"Wish For Peace" with Alex de Grassi and Hamid Drake in the GALLOP Trio. Celebrating the Rebels in Chiapas, San Francisco 1994. And John Ross' vital and superb book Rebellion from the Roots.

Looking Back to Chiapas 1994 on Memorial Day 2024 in the USA Tells Us Again that Everywhere Needs Justice for Peace.

The song “Wish For Peace” comes from San Cristobal, Chiapas, Mexico during the Christmas season of 1994. I arrived in San Cristobal after an overnight Flight from San Francisco and Bus from Tuxla Guiterrez just as Zapatistas’ ‘Relampago’ (Flash of Lightning) was unfolding. Soldiers and supporters of the indigena EZLN--the Emiliano Zapata Army of National Liberation?—were ocupying or re-occupying 58 of the 124 Municipios in Mexico’s southernmost, resources-rich State, Chiapas.

Lines speak for exact realities I’d observed by Christmas Eve 1994.. “Sunday couples arm-in-arm /Stones are split under their shoes / […’ On TV screens sleek face speak / Denying what has just been seen / … / Sometimes a fight may be the only thing / To make hopes lift and song / They wish for peace / They wish for peace / Wish that they could grow in peace peace / Evermore they could go.”

20 years later, Alex de Grassi and Hamid Drake and I performed the song as part of our GALLOP Trio Concert in the SPACE Theater of Ukiah, California, April 14, 2014. Frey Vineyards and Alex had organized the Concert to benefit SPACE as a Performing Arts Center which give hundreds of young people classes and stages for expression.

Sunday couples arm-in-arm Stones are split under their shoes Calle shops not far from farms Christmas a still, shiny thing They wish for peace They wish for peace Wish that they could grow in peace Evermore they could go.

On TV screens sleek faces speak Denying what has just been shown From the Mountains a Wind is heard No lies can stand against true Word They wish for peace [ … ]

Clips of guns break the sleep Thousands, millions, rise and ring Sometimes a fight may be the only thing To make hopes lift and sing They wish for peace They wish for peace Wish that they could grow in peace Evermore they could go.

11 months earlier, January 16, 1994, groups performed at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco’s Mission Distrct to celebrate and fund-raise for ‘the Rebels in Chiapas.’

Also in this Stands the Human Being Post for Memorial Day of 2024 in the USA (‘ [ … ] center of all, and object of all, stands the Human Being, …’ Walt Whitman wrote in 1888, some Abiding Guidance we can remember in this era for would-be A.I. for Wars) is my admiring review of John Ross’ incisive, expansive and bracing book, Rebellion from the Roots / Indian Uprising in Chiapas. For decades this journalist and poet, a frequent room-mate of q.r. hand and the father of Dante Ross, had sent us dispatches from Mexico. I reviewed John’s boon of a book directly after its publication.

JOHN ROSS' REBELLION FROM THE ROOTS Political journalism from Common Courage Press, 1995

    Rebellion from the Roots reads like the book that John Ross has lived to write.  

    By several measures the most vivid account of the Zapatista insurgency that continues to rock Mexico, Ross’ Rebellion ... chiefly chronicles events between January and August 0f 1994. It’s keenly rendered, warmly involved, and irreverently funny.

    An arresting shock happened to Mexico on New Year's Day of 1994. Masked Indian troops began this year by seizing several towns in Mexico’s southernmost State, Chiapas. Waves of consternation rolled outward from the nation to the world.  In one day--the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement began--the illusion that  an 'Economic Miracle' would bring  'social peace' to Mexico, a 'vision' touted by both the Mexican and U. S. Governments, was exploded by an uprising of militant indigena. 

    Who were THEY? Who were these Mayan guerrilleros? 

    Who were these intent "little people" behind their pasamontanas? Who was their 'White' or mestizo spokesperson, "Marcos"? What was the EZLN--the Emiliano Zapata Army of National Liberation? 

    John Ross tells us that Indians’ rebellion comes from a deep place. It comes from the "Mexico Profundo" that anthropologist Guillermo Bonfils has named, Ross says. It;s a rebellion ever ready to flare among Mexico;s masses of hungry, those left outside their societys thin layer of affluence. Mexico’s native peoples compose 'an unseen and unheard-from nation,' Ross writes, 'buried in remote sierras and deserts or in less distant but equally out-of-sight "lost cities."  For them, he writes, 'life is often like a jail--a quarter of the nation's prisoners are indigenas in a country where Indians officially account for a tenth of the population.'     

