Riding with Zapata through Las Entrañas del monstruo: representations of Emiliano Zapata from cold war Hollywood, chicana/o literature and culture, and the EZLN rebellion

When the ski-masked representatives of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) first announced their rebellion against the Mexican government from the Lacondón jungle on January 1, 1994, journalists, cultural critics, and many others marveled at their deft combination of armed guerrilla tactics and their skillful use of the Internet. In retrospect, their efforts to forge networks of solidarity and support employed at least one additional strategy, for this is hardly the first time since the Mexican Revolution of 1910 that the image of Emiliano Zapata—-his unmistakable moustache and piercing eyes, his sombrero, bandoliers, and rifle, and his undying love for the land—-has been used to imagine and/or mobilize competing visions of Mexico. The legacy of Zapata’s principled struggle for tierra y libertad on behalf of the poor and indigenous peasants of Morelos has also enjoyed a fruitful life in the literature and culture of the United States, where it has been marshaled from perspectives as disparate as liberal anticommunism and queer Chicana feminism to reproduce and to disrupt various ideas about identity and national development. My dissertation tracks representations of the Zapata legacy as they circulate across the U.S./Mexico border in order to create a transnational conversation about race, gender, and national belonging between the discursive contexts of mid-century U.S. exceptionalism, Chicana/o literature and culture, and the EZLN rebellion. Central to understanding how the image of Zapata operates in these different cultures of circulation, this dissertation argues, are the ways in which it relates to space. ❧ In Chapter One, I argue that by extricating Zapata from the historical realities of the Mexican Revolution in their film Viva Zapata! (1952), John Steinbeck and Elia Kazan transform the Zapata legacy into a kind of blank screen upon which to project, in the imagery of the cowboy western, Cold War fantasies about heroic revolutionaries in the so-called Third World. The driving logics of these fantasies seem particularly evident in the relationship between the film’s Zapata and his indigenous followers, who appear desperately in need of a father figure to free them from the feminized shackles of their underdevelopment. The extent to which both John Steinbeck and George H.W. Bush attempt to deploy the film against Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the 1960s suggests that Viva Zapata! has at least as much to do with the mid-century spaces of Cold War containment in Latin America as with the lands and fields of Morelos. ❧ In Chapter Two, I demonstrate that the activists of the Chicano Movement use Zapata, along with other symbols from Mexican and Mexican American history, to inform a militant sense of collective identity with which to challenge historical and contemporary experiences of dispossession and violence in the United States. On one hand, I find Chicana critiques of the Movement’s sexism and misogyny particularly relevant when cultural nationalist representations of Zapata appear to conflate female bodies and land as objects that become meaningful through male agency and ownership. Alternatively, I argue that some Chicano murals, especially when they mark sites of collective resistance, seem to disarticulate the revolutionary possibilities of the Zapata legacy from the Movement’s gendered constructions of space. ❧ Finally, Chapter Three compares the ways in which the EZLN uses Zapata to trouble structures of governance and identity in Mexico and the ways in which Chicana feminists respond to Chicano cultural nationalism in the United States. Focusing primarily on one narrative and one mural from each discursive tradition, I argue that both use strategic representations of indigeneity to reconfigure conventional ideas about the spaces and agents of revolutionary resistance. This chapter constellates representations of Zapata across Chicana/o literature and culture and the insurgent discourse of the EZLN in order to demonstrate that the visual and the spatial map each other through a wide array of different guerrilla, representational, and activist strategies—strategies whose greatest asset might be that they gesture towards otherwise unrepresentable modes of collective identity and agency. ❧ As a multidisciplinary cultural study, this dissertation uses the international circulation of the Zapata legacy and its relationship to space to introduce new perspectives to several overlapping fields of inquiry. In Viva Zapata! I identify specific visual and thematic tropes that help me to foreground race and gender as I connect the film’s currents of postwar U.S. exceptionalism and development to the historical trajectories of coloniality. Following contemporary trends in Chicana/o cultural studies, I argue that there is more to the Chicano Movement than its most egregious shortcomings. In fact, it is precisely within the tensions between their masculinist logics and their land-based critiques of U.S. imperialism that Chicano reproductions of the Zapata legacy offer the most revealing insights into the intersections of space, race, and gender within the literature and culture of the Chicano Movement. Finally, while I recognize that they respond to different configurations of state repression and violence (configurations that have always been determined by related, transnational currents of capital and power), I draw on Latin American subaltern studies to think about how the EZLN and Chicana feminists use the Zapata legacy to intervene in some of the very narratives and logics that produce structures of subalternity and exclusion on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border.