by Love and Rage Team / Events

As part of “The Big Conversation” lecture series, a lecture and workshop given by local activist Brendan Maslauskas Dunn on the Zapatista Revolution will be held at The Other Side in Utica on Wednesday, September 27 from 7:30pm – 9:00pm. The Other Side is located next to Café Domenico, 2011 Genesee Street in Utica. The event is co-sponsored by The Sunithi Bajekal Trust Fund and donations to support The Other Side will be appreciated.

On January, 1, 1994 the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), otherwise known as the Zapatistas, entered the global stage the very same day NAFTA came into effect when they launched a revolutionary uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. The masked revolutionary indigenous Maya insurgents claimed it was a war for survival for indigenous people. Since that day they have been in a declared war against the Mexican state.

The Zapatistas faced brutal military and state repression, massacres and targeted assassinations. Their communities remain under a stage of low intensity warfare to this day, but, “little by little” as the Zapatistas say, they are creating a new world. Over 1,000 villages in Chiapas are under Zapatista control and are governed by a system rooted in concepts of mutual aid, cooperation, self-determination, direct democracy and a fierce anti-capitalist ethos. A synthesis of socialism, anarchism and indigenous Maya beliefs have created a new way of understanding the world called Zapatismo. The Zapatistas have influenced not only the broader Left in Mexico, but the greater Global Justice Movement around the world, as more movements and groups have taken up the mantle of Zapatismo.

This workshop will give a brief history of the Zapatista movement and discuss Zapatismo, the Other Campaign, the system of governance of the Zapatistas, the recent decision to run an indigenous woman for president, and will open up the floor for discussion on what the Left in the US, and local activists, can learn from the Zapatista revolution.

Brendan Maslauskas Dunn is an anarchist who has been involved with countless social movements, most of which were influenced in part by Zapatismo, since the late 1990s. In 2015, he traveled down to the village of Oventic in Zapatista territory to learn first-hand about the Zapatsta revolution.