Abstract
Two murals, at the center of which there is a portrait of a Zapatista rebel masked with the iconic Palestinian kuffiyeh, stand in two different geographical sites: a community center in caracol Oventic, one of the major autonomous Zapatista municipalities in the highlands of Chiapas in Southern Mexico and the other on the so-called Separation Wall in Occupied Bethlehem. Gustavo Chávez Pavón, a Guechepe artist from Mexico and a cultural promoter in the Zapatista muralist movement, painted these murals in 2004. At the bottom of both murals, he signed in big bold red font the words “To Exit is to Resist,” thus affirming indigenous steadfastness inspired by Palestinian ?um?d.
How Chávez Pavón’s murals embody the shrinking distance between Mexico and Palestine is the key question in this presentation. Based on a critical visual analysis of Chávez Pavón’s murals in Palestine and Chiapas, and personal interviews that I conducted with him over Skype and in person in Mexico in 2017, I will first offer an overview of Zapatista cultural solidarity with Palestine. Next, I will illustrate how Chávez Pavón’s dissemination of ?um?d aesthetics in indigenous communities in Chiapas and beyond is, in fact, a visual performance of what I describe as “indigenous affinity”: a common thread between Mayan and Palestinian narratives of indigeniety and decolonization.
This particular Mayan-Palestinian affinity, I proceed then to argue, contributes to developing a conversation with other indigenous peoples in the Fourth World; a conversation anchored in intimate resemblance and belonging to shared histories of struggle against dispossession, displacement, settler colonialism and internal-colonialism. Finally, I will conclude by showing how Chávez Pavón’s murals of “indigenous affinity” are a living testimony of the long history of solidarity with Palestine from Chiapas and the Global South at large, and a vision for future models of indigenous solidarity from Palestine.
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