The Zapatista Movement at 30 Years and Mexico’s Election of Claudia Sheinbaum

| July 24, 2024| Event

The Zapatista Movement at 30 Years and Mexico’s Election of Claudia Sheinbaum

The Zapatista Movement at 30 Years and Mexico’s Election of Claudia Sheinbaum

July 24, 2024
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
118 Elliot

118 Elliot St, Brattleboro, VT 05301


Reserve your seat here   (If unable to attend live, You will find the Zoom link when you register)

The Zapatista Movement at 30 Years and Mexico’s Election of Claudia Sheinbaum:  A Discussion w/ Author & Activist Margaret Cerullo

January 1, 2024, will mark 30 years since the Zapatistas burst onto the world stage. Mexico elected Claudia Sheinbaum, the country’s first female president, in a landslide victory in June amid growing violence against women and journalists in the country. Sheinbaum won as a pragmatic problem-solver but comes out of leftist traditions. What role did the Zapatistas, who marked the 30th anniversary of the movement and appearance of ‘Subcommandante Marco’ on the world stage this year, play in her rise to power and ability to govern? 

‘They have infused left politics’, Margaret Cerullo writes, ‘with an imaginative, literary, or poetic dimension—organizing horizontally, outside and against the state, and with a profound respect for difference as a source of political insight, not division.’ And they persist. This new year they will be celebrating their decades’ long phase in 500 years of indigenous resistance in the Americas.

Join the Windham World Affairs Council (WWAC) to explore these connections with Professor Margaret Cerullo, a Professor Emerita of Sociology and Feminist Studies at Hampshire College and a member of the Lightning Collective, which produced the 2022 book “Zapatista Stories for Dreaming An-Other World by Subcomandante Marcos.” Cerullo, a keen observer of Mexican politics, will discuss how this Jewish former Mayor of Mexico City won the presidency, the state of the Zapatista movement at 30, and how stories and storytelling have nurtured the movement.  “Professor Margaret Cerullo brings luminous insights into the recent Mexican election and the Zapatista movement.  She’ll be bringing to Brattleboro a first hand account of her participation in the 30th anniversary of the Zapatista operation in January 2024,” said Chuck Collins, Institute for Policy Studies and member/advisor, WWAC, will introduce Cerullo.

Margaret Cerullo is Professor Emerita of Sociology and Feminist Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She has been involved in one way or another with the Zapatista movement since its public emergence in January of 1994, including organizing field study courses in Chiapas for the last 20 years. She is a member of the Lightning Collective that produced the book Stories for Dreaming An-Other World (PM Press). She attended the recent commemoration of the Zapatistas 30th/40th anniversary (including 10 years underground before emerging publicly in 1994) in Chiapas.
Stories and storytelling have been a distinctive and compelling feature of the Zapatista movement since its appearance in 1994. The impulse behind a recent translation of Zapatista stories by an activist translators’ collective will frame the presentation. A brief conceptual summary of the history of the movement will follow, with an emphasis on the 30th anniversary celebration in December and January, and the spate of communiqués that preceded it, announcing a new turn in the Zapatista struggle.
See Margaret’s recent commentary on the June 2 Presidential election,  What Does Claudia Sheinbaum Stand For? 

Last modified: July 23, 2024

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