The Web and Material Matters

In spite of all the talk about the Internet as cyberspace and a virtual world, the materiality of the Internet as a medium is unavoidable. You sit in front of a machine that has to be turned on and connected to the net. And if you want to access the resourses of the World Wide Web, you need at least a 28.8 Kbps modem and a computer with enough memory to support the current versions of Netscape or Internet Explorer. Kate Levy puts it bluntly: "My homepage uses frames. If you can't handle this, I'm sorry." In the United States the lines do not go to every neighborhood, and in the rest of the world, almost the entire continent of Africa outside South Africa is not online. At present the Internet continues the one-way flow of information from the First to the Third World. Can the Internet be a factor in promoting a two-way flow between the margins and the center?

One of the groups least likely to become a significant presence on the World Wide Web is the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, whose members rose in rebellion in Mexico on New Year's Day, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. The Zapatistas are primarily indigenous people from the Lacandón mountainous jungles of the state of Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state bordering on Guatemala. They take their name from Emiliano Zapata, hero of the Mexican Revolution, who was the champion of land reform and indigenous peoples in the south of Mexico. Estimates of the Zapatista forces vary, but the high-end guess of the number of well armed troops is only 3,000.

The uprising took the Mexican government by surprise. When Luis Donaldo Colosio was unveiled on November 28, 1993, as the presidential candidate of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico, the policies of President Carlos Salinas, in his last year of a six-year term, appeared to be firmly in place. The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) cemented Salinas' free-market economic policy; and opposition on the Right and Left was not attracting wide popularity. Colosio seemed to be the ideal, hand-picked candidate to continue Salinas' modernization policy. But on January 1, the day that NAFTA went into effect, the smooth road of Colosio's ascendancy suddenly came to a deep rut. The Zapatistas, unsuccessful in their previous efforts to address the misery of the people in Chiapas, called on Article 39 of the Mexican Constitution, which states that "the people have, at all times, the inalienable right to alter or modify the form of their government." They seized four towns in Chiapas including San Cristóbal de las Casas.

In other years the news of the uprising would have been suppressed in Mexico and little noticed abroad. Most people in the United States have never heard of Chiapas and likely would have overlooked a brief report on the back pages of a newspaper, just as they paid little attention to the concurrent massacres of people in East Timor. But the Zapatistas had two great allies--their timing and their innovative use of communications technologies. The Zapatistas faxed their Declaration of War to newspapers, to radio and television stations, and to the international press. They represented themselves as the heirs to the long struggle for social justice in Mexico--the legacy of Emiliano Zapata and the Mexican Revolution of 1810.

On the second day of the uprising, they held theatrical press conferences, where men, women, and children wore black ski masks. They invited reporters from the major international papers including Der Speigel, Le Figaro and the New York Times, the independent Mexican dailies La Journada and El Financiero, and European television crews, but refused access for the pro-government media in Mexico (Peña 91). The primary spokesperson for the Zapatistas, Subcomandante Marcos, was photographed with a pipe sticking out of his mask and a Zapata-style bandolero with shotgun shells that didn't match the rifle slung over his shoulder. The Zapatista media campaign within Mexico was enormously successful, forcing the government to declare a cease-fire on February 9. On the day of the cease-fire, over 100,000 people in Mexico City marched in support of the Zapatistas. A month later, the hand-picked PRI candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated after expressing sympathy for the Zapatistas. By the end of the year the Mexican economy had crashed with a huge flight of capital out of the country, and former President Salinas, a Harvard graduate, had fled in exile.

The Zapatistas effectively used the Internet for an ongoing alternative commentary on politics in Mexico. They critiqued NAFTA and the Mexican government's treatment of indigenous peoples, and they disputed the modernist view of peasant societies as isolated and backward, societies that should be relegated to the past as quickly as possible. They have explained why it is important to have a viable and sustainable peasant agriculture if the rain forests of Chiapas and the cultures of the Mayan people who live there are to be preserved. The Zapatistas have been greatly assisted by academics in Mexico and the United States, who have created distribution sites and translated communiqués. Online discussion lists concerning Chiapas were formed in Mexico and in the United States, and a Web site, "¡Ya Basta!," was begun in spring 1994 by Justin Paulson, a then undergraduate student at Swarthmore. The Web site itself has become much publicized through articles in many magazines and newspapers including The Guardian (U.K.) and Reforma (Mexico). In April 1995 the Mexican Foreign Minister, José Angel Gurría, declared that the uprising in Chiapas is a "Guerra de Tinta y de Internet" ("a war of ink and of the Internet")

The cleverness of the Zapatistas in distributing images has been one of the keys to their success. Subcommandante Marcos even created a cartoon character, a loquacious beetle name Don Durito, who skillfully avoids being stepped on. To reach sympathetic people in advanced nations, the Zapatistas have taken advantage of the graphic power of the Web to issue many images of themselves, images that portray both their revolutionary struggle and the daily lives of indigenous people. Without the images, I doubt that the numerous Web sites around the world that support the Zapatistas would be quite so prominent. The Zapatistas with a little help from their friends have shown how the disempowered can also engage in cross marketing if they understand the material effects of visual literacy. After nearly five years of intermittent peace talks, the Mexican government still has not granted the people of Chiapas the right of self government. But if the Zapatistas have failed thus far to win a just settlement, the government likewise has failed to restore credibility in its ability to lead the people of Mexico, and more violent uprisings of other groups have occurred in Guerrero and other states. The Zapatista rebellion exposed quickly that the only people in Mexico who would benefit from NAFTA would be the urban elites in the north and in Mexico City, while the indigenous peoples and the poor would suffer even greater marginalization.

The Zapatistas also give us an important lesson in material literacy. In the face of claims that computer-mediated language and images have broken with the past and have lost reference to the perceived world, the Zapatistas have shown that, while language and images are increasingly self-referential, they still have material consequences. The example of Chiapas demonstrates that people still adapt new technologies of literacy for their own purposes, that literacy can still be used to promote social justice, and that history, including the history of literacy, indeed still continues.