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CHAPTER 1
Atenco and Machetes
Traveling from Mexico City to the center of Atenco is a significant lesson in local political geography. My middle-class and academic friends in Mexico City spoke of Atenco as if it were in the middle of nowhere and took days to travel to, even though the journey from the center of Mexico City to the center of Atenco usually takes under an hour. The trip from the central bus station to Atenco regularly took less time than the voyage from where I was staying in the city to the central bus station. And yet one filmmaker, who by 2009 had made three influential films about Atenco and was deeply committed to solidarity with the Frente, told me that there would be no reason to spend much time in Atenco because there was really nothing there. In contrast, the first time I visited Atenco in 2008, the man I refer to here as Virgilio texted me that we should meet at the Casa Ejidal (the Ejido Commission Office) of Atenco as if it were an internationally recognized center for anti-neoliberal organizing. I met Virgilio, a middle-aged man who has dedicated a significant portion of his life to political organizing, at a film screening in Mexico City. After the film, the filmmakers introduced me to him, we exchanged numbers, and he promised to show me around Atenco. Virgilio's plan in inviting me was to take me on a ritualized tour that almost all journalists, academics, students, and other outside visitors received. The most widely circulated film about Atenco, Romper el cerco / Breaking the Siege (Canalseisdejulio and Promedios, 2006), begins with scenes taken from a similar tour given to an activist film crew. The famous Zapatista spokesperson Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos and his entourage were given the tour in 2006 amid a densely packed crowd of admirers. The tour was also given to a small group of bewildered American college students who visited under the instructions of a well-meaning teacher while I was living there in 2009. As it is how people from the Frente most frequently represent themselves and Atenco to outside visitors, it is an appropriate way to begin to describe the town, both from the perspective of the political imaginaries that the name "Atenco" connotes in Mexican media, and the physical place where people make their everyday lives.
The particularities of the history and place of Atenco are heavy with meaning, but there is an incredible diversity of these meanings. Atenco has continually been headline news since 2001, a central node of political organizing in Mexico, and a meeting place for anti-neoliberal activists from all over the world. In this sense, it is famous and important to national and global politics. In 2009, when I was living in Atenco, it was not at all unusual for there to be film crews there, famous public intellectuals, or even the occasional rock star. Even so, in every other way it is not very different from thousands of other small municipalities throughout Mexico. Aside from the Frente and the political waves that it was trying to make, my filmmaker friend was right in saying that in comparison to the places where Americans usually stay in Mexico-San Miguel de Allende, Oaxaca de Juarez, Cancun, even San Cristóbal de las Casas-Atenco was not very remarkable. In most ways, it is a small town like millions of others in Mexico.
The Atenco ejido is not very old. It was formed during the large agrarian reform policies of the 1920s along with all of Mexico's ejidos. This land reform converted large properties of rich landowners into the communal property, ejidos, of locals throughout Mexico. A local Comisariado Ejidal made up of the peasant farmers (ejidatarios) who work it manage the ejidos of each community. Within the ejido system, each farmer has an individual plot, or parcel, that he farms (ejidatarios are nearly always men, although women can be ejidatarias) and that he can pass down to his children and grandchildren. However, ejidatarios can never sell a parcel. If he moves away, or ceases to farm, or if his children don't want to farm, he must give it back to the Ejido Commission, and they will give it to someone else. The Comisariado in Atenco also manages the other communal lands of the town: the public park, public swimming pools, and the land that isn't currently useful as farmland. The Atenco Comisariado also owns a few tractors for plowing and cultivating that they loan out to ejidatarios and a water truck to transport water from the central park to fields.
During the 1990s, less than seventy years after they were established, the ejido system was dismantled by President Salinas as a part of initiatives surrounding the North American Free Trade Agreement and the popularity of neoliberal economic reforms. Under the reforms, ejidatarios could vote to privatize their land so that each farmer could sell, develop, and otherwise do whatever he wanted with his parcel. Ejidos could remain, however, if locals wished it. Atenco's land, like many ejidos around the country, has so far remained communal, although a vote in the spring of 2015, if it is found to be legitimate (its status is currently being contested), would privatize Atenco's ejido so that individual families can sell their parcels to companies wishing to "develop" the land.
