Jose Luis Solís López, a teacher in the Zapatista’s “Little School” (La Escuelita) was targeted and murdered, and at least 15 Zapatistas seriously injured, in an ambush by members of an anti-Zapatista organization known as CIOAC-H on Friday, May 2, 2014. The same attackers damaged or destroyed both the autonomous Mayan school and the local health clinic at the Zapatista caracol of La Realidad.
Yes, Zapatista autonomy means producing most of what one consumes while growing strong, healthy children and communities; but Zapatista autonomy also means that these small farming families are neither beholding to local political bosses, nor dependent on networks of corporate food production or international banking systems.
The Schools For Chiapas (SFC) English language library has been put together to mark the 20th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising. We aim to give students, teachers and researchers an accessible and ordered collection of key Zapatista texts spanning two decades of the rebel group’s public existence. A huge amount of documentation exists in the field and one could fill a large room with the amount of books, papers, dissertations and articles that have been written about and around the movement. The SFC library concentrates on emphasizing–in our humble opinion– the most important, significant and worthy texts. Considering the magnificent array of works around the movement, our task has been, as such, to separate the wheat from the chaff, and present the reader with a formidable guide to “the word which came from the depth of history.”
Check out the first installment of our Teach Chiapas video series! “Women in the Zapatista Movement” is a short video for educators and students that offers a clear introduction to women’s participation in the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico.
Autonomy is a word readers and researchers on the Schools for Chiapas website will come across often. It is a key concept of Zapatismo: One will come across autonomous zones, autonomous municipalities, autonomous communities, autonomous education, autonomous health…even an autonomous ambulance! The Zapatista project is defined by the demand for autonomy and it is important to have a clear understanding of the term.
