¡Zapata Lives! is an important addition to a growing body of research on the contemporary zapatista movement in Mexico. Lynn Stephen rejects formalistic political analysis in favor of an assessment of the movement in its historical, cultural, and regional specificity. She analyzes zapatismo at multiple levels, encompassing the local (agricultural collectives and population sites, or ejidos), the regional, the interregional (indigenous areas in both Chiapas and Oaxaca), the national, and even the global. Stephen demonstrates how the figure of the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata has been appropriated both by the Mexican state, in the context of agrarian, educational, and economic policy, and by indigenous populations, whose visions of history follow strikingly different “paths of imagination, storytelling, memory and codification” (p. xxxiv). One of the author’s principal interests is nationalism, specifically the dialogue between hegemonic forms of nationalism and local “nation views” that assimilate, contest, or reformulate dominant paradigms, projecting counterhegemonic perspectives back to the center.

Stephen provides a broad historical overview of both Chiapas and Oaxaca, based on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and an extensive survey of published historical and ethnographic literature. Oaxaca’s indigenous communities retained a significant amount of communal land through the colonial and even the national periods. Long-term land conflicts, both between Zapotecan communities and between those communities and nearby haciendas, were the backdrop for extensive intervention by state officials and teachers from the 1920s onward, especially in the 1930s, under the auspices of President Lázaro Cárdenas. Agrarian reform, education, and the formation of mass political organizations were all couched in a discourse of revolution and identified with Zapata’s legacy. In Chiapas, in contrast, from the colonial period onward indigenous communities were stripped of communal lands, virtually enslaved on coffee plantations, and eventually displaced. The presence of postrevolutionary governments was much more limited than in Oaxaca, both in agrarian reform and education. As a result, in Chiapas government officials and official nationalist ideology made few inroads, leaving fertile ground for the growth of a variety of independent political and religious movements beginning in the 1970s.

In the 1990s, as Stephen demonstrates, these divergent histories informed distinct local responses to the zapatista movement and to the overtly neoliberal policies adopted by the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional; until recently Mexico’s dominant party), which has couched its own policies in the legacy of Zapata, as if the fragmentation of the ejidos into individually owned parcels represented the consummation of Zapata’s struggle. In Chiapas, many indigenous ejidatarios rejected the new government programs and joined the zapatista movement, which was specifically antigovernment in nature and aimed at securing indigenous political and cultural autonomy. Participants in the movement embraced a sacralized Zapata, known as Votán Zapata, a figure born of a fusion of indigenous Tzotzil culture and Mexican nationalism. In contrast, in Oaxaca many ejidatarios participated in neoliberal programs, despite being broadly sympathetic to the movement in Chiapas. For Stephen, this seemingly contradictory “pro-zapatista and pro-PRI” (p. 287) posture is an outgrowth of the Oaxacan ejidatarios’ historical experience, which has lent national heroes like Zapata and Cárdenas an “almost familial status” in local historical memory (p. 240) and fostered an enduring, though tenuous, relationship to the Mexican government.

Stephen is right to emphasize the importance of nationalism in the zapatista movement, and some of her evidence supports this. Her larger exploration of “nation views” and “local nationalism,” however, is limited on several fronts. First, Stephen’s focus on the 1930s and the 1990s illuminates two critical periods but obscures the struggle over nation and citizenship in Mexico from the early to mid-19th century on. Thus the “official” nationalism of the 1930s is made to seem overly monolithic, and a previous century of popular involvement in struggles over the nature of the nation disappears from view. Moreover, Stephen does not elaborate enough on the content of “nation views,” a term she uses to encompass “pro” and “anti” government views of the ejidatarios, ethnic identifications (such as “Zapotec” and “Mexican”), and historical memories of national figures like Cárdenas and Zapata. Although all of these elements may be components of a vision of the nation, a more systematic exploration of explicitly nationalist discourse is needed. Stephen’s interviews with zapatistas explore critical issues like gender equity, the impact of low-intensity war, surveillance and repression, and land reform but do not address the issue of nationalism; her interviews with ejidatarios focus on the local histories of the ejidos and on memories of Cárdenas and Zapata rather than on how ejidatarios imagine the nation and their relationship to it. Finally, the author asserts that zapatismo’s alternative nationalism was projected back to the center and, via a process of “transvaluation,” was appropriated by a wide variety of groups in Mexico City and beyond as a “global discourse” (p. 175). Although Stephen provides examples of zapatistas addressing themselves to a national audience (via communiqués or demonstrations in Mexico City), she does not examine thoroughly the discursive appropriation of zapatismo at the national or global levels.

I have chosen to focus on the issue of nationalism; Lynn Stephen’s important discussions of human rights, globalization, and the ethics of anthropological fieldwork, however, are also deserving of note. By including extensive firsthand testimony, Stephen introduces zapatista leaders and activists to readers who may not have access to the testimonial literature published in Spanish. The most important contribution of ¡Zapata Lives! is Stephen’s insistence that readers listen to the zapatistas--to their words, but also to the diversity of histories, experiences, and perspectives that inform their visions.