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Masking Revolution: Subcomandante Marcos and the Contemporary Zapatista Movement

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Performing Utopias in the Contemporary Americas

Abstract

Orr-Álvarez examines the historical shift from a Cold War to a post-Cold War Latin America in order to explain how and why the Zapatista movement in Mexico began as a utopian revolutionary campaign that strictly followed Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s foco theory and ended up as a symbolic war against injustice—an (inter)national campaign for “absolute democracy” that promoted an imagined community or utopia of the twenty-first century. Within this framework, the author dissects how Subcomandante Marcos’s revolutionary performances use words, fictional characters, and masks as tactics with practical utopian effects, always rooted in the land.

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Orr-Álvarez, B. (2017). Masking Revolution: Subcomandante Marcos and the Contemporary Zapatista Movement. In: Beauchesne, K., Santos, A. (eds) Performing Utopias in the Contemporary Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56873-1_7

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