In the summer of 1996, two and a half years after the Zapatista armed uprising, Subcomandante Marcos, speaking on behalf of the EZLN in a public relations coup unrivalled by many heads of state, attracted to the Lacandon selva four thousand non-Mexicans, young, idealistic, from forty-two different countries, clad not in ski masks but in what might have been the hippie clothing of their parents, retrieved from a quarter century’s storage in attic trunks. Thus clad in the magic of idealism, they converged by plane, bus and caravan in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico, to respond to Marcos’ invitation to meet.

      Along with them arrived the widow of French President Mitterand, half a dozen world-class writers and intellectuals, a caravan from Pastors For Peace, and, into San Cristóbal de Las Casas, uninvited but intrigued, us: two aging folks from Boston, one a physics professor (him) and one a teacher of ESL (her).

      Invitations were out to Garcia Marquez and Oliver Stone. The FZLN opened an office in the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas to register attendees. Gossip had it that anyone with a press credential could attend the upcoming discussion grandly called Encuentro Inter-Continental por la Humanidad y Contra el Neoliberalismo: an intercontinental meeting on behalf of humanity and against the policies of neoliberalism. Faxes and phone calls hummed through the business of the day. Frente Zapatista Liberación Nacionál, the political arm of the Zapatista army.

      My companion George and I had planned our summer around studying Spanish at an immersion language school. We wanted to be close to the action in Chiapas and we found a school in San Cristóbal (pop. 75,000) where we enrolled. George was a student of Beginner Spanish, and I was a student of Intermediate Spanish in the morning, and a teacher of ESOL in the afternoon, so that my day was divided into two three-hour sections of teaching and learning. Being a tourist is the best camouflage any politically inclined person can hope for; and I think this strategy was well understood by other “students” who, like us, knew that San Cristóbal was where the action was.

      In the face of the power structure that oppressed them the EZLN demanded protection for subsistence agriculture and communal life styles threatened by timber cutting, hydro-electric development, oil exploration, land expropriation and ecological destruction, activities supported by federal governments (theirs and ours). The Zapatistas simultaneously called for deep structural reforms to the Mexican political system to allow communities local power over the provision of social services and the management of their resources.

      Whatever the Mexican authorities’ hopes (or the language school’s hopes) for revival of the tourist trade ruined by the uprising of 1994, we “Zapaturistas” came to cheer on thousands of Mexicans as they met during the rainy season in the soaked, tiny and impoverished indigenous settlements in the Lacandon jungle.

      The Aguascalientes, as all such Zapatista meetings are now called, were staged in unknown places like Oventic, La Realidad, La Garrucha, Roberto Barrios: minuscule villages with the huge tasks of unraveling political issues, economic injustices, cultural destruction, social issues, indigenous issues, human rights and women's issues.

      It took the government a week or so after the influx to figure out that the economic benefits of handcrafted Marcos and Ramona dolls, or the ubiquitous hawking of woven bracelets, or even the Chiclets peddled by small boys on the streets at all hours of the day and night, did not herald the return of tourist buses discharging eager purchasers in the markets and shops of San Cristóbal.

      Nor was it politically what the government had bargained for: international awareness that the Mexican PRI, the world's longest-dominant governing political party, was in deep trouble along with the Mexican economy.

      In a state already over-run with federal military and circled with blockades, the government’s response was harassment and eviction of foreign Encuentro participants, an act of folly which won the PRI another black eye. The post-history of the Encuentro, and the struggle for human and economic rights among the population of Mexico, is being written now, from day to day.

      The greater question is, must all things great and small (human beings, surfboards, language, monotheism, the wheel, chewing gum, the cosmos) have a single origin, or may spontaneous and simultaneous well-springs erupt in many places? I am speaking here now not of rebellion against oppression, the capacity for which is rediscovered in every generation. No, I’m thinking rather specifically about the contemporary worldwide grass-roots brushfires against neoliberalism. And even more specifically, the dignified demand that not every person, even within a single nation, need follow the same path, nor every community the same customs. The answer to the question is evident. My admiration for the Zapatistas one small community among millions on earth, is boundless.

      After a six-week stay in Chiapas headquartered at the language school, George and I flew up to Mexico City, and then back down to Oaxaca. The contrast, state to state, between glorious mountains shrouded in cloud, butterfly ecstasies, trumpets of brash flowers, is negligible. The contrast between economic conditions in the two states is negligible. The contrast between what the pueblos are doing, the stances they have taken and the struggle they waged, was enormous.

      Chiapas was devastated colonialism, racism, and the policies of the Mexican government. Oaxaca, equally ravaged, nevertheless held to a tiny but brilliant display of what must be saved and built upon: communitarian pueblos guarding their autonomy and their resources. Chiapas, distorted by the military weight of the government, was led, at the time of the uprising, only by a chimerical vision of dignity and self-sustenance that depended for its survival on the entire nation repudiating forever the PRI style of government. Oaxaca, through the combined intelligence of its educated young and its revered “uses and customs”, had been modeling the living vision for a long time, in the safety of remote villages, high in the Sierra Juarez mountains. This is not to obscure the fact that yes, small guerrilla outbreaks occur in Oaxaca, as in neighboring Guerrero. Nor to obscure the desperate economics of these tiny pueblos where half the male population emigrates illegally to the USA to find employment. But their armed rebellions are small, their vociferous complaints many.