The gaze and the distance from the door: Zapatista words take the first steps into unsubmissive lands

Abstract

Between 2020 and 2021, during the Coronavirus pandemic, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) launches a series of announcements on the Enlace Zapatista blog about the Gira, a round-the-world project on different continents starting with Slumil K'ajxemk'Op (term in the Tzotzil language that means unsubmissive land, how EZLN starts to call Europe). Having as its central axis the analysis of the communication “The Gaze and the Distance to the Door”, published in october 2020, this article seeks to reflect on how the Zapatista imaginary expressed in the text acts in what the movement calls its 'war against oblivion' and how the exercises of prefiguration proposed in the communication are in favor of a gesture that seeks to expand anti-capitalist resistance, operating against coloniality. I would like to suggest that, if epistles were once instruments to try to justify processes such as the European colonization, the Zapatista communication offers, at such a critical moment at the global level, an opposing movement, which goes beyond borders in the name of the struggle for 'a world where many worlds fit’.