Preface and Acknowledgments

Summary

Every student of Mexico has an opinion about the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas and its role in Mexico's recent political history. For that reason, this has not been an easy topic to research or an easy book to write. But for that same reason, it was an extremely rewarding book to write, and I hope I was up to the challenge. While a whole generation of cool-headed analysts is coming of age, some of the early scholarship treated these social movement underdogs as a cause to fight for rather than as a phenomenon to study. Activism definitely has its place, but I have tried here to focus mostly on scholarship. I must confess great personal sympathy for the movement when I started taking research trips to southern Mexico as part of my dissertation research in the mid-1990s.

By the late 1990s, I was hooked on the story unfolding in Chiapas and found several excuses to return even before I was formally working on this book. The Zapatistas have faded, although they can claim many accomplishments. But the scholarly community, led by several brave researchers in San Cristóbal de las Casas and a few in Mexico City, has started reckoning more objectively with the strengths and weaknesses of that movement, its broader lessons, and what it has portended for southern Mexico's development model and for the indigenous autonomy model the Zapatistas so articulately advocated.