Walking and Doing

About Decolonial Practices

xochitl leyva solano, Center for Higher Research in
Social Anthropology (CIESAS) Sureste

translated by joanne rappaport,

Georgetown University

The essay that follows is an English language version of chapter 10 of the book Sjalel kibeltik, Stsisjel ja kechtiki, Tejiendo nuestras races (Khler et al. 2010).1 Sjalel kibeltik (Interweaving our roots) is a co-authored book in four languagesTsotsil, Tseltal, Tojolabal, and Spanishand in three codes of representation: writing, oral, and visual.2 The co-authors call it an (audio) book because of the weight we give to orality and visuality. The (audio) book was collaboratively assembled by a team of two Maya painters, four Maya community communicators, a Japanese violinist, a German visual anthropologist, and me, a woman with Mixtec roots and a Maya heart, who is also an anthropologist.3 Some of the Maya co-authors are members of peasant and indigenous organizations, others belong to artistic or musical groups, and yet others are associated with transnational networks. All of us are members of the Red de Artistas, Comunicadores Comunitarios y Antroplogos/-as de Chiapas (RACCACH, Chiapas Network of Artists, Community Communicators, and Anthropologists).4 In the collectively written introduction to our (audio) book we explain that Sjalel kibeltik was not an end in itself, nor did it originate in an academic research project. Rather, it arose out of a convergence of our own life projects and struggles and, above all, out of the need we all felt to engage in closer communication with the youth and women of rural and urban indigenous communities, from which seven of the ten authors come; we also felt the need to work more closely as a collective (Leyva et al. 2010). Once we agreed on this objective at RACCACH meetings, we decided on long-term, medium-term, and short-term plans of action. In the medium term we proposed to develop the book Sjalel kibeltik and began to set out a dialogical and collective method for working together and for writing and taping our contributions. Our methodology drew upon the ways in which indigenous communities and organizations create consensus, but we were

also inuenced by dialogical strategies in the social sciences, including anthropology, and by the forms of transmitting indigenous knowledge used by the Maya co-authors of Sjalel kibeltik. This collective method provided us with a guide for organizing the content and arriving at a narrative style; contributions were written individually by each of the ten RACCACH members but then discussed in pairs and at RACCACH meetings. In this way, we set about co-producing oral, visual, and written narratives that responded to three basic questions: Where do I come fromwhat are my roots? What kind of work am I doing in my organization and my community? Where are we now and in what direction are we advancing as a community, collective, group, or organization? These questionswhich were drawn up collectivelyguided preparation of our collective-individual stories. Our aim was to reconstruct our wanderings, our encounters, and the challenges we face. The narrative texture was inuenced by biweekly meetings at which we read chapters aloud and shared commentaries that were then incorporated into our writing or audio taping. We feel that the way contributions were developed both reects our methodology and deepens our engagement with our communities. We also feel that it allows us to achieve the same goals in our communities as we do in a classroom. Despite age differences, the co-authors of Sjalel kibeltik share the experience of being cultural activists, but six of us also studied in university and two of us are academic researchers.5 In my case, in addition to lecturing at CIESAS Sureste (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologa Social del Sureste) in San Cristbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, I am involved in academic networks focused on the challenge of an epistemic struggle to decolonize ourselves, the social sciences, and anthropology.6 This struggle includes a search for cognitive justice and epistemic democracy (Sousa Santos 2009) and has sought, from the standpoint of our concrete experiences, to build knowledge from and for feminist and altermundista networks, anti-systemic movements, anti-capitalist organizations, and indigenous collectives and organizations in struggle.7 In other words, Sjalel kibeltik is part of an effort to contribute, in concrete and tangible ways, to creating knowledges that encourage transformations of the system in order to afford all of us a more just and dignied life, not only for academics but for all of those with whom we work and alongside whom we strugglepeople who are usually invisible, impoverished, excluded, and dispossessed but not defeated, as the Aymara-Mestiza sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui asserts (2010 [1984]). One can read/listen to/look at Sjalel kibeltik in its totality at http://jkopkutik.org/ sjalelkibeltik/ for a better understanding of this essay and its context. I am conscious of the risks of decontextualizing material by extracting it from the larger work, but I also believe that including it in this special issue of Collaborative Anthropologies allows dialogue between different geo-historical locations and exchange of experiences, knowledge, and concerns that we might call our theoretical-methodological-epistemic-ethical-political wagers.8 I hope this text will not be seen as a simple testimony. Sjalel kibeltik is not a collection of testimonies in the sense of empirical narratives gathered by a social scientist (Vergara 1999). The introduction explains in detail how each of us wrote our distinct his120 collaborative anthropologies volume 4 2011

tories alone and collectively. These histories are not raw material to be interpreted by an expert; they are part of a broader search for co-understanding, co-interpreting, coproducing, and co-theorizing with and alongside indigenous people, organizations, and movements.9 The interweaving of our roots, histories, and struggles in Sjalel kibeltik has permitted us to create knowledge from the interstices of indigenous art, community media, and anthropology with a commitment to the organized groups who live and struggle in Abya Yala.10

Where Do I Come From?

