SYMPOSIUM Autonomy: The Struggle for Survival, Self‐Management and the Common Organiser: Paul Chatterton: Introduction

We had been working for about a month in the village of San Isidro, in the Zapatista autonomous municipality of Morelia. At the time I was living in Chiapas, the most southerly state of Mexico, doing solidarity work with the Zapatistas through our solidarity group Kiptik (Kiptik means strength in the local Mayan language, Tzeltal). After raising enough money from donations and gigs back in Europe we’d meet with the Zapatista municipal water commission and get instructions about which village needed a water system next. We were laying out a gravity flow system fed from a spring a couple of miles away up the hill, and the head tank lay squarely in the middle of land reclaimed after the landowner fled in the land takes of 1996. The village overlooked Las Cañadas, the deep canyons that lead down to the Lacandon jungle near the Mexico–Guatemala border. It was winter in the Chiapas highlands and the freezing mornings gave way to clear blue afternoons. One Thursday, we were taking our usual lunchtime break, eating pozol, the ancient Mayan snack of ground maize hydrated with whatever river water was at hand. Packed with nutrients and carbohydrates, it’s amazing how that stuff could get you through the day. We hunkered down under the tarpaulin we had erected to protect the drying cement of the newly plastered water tank from the heat of the sun. “How many Zapatistas are there in your village?”, Manuel, one of the representatives of the water commission, asked me out of the blue. “Not many”, came my reply, resisting the temptation to say that I was from a city not a village. “Why not?”. “Well I suppose no one cares enough, or they’re too busy”, I said, and then instantly regretted it.