[two of two] the eyes behind the mask

In the first couple of days of my time in Oventik, the few people who were there were busy preparing for the week to come.    Structures still needed to be erected, food had to be hauled in, and spaces needed to be cleared for the thousands of guests soon to arrive.

The chango and I, on the other hand, didn’t have shit to do.  The Zapatistas turned down our offers to help.  Emphatically.  They had their own way of working, and it sure as hell was a lot faster than if we had tried to help and had gotten in the way.  So we did what our group is used to doing: we sat around, drank coffee, and talked.  One by one, the usual suspects arrived: the Chilanga and her English boyfriend, the Tia, and many of the Karavanistas. 

As we munched on avocado, cheese and sweet bread, the caracol grew from quiet pueblo to bustling town.  Three days before the start of the Encuentro, Comandantes Zebedeo and Tacho, in their pasamontañas and trademark caps, hurried around the caracol before everyone arrived, without the swirling crowd of security.  The next day, we played with the young daughter of one of the comandantas.  And while we finished off the last of the avocados on the day before the Encuentro, the rest of the Zapatistas put on the final touches and the famed pasamontañas.

Something changes when they put on their masks.  I don’t exactly know how to describe it, but my first reaction was to say that wasn’t fair. 

It was different with the Subcomandante.  I had spent enough time at his feet to learn his expressions.  But these Zapatatistas…  you can’t see their mouths.  Words appear as ephemeral.  Their eyes float unanchored, detached from their faces.  Everyone looks the same.

How do you speak with a person without a mouth?  With whom would you be speaking?  With one person, or with thousands, simulataneously?

Maybe the most thorough answer is “both”.  The pasamontañas is a symbol of what the Zapatistas are, as a community—as a whole of individuals forced to wear masks to protect themselves against retaliation, in a struggle with a world that would rather see them gone.  The pasamontañas are “para todos todo, y nostros nada” incarnate—“For everybody everything, and nothing for ourselves.”  The individual becomes the community, and the community the individual. 

It was difficult to see the people behind the masks, but it helps now to see the Zapatistas take them off again.