From a very young age I learned that in our society, skin color is of the rst order and classies people. No one taught me this explicitly, but in Mexico City I experienced this in kindergarten and part of grade school. It was there that some of my classmates called me black for the rst time and others, in a somewhat gentler manner, nicknamed me Negrita Cucurumb (Little Black Cucurumb).11 I remember that when I was ve, I did not totally comprehend why the copper tone that was the color of my skin should be equated with black. Thirty years would have to pass, and there would have to be an armed rebellion led by Maya Zapatistas in Chiapas, before copper-toned skin was described poetically and accepted socially as the color of the earth. We would have to move from a post-revolutionary assimilationist indigenism to neoliberal multiculturalism before an Englishwoman in London would ask me in a completely friendly and cordial tone: Are you a Mexican Aborigine? With her words, that anonymous woman made a positive value judgment not only on my skin color but on what she presupposed were my racial and ethnic origins. Curiously, my immediate reaction was to explain to her that I was a Mestiza and to add that in Mexico, calling a person an Aborigine or Indian was insulting and that what to her was admiration could quickly turn into discrimination. The woman gave me an astonished look, shrugged her shoulders, and turned away without responding to my explanation. I was left thinking. Why had I identied myself as a Mestiza if I had never done so in Mexico? I was doubly preoccupied because at the time I was writing about the ideology of mestizaje (miscegenation) promoted by the Mexican state. This national ideology led us to believe that the future of our country lay in the cosmic race (in the Mestizo) that arose from the mixture of Indian and Spaniard. I closed the episode in my mind by arguing that the discursive lapse that led me to self-identify
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as a Mestiza was a clear indication of the power of the dominant ideology, which penetrates everywhere, into all of us. Ten years before the incident in London, the issue of my identity and origins had already led me to self-reection in anthropology classes. After poking around my family tree, I wrote an essay about how I was the child of Oaxacan migrants to Mexico City, specically migrants from the Lower Mixteca who reached the national capital in the mid1940s, in search of a better life. Like many other young people in their generation, my parents met at one of the Oaxacan social clubs in Mexico City. After my mother married, she maintained links to her family for many years; we, her children, would go with our cousins to Huajuapan de Len in Uncle Ral and Aunt Bebas van to attend relatives quinceaos (lavish fteenth-birthday coming-out parties), weddings, or funeralsevents for people whom we barely knew. I remember Aunt Rosarios old house, with its row of rooms around a central patio, the huge bougainvillea at its center, and the crickets and frogs that sang a chorus on those star-lled nights when we played outside with the daughters of Cousin Evaluz. By the end of 1960 Evaluz had left to work in the yunaites, the United States of America. Anyone would have thought that with such a background, my parents would have given me a Mixtec name, perhaps Yuusavi or Yadee, but my grandmother decided they would baptize me with the name Xochitl, which in the Nahuatl language means ower or queen of the owers. Surely the name was added to the birth registry without an accent on the o because the clerk forgot it. I think the name they gave me was an expression of nationalist pride in the glorious Aztec past that public-school teachers and textbooks spoke of so often. This was a sentiment that in my case would be reined in by fate, as I was very young when I left the great Tenochtitln (the Aztec name for the historic city that is today Mexico City) and lived in many places, ending up in the Maya region, where I have been for thirty years, or two-thirds of my life. So as a woman with a Nahuatl name, a Maya heart, and scarcely explored Mixtec roots, over time I have built my multiple identities.

