Our Word is Our Weapon (part 2)

 Week 10: Our Word is Our Weapon (Part 2)

Like we talked about last class, in this next section I was able to see more of Marcos' personality behind the mask, especially pertaining to his humor, being good with kids, and literary influences. All of his letters addressed to the national newspapers, and therefore the government, had sass, sarcasm, and wittiness throughout; I laughed a bit when he welcomed the threat of unemployment by the government, told the newspapers to "not be anxious", and said that God is grand because their camp reeked of shit and urine but the troops still didn't find them. I also liked how he concluded every chapter/section with "Vale, health to you" but followed with a genuinely sincere statement when addressing the section to the Zapatistas or outlining a Zapatista story, and then was able to use it in a semi-sarcastic way when addressing the newspapers, like "Vale. Health to you, and a flower for this tender fury, I think it deserves one". Marcos' incorporation of short stories that he wrote in response to letters/drawings he received from kids also greatly showed his personality, but in my opinion in more of a humanizing and compassionate way. This aspect intertwines and shows his literary influences too; Don Durito the beetle, which was originally written for Mariana (a girl who drew something for the Zapatistas), not only was a kind of heartwarming response to Mariana but also incorporated the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez to funnily present the ideologies of the Zapatistas and narrate events of the revolution. I laughed out loud when Marcos wrote that Durito was "studying neoliberalism and the strategy of domination for Latin America"! By narrating the history of the Zapatista events in Mexico City through Durito, it made me wonder if Durito was a way for Marcos to self-represent in the book and show more of himself in it, or even if he was a character that represented another Zapatista; after all, Don Durito said that the city isn't his place, and that it is sick from loneliness and fear.

The other element that was super prominent in the second half of the book was how heavily integrated the Popol Vuh is throughout. Apart from the large section that explicitly retells parts of the Popol Vuh, I found smaller aspects throughout that upholded the moral lessons/teachings in the ancient text; when Marcos narrated his first journey to the mountains, he tells that he was struggling until he saw the sky, moon, stars, and Milky Way, which then gave him strength and purpose, like in the Popol Vuh when the first men were wandering aimlessly until the Heart of Sky gave them dawn/light. Later on, Marcos directly compares Hunahpu and Xbalanque to the Zapatistas and Xibalba to the government; that the 7 houses of punishment are rebel houses, "for anyone who won't passively accept their blood fattening the powerful". He refers to the men and women of corn as the true ones, highlighting the rights to social, economic, and environmental power that indigenous peoples should have, and Marcos explicitly states that re-examining the Popol Vuh "reminds us that it is through thinking and feeling that we find purpose", emphasizing once again that this is a war against humanity.