A brief history of the Zapatista murals

The movement emerged clandestinely in the 1980s in a region of southeastern Mexico inhabited by indigenous peoples displaced from their native land because of the occupation of land by non-indigenous people, who had been using the land for cattle breeding and coffee cultivation. As a result, the indigenous people were expelled from the most productive regions of the mountains and pushed towards the forests, places with less fertile soil and, consequently, with greater difficulty for food production. They were joined by guerrillas pursued by the army in the post-Mexican Revolution who fled to the same inhospitable regions, and thus the Zapatista community was formed. Lucas da Costa Maciel, an anthropologist specialized in the aesthetics created by the Mexican movement, says that “At the time of clandestinity there was already much talking about art such as poetry and theater, due also to the guevarist tradition of these guerrillas, somewhat inspired by the art production of Cuban guerrillas.”

On January 1, 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), which is still present in the country, occupied the town halls of several cities in the Chiapas region and drew attention to its demands: an end to the marginalization of indigenous people; the fight against corruption in local politics; and the great driving force of the demonstration, the extinction of NAFTA, a free trade agreement between Mexico, the United States and Canada, created on the same day of the uprising. Zapatista art began to solidify in the initial moments of the occupation. At one of the movement’s meetings that received foreigners – journalists who came from around the world to cover what was happening – the first known mural began to be painted, beginning the great tradition of murals existing in the areas occupied by Zapatistas.

The murals made in the Zapatista territories, however, aim to go against the premises of a single identity for all Mexicans, but to celebrate the differences between them, especially between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples.

The autonomous territorial zones – known as caracoles, spirals – formed by the Zapatistas in the occupied territories, are renowned for being similar to open-air museums, with large amounts of painted murals that can be visited by everyone who walks on the streets. “The tradition in Zapatista muralism has a strong mark of color saturation, and the colors produce a very intense contrast”, says Lucas.

In addition to the tonality of the paintings, images of corn with the human face, the figure of spirals, talking animals and human beings represented in a lateralized way, a reference that comes from the Mayan Mesoamerican tradition, are repeated in the works. The murals also served as a means of disseminating the icons of the movement, which are always present in the paintings: names like subcomandante Marcos, spokesman for the Zapatista movement since its inception, and General Emiliano Zapata himself. In addition, several figures represented on the murals make use of balaclavas and bandanas, an aesthetic option of the movement since the beginning.

It is worth noting that the aesthetic criteria used by the population in general to evaluate these works are different from what we commonly see. “There are pieces that are, from the point of view of the aesthetics of Western art, extremely refined, with fine lines, various techniques, under different supports, with depth, some realistic, other more conceptual. And there are other pieces that are simpler, more flat, without depth, with no pretension of realism, and yet there is no criterion for differentiating between these types of pieces,” says the anthropologist.