From Social Commitment to Political Commitment12

There was never any doubt that I would go to university. What was not clear was what I would study. For me, it was clear that I wanted to study
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something that would help me to work with the people and for the people. It could have been law or sociology, except that I quickly realized the former was conducive to corruption and the latter was too urban and too abstract. I think it was the air of the Mayab (Maya lands) in Yucatn that led me to anthropology. I was a dancer in the Provincial Ballet Company, where the maestro Vctor Salas, its founder and director, introduced me to the prima ballerina, Egl Lpez Mendiburu. From her I learned that anthropologists worked with the people and were concerned with culture and history: two things that at the time seemed to me important aspects of my wandering life. I also remember that thanks to my work with the maestro Vctor Salas and his company, I began, little by little, to learn what discipline, creativity, and critical thinking were. Now, thirty years later, I still believe this is the way we should go, a way that was reinforced through my work with the peasants of Yucatn, Michoacn, and Chiapas. So in the mid-1980s, together with my friends Gaby Cervera and Tete Cuevas, I joined a project to work with Yucatec Maya peasants and agronomist disciples of Efraim Hernndez Xolocotzin.13 The projects goal was to use Maya thought to counteract the progress of the modern technological package of improved seeds, agrochemicals, and heavy machinery. We hoped to stimulate better and more appropriate technological and cultural changes in traditional milpa (corneld) cultivation. Later, in 1988, I saw how in north-central Michoacn, the Neocardenista social movement was able to remove the party bosses of the PRI who had long controlled the entire region.14 Before my eyes, peasants, who had always been co-opted, were now rebelling and organizing, so that I began to appreciate fully the importance of grassroots organization and its potential for social transformation. I had read about it in classes with our teacher Jorge Doc Alonso and drew upon it to continue to walk the path of political anthropology. But it was not until I arrived in Chiapas that I stopped being a student of politics and engaged in concrete work with a group that was organized in struggle: la Unin de Uniones Ejidales y Grupos Campesinos Solidarios de Chiapas (Union of Ejido Unions and Peasant Solidarity Groups of Chiapas). When the small plane left me in the heart of the Lacandn Forest, in a village full of guanos (palms) on the Cristalino River, my social commitment began to be transformed into a complex
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political commitment that I am still nurturing, taking delight in, and suffering from twenty-four years later.

First Movement: The Armed Uprising of 1994

We would have stayed in Las Caadas in the Lacandon Forest and missed the uprising of January 1, 1994, if the neighboring villagers had not come a few days before Christmas to ask usalmost in codeif we didnt want to buy a parakeet, at the same time insistently inviting us to leave the forest to visit our families. We were surprised by their persistence and by the unusual number of mules and horses loaded with maize that were arriving in the villages instead of staying for a time, as they usually did, in the cornelds. It all began to make sense on January 1, when we watched on Yucatec television pictures of the taking of the city of San Cristbal. At that moment, I instinctively packed what I could and boarded a plane for Chiapas. I remember that we were stuck in the capital, Tuxtla Gutirrez, for two days, because the roads to San Cristbal and Ocosingo were closed. As is well known, the declaration of war on the Mexican government by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) challenged the ofcial discourse that announced our entry into the First World via the North American Free Trade Agreement. At the same time, the EZLN denounced the discrimination and marginalization that many native peoples suffer. Today a body of literature analyzes how Neozapatismo contributed to a questioning of the states one-party system and its ever-present electoral democracy. The armed movement opened a new phase for social movements in Chiapas by attracting international supporters who embraced the Zapatista political principles of autonomy and resistanceprinciples that became central to the creation and development of altermundista and anti-capitalist movements. The armed uprising of 1994, the war, and the political-military conictwhich still has not been resolvedled us to question our own certainties, our four and a half years of honest and arduous work in the Las Caadas area, and, of course, our way of living and doing anthropology. In the heat of the bombings of the southern neighborhoods of San Cristbal, the crossre in Rancho Nuevo, and the massacre in the marketplace of Ocosingo, in the face of the growing emergence of military checkpoints, the construction of a huge army headquarters in the
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heart of the forest, the emergence of paramilitary groups, the massacre at Acteal, and the development of counterinsurgency policies by the government, at the least we had to ask ourselves: Why and for whom are we writing and doing research? How have we been working and functioning up to now? Answers became clear when the people of Las Caadas, by then in arms, evaluated the regional development program fostered by their own organization, the Union of Unions, and found that it was not sufcient. This program had been intimately tied to funding from then president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and to his neoliberal policies, which continued to reduce peasants to simple producers of calves, pigs, and coffee. But it seems that it was not enough, either, to be a part of the organizations technical team (which was what the Las Caadas peasants called us), nor to reconstruct and co-produce with the communities the history of their colonization of the forest and a study of local religious traditions. Undoubtedly, when the Maya peasants of Las Caadas made an evaluation in 1993, they discovered that many things had failed abysmally, and for this reason they decided to dedicate their lives and those of their families to armed struggle. That is what I thought and wrote about, contradicting the discourse of the government and of some journalists and academics who preached to the media that the rebels were a mass of Indians manipulated by foreigners, by the bishop of San Cristbal, and by lay missionaries. And since I was intimately familiar with the capacity of the rebels for organizing and for hard work, from the very start I took them seriously and participated in the various political proposals they were placing on the table. So after January 1, 1994, we began to participate in very concrete activities, ranging from conrming and denouncing the existence of missiles red at the southern part of the city of San Cristbal to becoming involved in the creationand not just the academic study of Neozapatista networks (see Leyva 2006). What we were doingas many others have done in other times and other placeswas challenging in practice the principles of neutrality, objectivity, and distance that for positivist, neopositivist, and modern scholars constitute the pillars of the production of scientic knowledge.15 Without the Zapatista uprising, no doubt many of us would never have come to rethink our goals, our present, and our personal and colLeyva Solano: Walking and Doing 125

