Grietas: A Journal of Zapatista Thought and Horizons is our offering of respect, solidarity, and engagement with those of you seeking paths towards autonomy and away from the capitalist hydra. The journal is an all-volunteer effort through which we hope to strengthen connections between us, as we exist, resist and rebel, each from our own geographies, with our own calendars, in our own ways. Please contact us with comments, criticisms, contributions at journal@sextagrietasdelnorte.org.
You can order the second edition of Grietas from Amazon here.
The first edition is available as a PDF download.
Sexta Grietas del Norte’s Otra Editorial Committee invites submissions of written and visual pieces for Issue #3 of Grietas: A Journal of Zapatista Thought and Horizons!.
We hope you have enjoyed our previous two issues as much as we enjoyed producing them. We are excited to proceed with work on our next issues, which will include themes such as: Patriarchy/Femicides & Womxn’s struggles/feminisms; Organized Crime and Governmentality; Food and Land Sovereignty; Coloniality and colonialism; Labor oppression and exploitation; Migration and displacement; The Storm- climate crisis, civilizational crisis: Zapatista perspectives.
The journal has four sections:
With your submissions we hope to continue to broaden and deepen the dialogue around Zapatismo & autonomy in our geographies, and to amplify and reflect on resistance and rebellion from below against the capitalist hydra.
We are accepting submissions of written work, including essays, transcriptions of talks and interviews, poetry, prose, recipes, etc., as well as visual art. If you have a submission that does not fit the categories above, but that you think is relevant to our project (see below for a description), don’t hesitate to let us know.
If you are interested in submitting a piece to Grietas, please let the Otra Editorial Committee know of your intent to submit by emailing your proposal/abstract of no more than 300 words by January 15 to journal@sextagrietasdelnorte.org or by reaching out to a member of the committee. If you have an idea for a submission but are looking for support or co-authors, please contact us as well. You will hear back from the editorial committee whether we accept it for publication by February 15, 2025. First drafts of submissions are due by April 30th. We look forward to hearing back from you!
Submission guidelines:
About the Publication:
Grietas: Cracks in the walls of power, fissures in the capitalist monoculture, fault lines in the hierarchies of hetero-patriarchal, class and racial oppression.
Grietas, the journal, seeks to undermine and fight back against obsessive individualism, relentless economic logic, and the cruel and extractive exploitation of the natural world that destroys everything in its path. We accompany and celebrate the resistances and rebellions that emerge from these outside and in-between spaces, where other worlds have persisted, as new ones are built and envisioned; where paths to autonomy and communal ways of life are forged; where Zapatista and decolonial horizons are enacted.
Grietas: A space to share theory, analysis, senti pensamiento and experiences of the different paths to what we tentatively call “autonomy” from the civilization of death, whose multiple and entangled hierarchies of domination have marked the modern/colonial world over the long night of 529 years.
Grietas will publish translations and communiques from the movements we accompany, including the Zapatistas, and the National Indigenous Congress (CNI), and materials from events we organize. It will include essays, critical analysis, and reports; poems, films reviews, graphics, jokes, artwork, and photos by individuals and collectives that are part of the Sexta Grietas del Norte network. We invite submissions from other individuals and collectives who walk the path towards autonomy away from the many-headed hydra of capitalism, each in our own way.
Please send submissions and Inquiries to:
journal@sextagrietasdelnorte.org
La Otra Editorial Committee / The Other Editorial committee
November 8, 2024: Justice for Padre Marcelo- Stop the War in Chiapas
November 15, 2023: Free Palestine– Statement of Solidarity
November 11, 2023: Letter of recognition and solidarity with the compañeras and compañeros Wixáricas, Tepehuanas and Tepecanas of San Lorenzo de Azqueltán
October 24, 2023: Open Letter
July 26, 2022: Statement of Solidarity with BAEZLN, FrayBa, and the BriCO
June 28, 2022: Defend the Atlanta Forest
May 28, 2022: A solidarity statement by Sexta Grietas del Norte with Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban, South Africa
July 23, 2021: SUPPORTING THE STRUGGLE AGAINST LINE 3! A SOLIDARITY STATEMENT BY SEXTA GRIETAS DEL NORTE
January 03, 2021: EZLN: 27 Years of Rebellion and Resistance
December 05, 2020: Statement of Solidarity with the Water and Land Defenders and against the Morelos Integral Project in Mexico
November 2020: Greetings to Azqueltan on Its 7th Anniversary of Being an Autonomous Community
October 21, 2020: Declaration of Solidarity with the Occupation of INPI on October 12th, 2020
August 31, 2020: Statement of Solidarity with the Zapatistas and Indigenous Communities of Chiapas
August 8, 2020: The Word of Sexta Grietas del Norte for CNI Webinar on August 8, 2020
April 15, 2020: Statement of Solidarity with Azqueltán
April 15, 2020: Statement of Solidarity with the Struggle against the Maya Train, a Megaproject of Death
February 11, 2020: Communiqué from the Sexta Grietas del Norte network in solidarity with the call: Days of Action in Defense of Territory and Mother Earth “We are all Samir”
We regularly translate the communiques of the National Indigenous Congress in Mexico from Spanish to English, which you can find in our Translating page.
We also organize in-person and online encounters to find more of each other and share analyses and views from our various geographies and calendars on how we can effectively link up struggles. Please visit our Encountering page for more.
Sexta Grietas del Norte is a network of organizations, individuals, collectives, formations that work toward building autonomy in the Other United States. We move collectively in resistance and rebellion to build collective self-organization and anti-capitalist struggle against the hierarchical structures of state power and the capitalist civilization of death.
Our name Sexta, which is Spanish for “Sixth,” refers to the Zapatistas’ Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle of 2006, which summons all of us who wish to create a very different kind of world, one where many worlds fit.
Grietas is Spanish for “cracks” and refers to all our small but mighty resistances against the structures, the walls of the dominant world. Our many and persistent cracks break down the walls that divide us, seek to conquer and control us.
We are committed to the fight for the defense and the formation of a dignified life, which includes resisting the oppressive racial and patriarchal hierarchies and acting outside the established system of political parties.
We organize to build a broad front of autonomous and community struggles in the geography called the United States, each in our own geographies, with our own calendars, in our own ways.
Our network was formed in response to the EZLN campaign “The Walls of Capital, The Cracks of the Left.” At that meeting, we promised to bring Zapatista coffee to the north of the wall to help migrant and refugee relatives. From there our collective organization was born and the need to create a more concrete network in struggle and accompaniment with the compas of the EZLN and the CNI-CIG.
Our objectives are to mutually support our struggles and solidarity with our compas from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, and the National Indigenous Congress, the Indigenous Governing Council, and the Sixth in Mexico and everywhere.
We join with all the peoples who struggle to create and preserve dignified and sustainable ways of life, especially the Indigenous peoples who struggle to preserve their lives, history, identity, their ancestral lands, ways of being, and cosmovisions, and to protect Mother Earth.
All of us are adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle and follow the seven organizational principles of “leading by obeying” offered by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) of Mexico to us all:
To obey, not command
To represent, not supplant
To serve others, not serve oneself
To convince, not defeat
To work from below, not go above
To propose, not impose
To build, not destroy