This Bridge Called Zapatismo

This book traces the growth of a new kind of transnational social movement inspired by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in Mexico that has spread to urban Mexico and abroad. Based on ethnographic data in Mexico City and Los Angeles, this work traces the development of an urban, transnational, and transcultural network of community-based organizations that attempt to implement a Zapatista political vision. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate the complex and problematic linkages between these diverse communities and political discourses originating from indigenous communities in Mexico. This study centers on the influence of indigenous cultural politics on urban political culture in Mexico City and Los Angeles.

Activists and social movement scholars will find useful insights in this analysis of how Zapatista horizontal political practices spread from the global South to the North through “transcultural activist networks,” influencing other movements from Mexico City to Florida to New York City to Los Angeles. This Bridge Called Zapatismo illuminates the changing political culture of contentious politics in the era of globalization., This book makes an important contribution to a growing newer literature on transnational social movements that counteracts the colonialist assumption of a unidirectional flow of ideas and strategies from North to South. Dellacioppa shifts the focus away from the bureaucratic world of NGOs to grassroots organizations and the ways in which they appropriate and adapt Zapatista principles in their local contexts…. This Bridge Called Zapatismo highlights the subjective perceptions and experiences of grassroots organizations, and in its own way raises important questions about perspective and about the power dynamics in the construction of knowledge.

Kara Zugman Dellacioppa is associate professor in the sociology department at California State University, Dominguez Hills.