lective histories, nor to create a new radical practice. By moving in the direction of what we have called decolonial practices the autonomous Zapatista municipalities and the Councils of Good Government have come to play an important role.16 Also important has been our participation in La Otra Campaa (The Other Campaign), the Wallerstein Seminar, CIDECI Las Casas/UNITIERRA-Chiapas, the Collective La Otra Historia, Los Otros Saberes . . . (Another History, Other Knowledges. . .), the 99.1 Frecuencia Libre Radio Collective, and of course RACCACH and the collective projects of Governing (in) Diversity and the Indigenous Videomakers of the Southern Border Project (PVIFS). I will speak briey about these last two projects in order to explain more clearly how decolonial practices are always in continuous construction, based in collective practice, emerging from below, from the personal, the spiritual, the subjective, and the intersubjective spheres.

Second Movement: An Other Language, the Audiovisual

In the period after 1997that is, after the Acteal massacre and the dismantling of the Zapatista autonomous municipalitiescame another key moment in our voyage in search of what Latin American thinkers have called the decoloniality of power, knowledge, being, and gender (e.g., Anbal Quijano 1993; Arturo Escobar 2003; Walter Mignolo 2006; Mara Lugones 2008). As I have already mentioned, for many of us this search began thanks to the armed uprising of the EZLN, and it continued to be constructed and deepened through our concrete practice as we started to work in a language different from writing, an audiovisual language. In order to explain better what I mean by decolonial knowledge and practice I look at some concrete experiences that I hope will help me communicate more clearly with everyone, and not just with the experts. As many are aware, what counts in academic institutions and communities is writing texts and publishing them. That is what gives meaning to homo academicus (see Bourdieu 2009 [1984]). This is not by chance; it is a response to many historical factors, such as the origins of the Academy and the social sciences as hierarchical, institutionalized, and systematic spaces of power, born of the West and of modernity.17 In the academic world, written language is expressed in colonial/ imperial tonguesEnglish, French, German, Spanishwhich in a
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play of power and hierarchy leave behind the colonized languages for example, Maya languages. In the face of colonial/imperial written language, any oral, visual, or audiovisual expression is seen as inferior; it is depreciated, undervalued, made invisible. In the academic world, video, photo, and radio production is labeled as simple popularizing material, occupying a secondary status, a gesture that researchers make (note: optionally) when they have already lled their quotas of single-authored books, articles, papers, reviews, etc. Many colleagues follow these rules of the game (sometimes without really being conscious of them), and few dare to delve seriously into the audiovisual sphere; to do that would place your time, your merit review, your salary, your status, and your prestige at riskbesides which it means learning to express yourself in a language different from writing, to use a different technology, and to be interested in reaching a different public and not just students and colleagues. But please do not get me wrong or get angry with me, because I do not mean to say that all academics should make audiovisual material but simply that the subordinate status of audiovisual material in the academic world is the result of a deep systemic logic that reproduces the coloniality of knowledge.18 I also want to emphasize that written language, privileged in the Academy, has its own very long colonial history and severely limits our achievement of a real, horizontal, and uid dialogue with the members of the communities and indigenous nations with whom we work, whose tradition and lived reality (especially in the rural world) continues to be mostly oral. So let us return to the story I was telling. As we began reecting on all this, we were once again shaken by reality. In various parts of Chiapas, paramilitary groups were attacking the Zapatistas and some peasant and indigenous organizations. On December 22, 1997, nineteen women, fourteen girls, four boys, eight men, and four unborn children of the organization Sociedad Civil Las Abejas (The Bees Civil Society), who had taken refuge in the Los Naranjos camp, were massacred by paramilitaries in the village of Acteal, in the municipality of Chenalh. This was at precisely the same time as the autonomous municipalities were being violently dismantled by order of the PRI government.19 The massacre occurred at a moment when the militarization of the state had reached its most critical point. Without doubt, the context required immediate action by a committed and creative civil society.
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It was in that context of militarization and paramilitarization that I and my partner, the visual anthropologist Axel Khler, organized a diplomado (workshop) that would be the seed of what would later become the Indigenous Videomakers of the Southern Border Project (PVIFS 2007).20 This project responded to young indigenous members of rural and urban organizations in Chiapas, Oaxaca, Yucatn, and Guatemala who were already producing their own videos or were interested in beginning to do so. Perhaps the most important contribution of the PVIFS was to facilitate the video making of young Tsotsils, Tseltals, and Chols inside their own organizational frameworks in the city of San Cristbal and in some indigenous communities in northern Chiapas, in the Lacandn Forest, and in the Highlands region. This not only meant contributing to the creation of the material conditions for training in camerawork, editing, and postproduction, but also involved a discussion of contents and meanings. For the past seven years, all the project members have fostered the production and distribution of indigenous videos in Native communities as well as in national and international lm and video festivals. We have all sought to make what we have produced together as meaningful and useful to a midwife in the community as to a student or scholar at the university. Although we did accomplish a great deal in the project, I should also mention what we did not achieve: we were not able to stimulate interest in social research among all of the indigenous video makers of the PVIFS; that is, the goal of placing research at the service of their organizations, groups, and collectives.21 Perhaps this was not possible due to the colonial and extractive nature of research itself, which for many automatically brings forth a reaction of suspicion and denial. Perhaps it was not possible because we still were not clear on how to achieve it, and so it was easier to subordinate our agenda to that of the groups and the young people with whom we were working. In short, it was only at another moment and in another context that we began to construct another agenda, which we call a shared agenda.22

