone calls from Baichu demanding sex. When he called her to meet in a restaurant’s parking lot in Queens, she was prescient enough to stash her cell phone, which was recording their conversation, in her purse. Her cell phone captured Baichu asking for sex “one or two times. That’s all. You get your green card. You won’t have to see me anymore.” Later in the tape there’s a minute-long pause when, the reporter writes, the young woman “yielded to his demand out of fear that he would use his authority against her.” The Times posted an audio clip of the woman’s recording in the web edition of the article (yay, multimedia?).

The sexual exploitation of immigrant women is nothing new, but there’s a very specific pattern of abuse tied to this case. News of a Miami ICE agent who made a pit stop at his home so he could rape the Haitian woman he was responsible for transporting to detention and reports of sexual assault on a woman held at the Don T. Hutto Family Residential Facility, a de facto prison in Texas for families awaiting immigrations processing, come to mind. Similar scandals have been reported in Maryland (Deputy Lloyd W. Miner this year), California (Agent Eddie Miranda in 2007) and Georgia (Agent Kelvin R. Owens in 2005).

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