Ya Basta! strives to make the invisible visible. The colors orange and yellow represent a warning! We are here with our bodies to warn America's communities about the "new economy".
As America stumbles into the 21st Century, we here in New York City watch passively, as entire communities are rendered invisible by our much-lauded economic growth. We see that "welfare reform" means more war on the poor; that it is illegal to sleep on the streets, let alone protest; that profits for Wall Street mean increasingly unaffordable rents, as jails become the only alternative means of housing. Indeed, while New York has become the world capital for the manufacture of glamorous images, the majority of its citizens have been made to vanish: their dreams, labors, passions, aspirations, communities, their very bodies disappear.
Yet they are not invisible to everyone.
We ask ourselves, not surprisingly; how do we give voice to our helplessness, and how do we warn our communities that there is a real danger?
Within the landscape of Manhattan's media empire, we choose to do so in public, with our very bodies. We show our rage as visibility, as presence....
(More on the site.)
a pdf of a paper (and the same as html ) which says:
"Your word is too hard", people were telling them. They could not follow the ideological discourse of the revolutionaries. After months of an effort to educate the people in their ideology and political plans, the would-be guerrilleros began to listen to them. "In the confrontation of ideas", they confessed later, "we lost. And something new was born: Zapatismo". This movement was no longer embedded in any form of marxism-leninism. But neither was it the expression of the traditional resistence of indigenous peoples, entrenched in their communities, finding a refuge for their local identity in their oppressed isolation or their traditional rebellions against the oppressors. Well rooted in their tradition, explicitly affirming that identity, it was also open to others, to the world. The uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), on January 1st., 1994, attracted immediate attention and played a very important role in the revitalization of local identity everywhere --within Mexico as well as abroad. On the one side, it gave visibility and legitimacy to the movement already in place. On the other side, it inspired and activated many people involved in their own local struggles and broke their isolation or disarticulation. It has been, since then, a continual source of inspiration and a necessary reference for many local struggles. Zapatismo does not fit well in any of the categories or classes of 'old' or 'new' social movements. It is a living being, changing continually and involving an amazing diversity of persons, groups and peoples. It is not defined by a specific ideology or doctrine. As I explained in the first paper, it is not a guerrilla or a fundamentalist, nationalist or ethnic movement. The EZLN plays a key role in Zapatismo, continually nourishing it with its creative and audacious initiatives. Zapatismo itself, however, cannot be reduced to the EZLN.
Zapatismo expresses and articulates a wide movement of diverse groups of people -even those that do not recognize themselves as Zapatistas or refuse any affiliation with Zapatismo. They are affirming themselves in their local places, which they are courageously crafting in the shapeless spaces imposed by the market or the State. |