Third Movement: Another Agenda, a Shared One

It was 2003. The creation of the Zapatista Councils of Good Government marked a watershed in the history of the struggle for autonomy,
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now operating on a regional level. Their founding also conrmed the fact that the Zapatista struggle was ultimately one of political and civilian resistance. On the Latin American stage, other movements of Native peoples were beginning to articulate anti-neoliberal demands and to work toward the reconstruction of their peoplehood. For example, the Mapuches in southern Chile fought ercely against the lumber and mining companies that were advancing on their communities. Members of the indigenous nationalities of Ecuador took over the streets of the capital to oppose the governments neoliberal plans and to bring down politicians. In Bolivia, Native people from rural and urban areas began to ght against the privatization of water, at the same time that Miskitos, Mayangnas, and Sumus on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua demanded a true autonomy that went beyond the constitutional statute achieved under the Sandinistas. Various wings of the Maya movement in Guatemala, less spectacularly but just as importantly, demanded compensation for the surviving relatives of the victims of thirty-six years of ethnocidal war, at the same time promoting Maya spirituality. The project we nally decided to call Governing (in) Diversity was set in motion that same year, with the participation of indigenous intellectuals from many of these movements, including ve indigenous organizations in Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Milpa Alta, and thirteen academics. A goal for many of us was to begin to operate within the framework provided by feminist notions of positionality. That is, from the start we hoped to recognize openly the spaces from which we were co-producing knowledge, and for whom. But what was central was the fact of having indigenous intellectuals and organizations interested in research as our counterparts; this was key to building a shared agenda for collaborating and co-researching.23 This is easily enough said but very difcult to achieve, since each of the groups involvedthe academics, the indigenous intellectuals, and their organizationshad its own rhythms, priorities, and interests. The challenge we faced was how to create a substantial space of overlapping interests where we could collectively decide on what we would study and identify the uses this dialogically produced knowledge arising out of collaboration would have for all the parties involved. The Governing (in) Diversity project was important in terms of what its collaborative methodology contributed in practice. Also signicant
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was the process of joint analysis of different governing experiences and of policies of governance that indigenous organizations had implemented in different places and times. It is also important to emphasize the one-on-one dialogues we held to exchange different kinds of knowledge: the knowledge of the Native peoples and of the academics.24 In spite of all our time and effortindeed, ve years of our livesit is important to engage in self-criticism and to point out that our writings were produced in an academic jargon that overshadowed other forms of knowledge. Moreover, the nal results of our collective endeavor were published as a book that came out only in Spanish and never achieved wide distribution among the grassroots organizations of our counterparts. This led us, once again, to reect on our work and seek out other pathways and strategies.

