“So That My Wings Don't Fall”

Journal of an Honor the Earth Delegation to Chiapas, Mexico
By Dana Powell
Photographs by Keri Pickett

The fuchsia bougainvillea in San Cristobal de las Casas tumbles over the rough concrete of high, roadside walls. These flower-fringed walls become spaces protecting the privacy of gardens and homes, while at the same time projecting, in spray-painted graffiti, a message of resistance and hope that has resonated around the globe: Viva la Revolucion! Vivan los Zapatistas! The Zapatistas and their 1994 uprising have captured the imaginations and sympathies of global justice activists worldwide, but in this city that endured the bloody conflict between the Indigenous rebels and the Mexican military, the legacy of the uprising is far more complex. In May of this year, I had the opportunity to be one of ten Honor the Earth supporters to travel to Chiapas, Mexico to explore the complex effects of the uprising, and to trace and build connections between the movements in Chiapas and our own work in political, artistic, and social movements north of the border.

We were a group of activists and artists of one ilk or another, most of us linked together by our friendships and long-time support of Honor the Earth, Indigenous rights and women's movements. The delegation emerged as a network of women, including: Winona LaDuke, Honor the Earth Director, her two teenage daughters Waseyabin Kapashesit LaDuke and Ashleigh Stevens, and her five-year old son Gwekaanimad Gasco; Faye Brown, All Tribes Foundation Director and her teenage daughter Sasha Brown; Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls and founding supporter of Honor the Earth; Keri Pickett, photojournalist and frequent photographer for Honor the Earth; Carrie Schraeder, filmmaker and student at Columbia University in New York City; Kathryn Temple, painter, activist and writer from Asheville, NC; and myself, Dana Powell, long-time supporter of Honor the Earth and graduate student in Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill. Honor the Earth has a history of connections with the movements in Chiapas , but it had been many years since any face-to-face exchange had taken place. With this history in mind, I organized the trip with local women activists and scholars in Chiapas, assembling a week of activities and encounters aimed at learning more about the economic, social and political alternatives being built in Indigenous movements in Chiapas.

This trip was also an antidote to the burnout and disillusionment that threatens each of us in our work. Although it had been a financial and personal stress on many of us, the trip came together in large part out of a sense of necessity in strengthening the movement and ourselves. We recognized the need to continually politicize ourselves, deepening our sensitivity and our analysis of the issues affecting Indigenous peoples in the Americas ; and at the same time, we saw the value in creating experiences that replenish our energies and convictions. There is a need to come out of our own fields of comfort (and discomfort) and into places that challenge our assumptions about others, and ourselves. By traveling these edges of our own experience, we hoped to reinforce our senses of purpose and possibility in our own work and, more broadly, in Honor the Earth's work in Latin America .

With this sense of possibility, our delegation of women artists and activists to Chiapas was a project in cultivating a hope that is not naïve , but is informed, relational, intentional and critical. The title of this piece expresses the determination to construct a non-naïve hope and to sustain our work, despite the many obstacles to building healthier, more dignified lives for marginalized communities that are imposed by transnational and local forces. I borrow the expression, So that my wings don't fall (in translation), from Michaela Ico Bautista, a Mayan midwife and health activist who spoke these words in her appeal to Honor the Earth for support.

Our group was based in San Cristobal de las Casas, the capitol of the state of Chiapas and center of operations for many grassroots groups, NGOs, and other movement workers around the state. The colonial city is nestled in the misty highlands of southern Mexico at 2,100 meters with a population of 113,000 people in a region that is largely Mayan (primarily Tzotzil and Tzeltal). One quarter of the people living in the state of Chiapas are Indigenous people and their struggle for justice in the face of state repression, land loss, and enduring racism came to the world's attention on January 1, 1994 with the Zapatista uprising (the same day as the signing of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement). The rebellion spawned the growth of dozens of local progressive organizations with regional and transnational ties and continues to draw interns, volunteers, and support from all over the world. Today, the colonial city bustles with tourism, university students, sanctioned and informal commerce, and dozens of activist research and action centers whose work is primarily oriented towards the highland communities surrounding the city; these Indigenous communities live the paradox of being on the margins of the city's resources yet providing a large majority of the city's labor force and transnational appeal.

When we arrived in San Cristobal , three local women joined our group as allies and brought with them their individual expertise and knowledge to guide us through the political and cultural labyrinth that activism in San Cristobal presents. They were: Xochitl Leyva Solano, an activist anthropologist at the research center CIESAS ( Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social del Sureste ); Ana Laura Hernandez, activist and filmmaker with Promedios/Chiapas Media Project; and Eva Shulte, bilingual education activist and translator. Each spent time with us during our week in Chiapas, coordinating and accompanying us to appointments with local groups, arranging travel logistics, introducing us to other local and international activists, and sharing their own experiences of working with Indigenous communities and transnational networks of pro-Indigenous allies. Our group was deeply enriched by the lively presence of Xochitl, Ana and Eva, who helped us see things, through their years of living and working in Chiapas , that we would not have seen on our own.

The week we spent together in Chiapas brought us face to face with activists working on political and economic justice; self-representation, storytelling and popular education through the medium of film; environmental justice and cultural preservation; health education and cultivation of cultural knowledge; accessing justice systems for women survivors of violence; supporting women artisans and building artist cooperatives; sovereignty movements and the building of “good governments” (the Zapatistas' municipalities that counter the Mexican government); feminist movement building; alternative economies and alternative medicines; and community building through mural painting events.

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5

Photographs ©2005 Keri Pickett, courtesy WorldPictureNews