September 16 is the anniversary of “El Grito de Dolores”, a speech made in 1810 by the catholic priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, in the town of Dolores located near Guanajuato in the center of Mexico. Hidalgo’s speech urged a “resistance” to the “bad government” and helped ignite a process which finally led to the “Declaration of Independence of the Mexican Empire” on September 28, 1821.
Schools for Chiapas, like many of you, has been involved with the autonomous Mayan communities’ on-going and creative resistance to genetically modified seeds for many years through Mother Seeds in Resistance. Now the GMO industry is fighting back against us all – and they are fighting dirty! For example, the tiny U.S. state of Vermont is being sued by the massive Monsanto Corporation for requiring truth in GMO labeling and the Indian scientist Vandana Shiva has been smeared in a far-ranging article in The New Yorker magazine. Here we reprint Dr. Shiva’s articulate and insightful response. (http://vandanashiva.com/?p=105) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ August 26, …
Blogging for Chiapas gives voice to participants and supporters of Schools for Chiapas working to describe for you the smells and sights and sounds and feels of Zapatista education. Here we share the sounds of Zapatista schools where education promoters reject the name of “teacher” and students teach as they grow strong. We will continue sing unexpected songs from schooling on rocky, hand cultivated corn fields and we will try to capture the feel of scientific studies carried out in tiny rural health clinics.
It’s the birthday of the Mexican revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata and anniversary of the founding of the Zapatista civilian Good Government Boards. Revolutionary hero and icon On August 8, 1879 Emiliano Zapata was born in Anenecuilco, in the Mexican state of Morelos, just south of Mexico City. Zapata was an advocate of fundamental land reform who lead a successful peasant army to become one of the most famous heroes of the Mexican Revolution. His central demand famously states “The land belongs to those who work it.” In 1917, Zapata’s land reform was enshrined in a new Mexican constitution legalizing communal …
Your silence hurts me, wrote the renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. The Zapatistas of Chiapas, despite facing their own considerable difficulties, have not been silent on the ongoing carnage in Gaza. At the recent First Exchange of Indigenous Peoples in Mexico with the Zapatista Peoples meeting held in Chiapas, Comandante Tacho of the EZLN expressed solidarity between indigenous liberation movements in Mexico and Palestine. Addressing hundreds of delegates at the indigenous conference, Tacho condemned Israel’s “war of extermination” against the Palestinian people in Gaza. and said the Zapatistas “embrace the [Palestinian people] today as we have before, as we always …
Zapatistas express their solidarity with the people of Palestine READ MORE »