Fourth Movement: Beyond a Shared Agenda, Engaging Our Roots, Idioms, and Languages25
As we explain in our introduction to Sjalel kibeltik, this work did not arise out of an academic research project or even out of an academic project with nonacademic partners. The (audio) book emerged out of our life-projects and, more concretely, out of a collective need to transcend the limitations that we experienced building an agenda.26 It also came out of the need to build relations among us and with our indigenous, artistic, political communities. In January of 2008 we founded the Chiapas Network of Artists, Community Communicators, and Anthropologists (RACCACH), each of us aware of our own experience and our own reasons for committing to this new intertwined path.27 For me in particular, this was the beginning of a seventh attempt to nd a better path in life that promised the possibility of pursuing my own autonomous course interlinked with the other members of the network and with their communities of origin and their organizations. Rethinking our roots and reassessing their value constituted a process that helped us to relate to one another as a network and gave life to our (audio) book. The reevaluation of our ancestral roots is not something that only occurred in the RACCACH network; indeed, it lies at the heart of the ethno-political struggles, organizations, and movements across our continent that are working toward the reconstitution of
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First Nations. We suggest our small contribution be read within this framework. The notion of undressing ourselvesas RACCACH member Damin Guadalupe Martnez Martnez (2010) called itthrough the exposition of our personal histories never had egotistical purposes (me here, me there, me everywhere) but was meant to draw us closer to larger collective processes.28 We could even say that the very process of preparing an (audio) book has been a way of practicing decolonial knowledge, by moving against a coloniality of knowledge that tends to recreate the Other as exotic, primitive, and traditional. The Other for whom one speaks, the Other one interpretsthe very act of doing so turns the person into a thing and is dehumanizing. In contrast, what each of us was exploring was how to speak for ourselves; constructing ourselves in conversation with others who, while different, were equal at a basic human level. As we all know, Otherness intensies difference, accentuating it, reproducing it. It is not by accident that producing Others, Otherism, is the privilege of colonial/imperial difference. And I do not say that in order to repeat fancy theories; I say it thinking especially of our experiences in the RACCACH network. While I as the anthropologist emphasized the indigenous and Maya dimensions of the network members, my counterparts emphatically pointed out that there were also a German man and a Japanese woman in the network; which is to say, they emphasized the interculturality that was unfolding. Juan Chawuk (2010) titled his chapter A Universal Being, not A Tojolabal Being. In one part of his text, Chawuk declared that in the rst place we are human beings and deserve respect. I think these simple words constitute a stirring call to the West and to humanity, reminding us of the arguments made by defenders of First Peoples in colonial times. However, we are not living in the sixteenth century but at the dawn of the twenty-rst century. And I ask myself: Why would an artist of Tojolabal roots, with his oeuvre and his writings, have to remind us of his humanity? My only possible response is that it is because we live in a society that is still not capable of dignifying him with that recognition. A similar plea can be heard and read in all of the spoken and written chapters of Sjalel kibeltik. We also did not want the (audio) book to be trapped in Spanish. To the contrary, we have sought to give equal weight to Tsotsil, Tseltal,
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and Tojolabal in the written and spoken versions. This has presented a series of ample challenges to each of us and to RACCACH as a whole, which we point out in detail in the introduction to Sjalel kibeltik (Leyva et al. 2010). Here I will add only that we cannot achieve a true and deep intercultural dialogue if all the conversations take place only in Spanish and if one does not speak and understand the mother tongue of those with whom one is working. I am sure that if our discussions had taken place exclusively in Tsotsil, Tseltal, or Tojolabal, we would have produced something quite different, because our intersubjective dialogues would have been different. The same goes for the writing of the chapters; if they had rst been written in the authors mother tongues, the results would surely have been different. This leaves many of the coauthors of this (audio) book with the urgent task of learning to read, write, or speak well in our respective languages.

What Next?
This (audio) book was not born of the cold calculations of an academic seated at her desk speculating (in other words, producing something out of nothing). Therefore, it is not an end in itself, but instead, as we all afrmed at our January 2008 meeting, we hope that our (audio) book will become a medium, a tool, that will help us to develop a concrete collaboration with the indigenous, artistic, academic, and political communities to which we belong, and with the Native youth of the countryside and the city. I believe that if this (audio) book does not arrive in the hands of the members of those communities, if it does not address them and move them, we have merely produced more of the same, and the thirty-six months of hard, voluntary, and self-directed work by each of us will have little value. I want to close by emphasizing the importance of this (audio) book in bringing together people who work in the arts, in community media, and in committed research. It seems to me to be appropriate to look at Sjalel kibeltik as a small grain of sand in a continental process that is on the move, in which men and women of Native communities and various organizations and movements of Abya Yala are taking the lead in social research with the aim of allowing their cosmovisin (worldview) and culture to contribute to a just life in plenitude, not of the few but of humanity in general.29
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I hope that in our community spaces, in our organizations, and in our artistic, political, and academic activities we will be able to nurture creatively and collectively the co-creation/co-production of knowledge of the peoplescommunities, organizations, and movementsinvolved. Or, to put it another way, it is our right to stop being raw material for others, but it is above all a weighty responsibility. Let us assume it together!
xochitl leyva solano is a researcher and senior lecturer at the Center for Higher Research in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) and an active member of the University of the EarthChiapas. She has worked since 1987 in Chiapas, Mexico. In 2010 with Mayan artists, community communicators, and a visual anthropologist, she co-authored the book Sjalel kibeltik. In 2008 with indigenous organizations of Abya Yala and committed anthropologists, she co-authored the book Gobernar en la diversidad: Experiencias indgenas desde Amrica Latina. In 2000 she co-founded Proyecto Videoastas Indgenas de la Frontera Sur. Leyva has contributed to the development co-labor research (investigacin de co-labor) and research with roots, heart, and co-reason (investigacin con raz, corazn y co-razn).

