January 20, 2021
Text and photos by Daliri Oropeza
@Dal_air
Honor the fall of Tenochtitlan? What happened 500 years ago with the hundreds of communities that lived in this territory? As the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) says, many were never colonized. Considering contemporary colonial sites such as the megaprojects, is it even worth asking other nations to apologize?
Everyday a river flows…
“ Wherever you go, do what you see”, my grandma advised me. She would look at me seriously, demanding that I behave like a girl. I have never reached that goal but with her at least I tried.
It was the best advice I could have gotten as a journalist. It has helped me to engage with the communities that have received me on my journey to accompany, witness, document and learn from their ways of being in the world, their traditions, their languages and signs.
These cosmo-existences have their own normative structures and adhere to social justice systems such as those Paulina Fernández describes in Zapatista Tseltal Autonomous Justice; Tzeltal Jungle Zone or the normative systems of Nahua communities from San Miguel Tzincapan investigated by Eliel Sánchez, Professor of Communication for Social Change. Professor Sanchez describes the epistemicide that was unleashed by the shock of colonialism and positive law.
Ways of self-organizing that take into consideration the health of the social fabric.
These ways of being in collectivity, these people who practice their own culture in their daily lives, have nothing to do with functioning of the Mexican Nation-State (that exonerated Cienfuegos) or with the colonial normative order. What to say about the forms of governance or the ways of healing of all Indigneous communities? I think of Utopistics as proposed by Immanuel Wallerstein.
Recognizing these cosmoexistences is not enough. Neither is it enough to us to spruce up our discourses with them. Asking for forgiveness? Hardly…
They say that on August 13th, 1521, the Mexica ruler Cuautémoc “surrendered to the colonizers,” and was kidnapped by the invaders from the Iberian Peninsula. Later the story is told of looting and outrage. And what does history have to say about the wealth and power obtained from “their” territories, territories that “they” had discovered? The same goes for today’s “global powers”.
Are we supposed to honor, ipso facto, the fact that Hernan Cortes and his army destroyed the city of Tenochtitlan, beginning with the aqueducts? That they dried up the great lake? Are we supposed to commemorate the beginning of the era of looting, known as the colonial period? Why do they omit or “forget” the participation of millions of Indigenous peoples in the enterprise of conquest and invasion?
There are Indigenous communities that went “undiscovered” for centuries, and it was even longer before they learned about “colonization”. For example, the Guarijiíos were some of the last communities registered by the Mexican nation, and that was in 1976. Who would know that 40 years later they would impose a dam on the Guarijiíos, leaving their lands and stories under water.
Through AMLO, the self-named government of the 4T (the Fourth Transformation) announced a program of commemoration that includes parades, cultural activities, and a commemoration and “revindication for Indigenous peoples”. They are hosting a series of events in 2021: on the 700-year anniversary of the founding of México-Tenochtitlan, on the 500-year anniversary of the occupation of México-Tenochtitlan, and on the 200 year anniversary of independence.
All this is detailed in the letters sent by the President of Mexico to the King of Spain and Pope Francis in 2019, demanding an apology. In the last one to the Pope, in October 2020, he insisted :
“ The Catholic church, along with the Spanish Monarchy and the nation of Mexico, should all offer a public apology to Indigenous people who suffered the worst atrocities in order to steal their land and wealth and to oppress them, from the conquest of 1521 until the recent past” said the letter.
AMLO has repeatedly announced in his morning press conferences that he will apologize to the Yaqui and Maya communities for the “extermination” that they were subjected to. And, apparently in reprise of this idea, this year’s National Lottery tickets will bear the images of the 32 archeological zones. That’s right, the majestic ruins. The ruins.
According to María Eugenia Sánchez Díaz, Ph.D. in Sociology, after citing a poem by Sitalin Sanchez, this is hypocrisy. You can’t, on the one hand, perform folkloric rituals as you impose megaprojects on Indigenous lands, and on the other, ask for forgiveness. “AMLO practices polite racism.”
For professor Sánchez Díaz, asking for forgiveness serves to visibilize all the colonial struggles, the racism, the de-indigenization, the dispossession of land and ways of being, which she refers to as “a painful wound.”
But “the colonial gaze is more vigilant than ever.” María Eugenia warns: “asking for forgiveness is not complacency.” What it does is to refunctionalize the communities for the benefit of the State: the Indian is allowed as folklore:
“Asking for forgiveness is effective only when something is unforgivable, as Derridá would say. Forgiveness is central to the practice of human dignity. But Indigenous communities ask not to be used in the demands for forgiveness. How can you ask for forgiveness when you throw the Train Maya at them, or the thermoelectric plants, or the Integral Morelos Plan, and you inaugurate them with a ritual that is not even Maya? To me this seems outrageous.”
The current government does not talk about the megaprojects on Indigenous lands. AMLO just says we have to make a choice between inconveniences.
From all these layers of curtains, the EZLN cuts the fabric, fashions it into boat sails, and announces a tour of at least five continents.
“We will go to Spain to tell them two simple things:
One: You did not conquer us. We continue to resist and rebel.
Two: You don’t need to ask us to forgive you for anything. Stop playing with the distant past and using it to justify the current crimes: the killing of community leaders, like our brother Samir Flore Soberanes; the hidden genocides of the megaprojects, conceived for and dedicated to the pleasure of those in power, the same one that lashes out in every nook of the planet; the funding and impunity of military personnel, the buying of consciousness and dignity with a few coins.
We, Zapatistas, do NOT want to return to that past, not on our own, much less accompanied by someone trying to seed racial resentment and feed his outmoded nationalism with the supposed splendor of the Aztec Empire which built itself from the blood of its neighbors, and convince us in turn that with the fall of that empire, the original peoples of these lands were defeated.
Neither the Spanish state nor the Catholic Church have to ask our forgiveness for anything. We will not echo those frauds who seek to legitimize themselves with our blood while they hide the fact that their hands are stained with it.”
The present of Indigneous peoples is the path toward an epistemology of life. We learn from how they survive, dance and resist. Our role as de-indigenized people is to embrace postcolonial thinking, as proposed by Achille Mbembe:
“ …postcolonial thinking stresses humanity-in-the-making, the humanity that will emerge once the colonial figures of the inhuman and of racial difference have been swept away.
Not falling into hegemonic narratives. Creating our own.
Originally published in Spanish in Pie de Página under the title“Pueblos indígenas: narrativa en disputa este 2021”
English translation by Sexta Grietas del Norte