Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater has encountered the Zapatistas as a human rights observer, as a participant in several international gatherings, and as a student at the Zapatista language school in Oventik. His most recent permanent residence was Portland, OR where he worked at Burgerville, a regional fast-food chain, and organized for the Burgerville Workers Union, an affiliate of the Industrial Workers of the World. He is currently on the road living out of a van and selling Zapatista coffee through MonkeyBear Coop.
Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language
SKU: 9781629635804
Author: Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater • Foreword: John P. Clark
Publisher: PM Press/Kairos
ISBN: 9781629635804
Published: 2/2019
Format: Paperback, ePub, PDF, mobi
Size: 6 x 9
Page count: 224
Subjects: Politics-Activism / Latin America / Linguistics
Praise
“This is a refreshing book. Written with the humility of the learner,
or the absence of the arrogant knower, the Zapatista dictum to ‘command
obeying’ becomes to ‘know learning.’”
—Marisol de la Cadena, author of Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds
“Autonomy Is in Our Hearts is perhaps the most important
book you can read on the Zapatista movement in Chiapas today. It stands
out from the rest of the Anglophone literature in that it demonstrates,
with great sensitivity, how a dialectic between traditional culture and
institutions and emerging revolutionary and regenerative forces can play
a crucial role in liberatory social transformation. It shows us what we
can learn from the indigenous people of Chiapas about a politics of
community, care, and mutual aid, and—to use a word that they themselves
use so much—about a politics of heart. A great strength of the work is
that the author is a very good listener. He allows the people of Chiapas
to tell their own story largely in their own words, and with their own
distinctive voice.”
—John P. Clark, from the Foreword
“Autonomy Is in Our Hearts takes us step by step through the
first two grades of the Zapatistas’ international primary school in
politics called the escuelita, and carefully describes the ongoing
revolution of everyday life in the autonomous municipalities of Chiapas.
Most importantly, this book studies the Zapatistas in their own
language. In the syntax and semantics of precolonial languages are
encoded the seeds and harvest of a post-capitalist present and future.
If, as the Zapatistas say, ‘the word is our weapon,’ then this book is a
glimpse into an armory for decolonization.”
—Quincy Saul, coeditor of Maroon the Implacable and member of the East Coast Chiapas Solidarity Committee
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