Notes
1. I thank Joanne Rappaport for her invitation to publish my reections in English in this journal, and for her translation of chapter 10 of Sjalel kibeltik, as well as for sharing her thoughts in our Methodology II course in the graduate program in social anthropology at the CIESAS Sureste, Chiapas, Mexico. I also thank Axel Khler for his comments and assistance in the editing of this text, and I thank the copyeditor for massaging my prose. 2. The entire (audio) book Sjalel kibeltik, Stsisjel ja kechtiki, Tejiendo nuestras races can be accessed at http://jkopkutik.org/sjalelkibeltik/. 3. Two of the four community communicators have university degrees; one is a sociologist, the other an anthropologist. 4. Three are young members of independent indigenous peasant organizations that have been engaged in struggle since the 1990s; another four are youth who are pioneering pintura con raz (painting that draws on the artists indigenous roots), indigenous video and photography, and batsi rock (a fusion of rock and traditional music with lyrics in Tsotsil). 5. The youngest RACCACH member is a twenty-year-old Tsotsil painter, followed by seven members in their thirties, and two of us who are forty-eight and fty-four years of age. 6. For an idea of the academic networks, note the contributors to the two-volume collective book Reexiones desde nuestras prcticas polticas y de conocimiento situado (Reections from our political practice and situated knowledge; Leyva et al. 2011): they come from Central America (Guatemala), the Caribbean (Cuba), South America (Colombia, Argentina, the Mapuche Nation, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil), Mexico (Chiapas, Guadalajara, Xalapa, Mexico City, and Yucatn), the United States (North CaroliLeyva Solano: Walking and Doing 133

na, Austin, Washington, D.C.), Canada, and ve European countries (Spain, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Portugal, and Germany). The central concerns they address are: From what subject positions do we produce knowledge? For what purpose? For whom, with whom, and how? How can we build a social science grounded in transformative, liberatory, and emancipatory commitment, from our various sites of enunciation, our distinct positionalities, and our concrete activities? The decolonial knowledge practices of First Nations in struggle, resisting and organizing in different ways since colonial times, have inspired, guided, and motivated us in producing Sjalel kibeltik. The quest for decolonization of anthropology and the social sciences also has a long history, some of it partially or completely unknown. Sjalel kibeltik is part of this history. Among its points of reference are Maya art and indigenous community media but also anthropology and sociology, in which four of the ten co-authors have degrees. On a personal note, debates on academic politics have been of great importance for my own engagement in various collectives and the quest for decolonizing power, knowledge, being, and gender. Seminal contributors to these debates have included French Caribbean and African authors who were part of the liberation struggles against colonialism in the second half of the twentieth centuryFanon, Csaire, and Cabraland postcolonial and decolonial feminists like Mohanty, Haraway, Rivera Cusicanqui, Lugones, Hernndez Castillo, Surez, Marcos, and Waller, to name but a few. Other signicant inuences have been Fals Borda, Bonilla, and Castillo of Colombias La Rosca de Investigacin y Accin Social (Circle of Social Research and Action); Quijano, Escobar, Dussel, Mignolo, and other members of the research program on modernity/coloniality and decolonial thought (MCD); the driving forces of the World Anthropologies Network (WAN); activist researchers like Hale, Greenwood, Gordon, and Speed; collaborative ethnographers, in particular Lassiter and Rappaport, as well as the pioneer work of shared or collaborative research being advanced in Abya Yala by the likes of Tibn, Marimn, Hernndez Ixcoy, Aguilar, Gmez, Khler, Burguete, Daz Polanco, Speed, Snchez, Aylwin, Gutirrez, Bastos, and Garca. 7. For more on this alternative form of producing knowledge, see the Grupo de Mujeres Mayas Kaqla (Kaqla Maya Womens Group) and the Maya Association UKux Be, both in Guatemala; the Indigenous Videomakers of the Southern Border Project in Chiapas, Mexico; the Nociones Comunes (Common Notions) and Tracantes de Sueos (Dream Dealers) projects in Spain; the work of the Argentinean Colectivo Situaciones (Situations Collective); the Investigadores Descalzos (Barefoot Researchers) in Oaxaca, Mexico; the seminars and fora held at CIDECI Las Casas/UnitierraChiapas in Mexico; El Colectivo (The Collective) in Bolivia; and the Programa Democracia y Transformacin Global (Democracy and Global Transformation Program) in Peru. 8. A dialogue between different geo-historical locations, with the conviction that the future can no longer be imagined from one single and overarching perspective. See Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: A Web Dossier, http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/wko/ dossier2.1archive.php. 9. Regarding the hierarchy/discrimination of scientic knowledge toward other ways of knowing/knowledge, see e.g., Sousa Santos 2009 (chap. 1). On co-interpreting see Lassiter et al. 2004; Lassiter 2005; on co-producing knowledge see Casas et al. 2008; and co-theorizing see Bertely 2011; Khler 2011; Rappaport 2008. 10. The meaning of Abya Yala is ripe land, land in ower, or living land in the Kuna language of Panama. It is what the Kuna and other First Peoples called the American continent before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Today, members of ethno-