Part of the continual struggle of the Frente since 2001 has been over what Lynn Stephen has called the "cultural packaging of violence" that make "particular groups of people susceptible to violent abuses and [allow] them to be treated with less than human respect and dignity" (2002, 28–29). Under the developmental logic that identified Atenco as a potential site for a new international airport, the area was a blank slate, a "nothing" that could be built into "something" through the attentions of transnational corporations and relatively wealthy consumers of international air travel. Because the geographical area was undesirable-an anachronism and a reminder of Mexico's poverty and under-development-the people who resided there were also seen to be unimportant and undesirable. Some residents of the Atenco area also saw themselves in this way and continue to see themselves in this way. Some would much prefer to replace their semirural, farming way of life with another version of themselves. To the people that came to make up the Frente, however, and who at one time could count on the support of the vast majority of its residents, this thinking was the same logic of colonialism that imagined all the Americas as a blank slate to be filled with European enterprises. To Virgilio and others of the Frente, Atenco is a place rich with meaning and history that would have been completely destroyed by the expropriation.
The struggle in Atenco is primarily a struggle over who gets to decide the meaning and worth of the complex relationship between people and land. Furthermore, this struggle over meaning is not a two-sided oppositional struggle with a local population on one side with a consistent, homogenous identity and a unified oppressive state completely at the service of transnational corporations on the other. As any other community in any other place in the world, there as many views about what Atenco is and what it should be as there are residents living there. An ejidataria and member of the Frente, who I refer to here as Ana María, told me in 2009, "each one of us that makes up the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra, each one of us is a story and a different story, a story with many nuances, with many emotions. ... I believe that every point of view is distinct."
This nuance and diversity of experiences is especially important to emphasize in cases such as Atenco that are so heavily burdened with meaning. Much as place names such as Kent State, Columbine, or Ferguson, Missouri, are in the United States, "Atenco" has become a touchstone for national and international conversations about political, social, and cultural transformations. In Mexico, "Atenco" is synonymous with dramatic social movement: an incredible triumph over the state and neoliberal reform in 2002, and a devastating police repression in 2006. The meanings of "Atenco" that play out on the front pages of national newspapers and magazines are heavily polarized (see Figure 1.1).
For some, the name is a symbol for the possibility of organized social movements to triumph over the overwhelming political and economic forces of corporate capitalist globalization. This is why the name was stenciled in spray paint on the walls of social science buildings at the national public university in Mexico City well in to 2009. It is why they can mobilize political marches in the capital of tens of thousands of people. It is also why filmmakers and activists from all over the world have traveled to Atenco and invited activists from the Frente to their homes in Canada, South Africa, and Australia, and throughout Europe. The image on the left-hand side of Figure 1, from the left-leaning newspaper La Jornada, is a representation of this set of meanings that the name evokes.
This image was published on July 13, 2002, in the heat of the Frente's first political struggle. The federal government had expropriated all the land of Atenco, its ejido land as well as a good portion of the land on which people live, and the land of thirteen surrounding municipalities. The headline, from a tense moment in the confrontation with the state, reads "Atenco on guard." Although the subheadlines refer variously to the "project in Texcoco" (the larger neighboring town), "Ejidatarios from San Salvador," "campesinos," and "the population" as actors and subjects of various news stories throughout the paper, the name "Atenco" stands in for each of these various actors and places in the headline. Atenco is represented visually by an image that takes up the majority of the front page: the dramatic silhouette of a single anonymous young man standing in front of a bonfire (probably a burning car) on asphalt. He looks to the side rather than toward the camera, and his body language is not confrontational. He appears to be unarmed. It was headlines like this that popularized the idea of Atenco as a single political actor rather than a complexity of actors from a variety of political positions and local municipalities. As in this image, Atenco was, and is, often dramatically romanticized.
