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Image: Chenalhó, Chiapas, photographed by Pedro Valtierra. Published in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, January 1998.           

“What connects me to this photograph is not a scholarly reflection or a sovereign and distanced observation but what Roland Barthes called a punctum, which ‘rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.’ The phrase global uprising escaped many a mouth in the past twelve months. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly the last time people of otherwise lukewarm, muted political temperament spoke so plainly and widely this way. Rebellion—if one dares evoke revolution—often carries a hue of embarrassment in the polite global North, not least of all in the one industrialized country on earth where capitulation to powerful and inbred ruling elites has been par for the course. In a communiqué about this image, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos wrote, ‘Do these pictures lie when they show the look in those Zapatista women’s eyes? Do you see submissiveness or shyness in those looks? The government says they’re not persecuting Zapatistas, that their army is helping the population. Do you see gratitude in those eyes?’ What traces this image (taken during arguably the first major alter-globalization uprising) to the present and, one hopes, the present-future, is the loss of submissiveness, shyness, and gratitude.”

—Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

(via Call and Response - Triple Canopy)