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political movements use the term in an effort to distance themselves from the colonial/ imperial categories imposed by Europeans. 11. This nickname was taken from a popular song about a little black girl by the Mexican singer and songwriter Cri-Cri. 12. Although I do not mention it in the original Spanish text, it seems to me that it is important to point out that in my case, this concern with knowing and interpreting in order to transform has its roots in Marxism. But as many postcolonial theorists have noted, it is time to go beyond Marx, who advocated representing subjects as if they were not able to represent themselves (Mohanty 2003: 42), and beyond a Marxism that sees European history as the legitimate norm for all societies; as such, Marxism is incapable of adequately theorizing the phenomenon of modern colonialism (Castro-Gmez, Guardiola, and Milln 1999: 1011). For that reason, it seemed crucial to counterpose my Marxist heritage with that of the original decolonizers of this continent: the First Peoples. It is from their history and their resistance today, that (we) derive the notion of how to think and act in the direction of decolonial practice. I emphasize practice, so that we do not remain at the level of attractive discourses and complex narratives that could end up reinforcing the global system of power/knowledge. 13. Efraim Hernndez Xolocotzin was a pioneer in the study of traditional agricultural systems and Mexican ethnobotany. 14. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party) controlled Mexican politics for most of the twentieth century. 15. See, for example, the authors referred to in notes 6, 7, and 1012. 16. The Zapatista Councils of Good Government exist within the Zapatista Caracoles (Snails), consisting of elected representatives from each of the autonomous municipal councils. Their goal is to coordinate autonomy, resistance, and good local and regional government. 17. The Academy (capitalized) signies a scientic, literary, or artistic society functioning in an institutionalized formgenerally in educational institutionswith public or private funding. Its origin lies in ancient Greece, where in 384 BC Plato founded the rst Academy to teach mathematics, dialectics, and natural sciences. The West is used as a counterpoint to the East, and both of these terms have been coined to orient the European gaze and the form in which history is written there. The West is used as a synonym for Western culture, the Western world, and Western civilization, but in all cases it harks back to Greco-Roman and medieval European cultures that expanded over the world through conquest and war. Enrique Dussel (2005: 45) points out that what today we call modernity should be understood as an emancipation, an exit from immaturity through the use of reason as a critical process, which opens humanity to a new development of the human being. Dussel cautions that this is the dominant and accepted denition of modernity, which has at its center Europe and intra-European experiences. To counter this perception, he appeals to a vision of modernity that has a global scope. As he shows convincingly, since 1492 modern Europe has constituted all other cultures as its colonial periphery through the use of violence. 18. Clearly, it is not that simple. There are also researchers who produce audiovisual materials that reproduce the coloniality of knowledge. 19. See the chapter by Jos Alfredo Jimnez Prez (2010) in Sjalel kibeltik. 20. Indigenous video emerged in Chiapas at the beginning of the 1990s among organized indigenous peasants from the Selva Norte (Northern Forest) region of Chiapas (see Estrada 2010). The work of indigenous video makers expanded in 1995 and was Leyva Solano: Walking and Doing 135

included within the autonomous Zapatista municipalities that arose after the armed uprising of 1994. The Proyecto de Medios de Comunicacin Comunitaria, A.C. (Chiapas Media Project, now better known as Promedios) played an important role in articulating indigenous video with resistance and de facto autonomy. Before the founding of the PVIFS in 2000, two nongovernmental organizations, the Civil Association Melel Xojobal, A.C., and the Red de Comunicadores Boca de Polen (Pollen Mouth Communicators Network), promoted community media in Chiapas. 21. On the achievements and challenges of the PVIFS, see the 2007 multimedia series and web page http://sureste.ciesas.edu.mx/Proyectos/PVIFS/pagina_principal.html. 22. About the concept of a shared agenda, see Fals Borda (1985), Rouch (2003 [1973]), Hale (2008), and Leyva, Burguete, and Speed (2008). 23. The original Spanish version of this text uses co-labor instead of collaborating or collaboration in this and the following sentences.Trans. 24. See the introductory sections at the beginning of each of the ten chapters in Leyva, Burguete, and Speed (2008). See also the methodological chapter by Leyva and Speed (2008). 25. The original Spanish uses the constructed expression, en-red-ndonos, a pun on getting ourselves entangled that simultaneously signies interweaving ourselves and walking together in a network, more intricate than the English gloss of engaging.Trans. 26. I am referring to an agenda that we produced with the participation of Maya artists and video makers and that was published by the CIESAS in 2008. 27. Intertwined is en-red-ados in the original Spanish, a play between entangled, interlinked, and networked.Trans. 28. Egotistical purposes is given as yosmo in the original Spanish.Trans. 29. A preliminary bibliography of indigenous intellectuals and professionals working from their own roots and culture can be found in Sjalel kibeltik, 37085, or on its website.

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