The emergence of the Zapatista movement in 1994 has forced scholars and activists to reexamine not only the peculiarities of Chiapas, the EZLN’s home base, but also the complex tributaries of the popular movements from which the Zapatistas have sprung. A history of the EZLN would require engagement not just with its indigenous core but with the role of radical Christians, veterans of the 1968 student-popular movement, insurgent peasantries, and above all, teacher-activists.
Historians of Mexico have long been interested in the role teachers have played both in popular struggles and in the construction of a new revolutionary state. Joe Foweraker’s important book is a rich addition to this scholarly literature. It also offers some provocative suggestions about how contemporary “popular movements” in Latin America might best be studied.
The book traces the development of a group of dissident teachers in Chiapas from the late 1970s until the electoral “earthquake” of 1988. Starting as a struggle over their material and professional rights, the teachers’ actions inevitably grew into a movement that challenged Mexico’s largest national union (SNTE) and the clientelist politics of both that union and key central government agencies.
The core of this fine monograph is a detailed study of the teachers’ movement as seen from Chiapas, providing portraits of key leaders and a careful examination of the complicated debates over strategy and tactics that animated and divided its members. Foweraker’s lens, however, also focuses on the complex interplay between the unfolding struggles in Chiapas and the national political arena. For the teachers’ struggle was both “syndical” and political. The dissident teachers made a strategic decision to fight their battles within the SNTE rather than create a parallel union. Adopting this route involved the teachers in acrimonious debates over the strengths and weaknesses of particular strategic options and, in particular, over the appropriateness of legal and extralegal action, and of mobilization as opposed to negotiation.
The book puts particularly strong emphasis on demonstrating that changes in the “strategic terrain” in which the teachers operated were shaped both by the actions of the teachers and their local allies (peasants and Indian teachers, for example) and by shifts in the institutional context of the struggle. Interagency tensions (for example, between the projects of the Ministry of Education and those of the SNTE’s national leaders) created temporary “openings” that dissidents could exploit. Examining how the activist teachers responded to such “moments of strategic choice” is the most effective way to understand the changing fortunes and character of the popular movement, Foweraker concludes.
I have a few quibbles. The book would have been strengthened had Foweraker paid more attention to the ways that teachers linked their mobilization to the struggles of local allies. Foweraker insists that alliances with small coffee and maize growers and with highland peasants engaged in struggles over forest rights were crucial elements in the Chiapan teachers’ strategy. But he does not give much detail about the content and outcomes of these cross-sectoral and class coalitions. Nevertheless, Foweraker’s book is now obligatory reading for historians of twentieth-century Mexico, and especially for those scholars searching for effective frameworks in which to understand the evolution of local and regional social movements.