The second image in Figure 1.1, the front cover of the right-leaning political magazine Vértigo on May 7, 2006, evokes a critical version of this same history that is fearful of powerful social movements and conjures images of violent uneducated peasants who destroy and riot. It was published to describe the second incident Atenco is known for: an occasion four years later in which residents and police clashed over the arrest of several local political leaders. The image shows many young men crowded onto the hood of a car with more young men beside and crowded behind the car. All their faces are covered with cloth or shirts so that only their eyes are exposed. One man, perched high on the car, is shirtless and wearing a gas mask. Many of the men are making what seem to be aggressive gestures toward the camera, and the men highest in the picture nearly stand on the moving car with their arms in the air. Upon closer inspection, the viewer may note that the aggressive gestures they are making are peace signs. The headline, written in large letters across the bottom of the image reads, "They violate the rule of law: ATENCO AGAIN." In this case, the name "Atenco" stands in for a specific meaningful physical confrontation of uncontrolled, chaotic violence that the reader is assumed to be familiar with.
In neither headline does "Atenco" represent a geographical region where a diversity of people live and make their daily lives. The political significance of the name is so heavy and divisive that it was difficult for me, as a foreigner and an outsider, to say the name aloud to a stranger, even a bus driver, and admit that I was going there the first time to meet Virgilio. The same filmmaker who told me there was really no reason to spend much time in Atenco told me that the local officials removed the sign at the city limits that identified the place as Atenco because the name had such a heavy weight of meaning. Several people from Atenco claimed that the name Atenco was removed from highway maps (although I never saw evidence of that in 2008–2009). The sign on the highway when I arrived there for the first time in 2008, however, did indeed label the town as "San Salvador" instead of "San Salvador Atenco." Aside from erasing the indigenous name of the place by relying solely on its Catholic saint's name, this superficial erasure further divorced the abstract and emotionally and politically charged meanings of "Atenco" from the physical location of San Salvador Atenco, a place with a market on Mondays, a juice stand in front of the church, a large central park with swimming pools, street vendors, bicycle taxis, and unique local festivals and traditions.
The shorthand of "Atenco" in the popular public imagination also erases the fact that the specific place of San Salvador Atenco is merely the municipal center of a wider region of thirteen smaller villages that run along the Texcoco highway on the east side of Mexico City that were all impacted by the expropriation decree in 2001 and whose residents have formed a part of the Frente from the beginning. Virgilio, for example, was not from Atenco proper but would be traveling there from his village to meet me there.
As in most Mexican towns and cities, the center square of Atenco is built around a large open space with the town's church on one side and government buildings along another. In 2008, Atenco's plaza also had a tall, rusty water tower standing alongside the churchyard with a Laundromat and two cell phone stores behind it. The arches of the government building faced the church and the water tower. As I approached on foot to meet Virgilio, a policeman in black body armor was getting a soda out of the vending machine outside his office under the arches. It was difficult for me to cut through the heavily politically and emotionally charged images that I had seen repeatedly over the last few years in documentary films and experience this mundane small town scene as a real place rather than a scene from a movie. It was even more difficult to see a police officer calmly drinking a soda in this place that I associated entirely with the most brutal police violence I had ever seen on film.
Right next door to the policeman was a scene I knew well from countless documentaries and scenes of political violence: a set of concrete steps leading up to a stage with an enormous mural painted behind it on two sides. The mural graphically illustrated the political imaginary that I mapped onto the place, a giant portrait of Zapata (a Mexican revolutionary war hero who fought for land reform) surrounded by symbols of the local struggle. Images of men riding horses, red bandanas, and machetes are all strong symbols of the Frente. A woman's face painted red and black references their ties to anarchist movements, and the image of a "viejo," a man with a beard wearing a white three-piece suit, references a tradition of local cultural festivals. I knew this mural from images of press conferences announcing the retention or release of "retained" government officials, demanding the release of prisoners, and one famous image of a half-naked man crouched on his hands and knees over a pool of blood, an abandoned combat boot by his head (see Figure 1.2). I was standing on that very spot.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Atenco Lives!"
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