    John Ross has lived  in Mexico off and on for more than 30 years. Indignant sarcasm is his weapon toward the Mexican elite who profit from poor people’s plight. Spectacles that followed the Zapatistas' 12-day war with the Mexican Army offer abundant grounds for his humor. The fighting for power among higher-ups in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI, the Party that has ruled Mexico for 66 years) after the assassination on March 23, 1994 of their Presidential candidate, Luis Paldo Colosio, exposed a fine frenzy of long-festering conflicts. John Ross gives these ‘Dinosaurs’ an acerbic back-of-the-hand. 'The competition to fill Colosio's shorts had begun with the death of the candidates' brain,' he writes. 

    The EZLN in Chiapas is for him an entirely different story. Ross marvels at the National Democratic Convention that Zapatistas managed to pull off in foothills of the Lacandon jungle between August 6th to 9th of 1994, three weeks before Mexico's Presidential Election. Using logs, they built an amphitheater, cookhouses, latrines, and five "inns" or "Hiltons", then hosted 6000 delegates from the multiple factions of Mexico's Left. While the attempt was a self-described 'locura' --craziness--it succeeded. It excited and united delegates with a hope that the date of national elections, August 21, ;might indeed be the first day of the Mexico that had been born again in this damp, Zapatista-infested jungle.’

    Delegates’ unifying hope was that demands voiced by Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution in 1917--for land, education and equality to campesinos--promises that were grievously broken by subsequent PRI Governments--might be fulfilled. 

    The PRI won the Election of August 1994, as it's won every Presidential Election since 1928, defeating the PAN on the Right and the PRD on the Left. 

     Computerization made vote-counting more manipulable, but older kinds of fraud were still obvious. John Ross has fun with some of the more gigantic discrepancies. He writes: 'The anomalies were staggering--at one Nueva Casa Grande, Chihuahua casilla, 400 voters cast ballots, but 1,200 ballots were extracted from the ballot box.'   

    Rebellion from the Roots lets us understand that Mexico will never return to the inertia that controlled it before the Zapatistas in Chiapas rose up. While a Chase Manhattan Bank memo of January 1995 has called for Mexico’s government to 'eliminate'  the rebels, they endure. They remain 10,000 to 15,000 under arms, entrenched in their jungle and loyal to their communities, while Mexico as a whole society founders under debt incurred through the bail-out of U. S. financiers after the Mexican Stock Market collapsed in December 1994. Its PRI President, Ernesto Zedillo, struggles with ruling-class rifts and middle-class losses, as millions more of Mexicans now organize against their recent deprivations. 

    John Ross’ Rebellion ... shows us that the real 'miracle' of our present has nothing to do with 'neo-liberal policy' and Banks' trickery. Instead--’Basta ta!”—the real wonder among us now has everything to do with native people’s resistance to a ‘New World Order’, whether the United States’ Administration be Democrat or Republican or a mixed bag of affiliated scoundrels.

    With vigor, humor and moral spirit that recall John Reed's Insurgent Mexico as well as Mark Twain, George Orwell and Agnes Smedley, John Ross brings fresh realities home to us. ‘

The January 1994 and the review of John’s Rebellion are part of my 2002 book Flares. Somehow Amazon offered a signed copy of Flares for $902 in 2021. Matt Gonzalez’ ‘Preface’ in the book is here. You may be delighted by Matt’s colleages on his site.

I’m sure you can find a cheaper copy now.

More of the GALLOP Trio is available on YouTube via the ‘Wings Beyond Wings’ compilation on the DressedLikTheLilies Channel that Maryse named. Kidd Jordan, Oliver Lake, Alvin Fielder, Darrell Lavigne, and Brian Quezergue are the other brilliant musicians improvising there. From our first set I’ve felt something special going on with Alex and Hamid. Sympathy is that key! I hope that you enjoy more of what we do on ‘Wings Beyond Wings’.

Wishing you another day of doing great and good things!