The Zapatista Movement in the South- East of Mexico is strongly characterized by their performative and bodily praxis of mediation of memory.
This indigenous group upraised in 1994 against the neocolonial and neoliberal policy of the Mexican government, with a call for democracy, justice and freedom. This was the starting point of a new culture of resistance, which consists in the entanglishment between a guerilla movement and the emancipator indigenous movement. The Zapatistas reject the take-over of the power. They are establishing an autonomy, which is formed by grassroots-democracy, protection of the nature, collective economic property and distribution, gender justice, diversity and recognition of the individual. The armed forces are subordinated of the community. All matters were decided in the assembly of the parishioners and the government has to implement it. Despite the Zapatista are armed, they do not exercise violent methods of fighting. In the last time they extended their autonomy a others indigenous communities of Mexico.
As far as the weapons have more symbolical importance they replace the armed struggle by a symbolic struggle. Besides wide spreading narrations as the stories of Subcomandante Marcos y now Galeano, besides murals and artistic festivals, the Zapatistas execute a wide range of performances and bodily practices as measures of representation and of auto-consciousness, in which the memory is an important reference, for example the mother earth, the history of resistance and their protagonists. In it the body and the participation of the whole group plays a big role. The direct participation creates a feeling and sense of belonging and of safety, this especially in view of the fact, that the Zapatista communities exist under the attacks of military and paramilitary threat.
In the presentation I want to explain the relation between the performative and bodily mediation of memory, the rejection of violence and resistance and the importance of symbolic representation.
