Subterranean echos: Resistance and politics “desde el Sótano”

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Notes

1. [“From the basement” – an expression used by Subcomandante Marcos.]

2. I use the words “margins” and “marginality” in a merely descriptive sense. The term “exclusion” refers to persons or social sectors that were not granted social rights within the context of welfare state legislation.

3. [See Pablo González Casanova's article in this issue.]

4. On the “ethnic territories” in Ecuador, see Ramón Valarezo (1993); on the Aymara quarters, see Patzi (2003).

5. Subcomandante Marcos's text “Un mundo nuevo” is a good synthesis of the Zapatista responses to these and other questions.

6. What is certain is that, as E.P. Thompson and other social historians have pointed out, cultural homogeneity never existed. But now we face an even bigger problem. The changes that have taken place in our societies are of such scope that traditional social history (working-class history, basically) cannot comprehend them. Everything indicates that we must now turn – even in countries and regions where the original populations have almost disappeared – to so-called “subaltern studies,” since the complexity of a society fragmented by “neocolonialization” calls for more appropriate analytic instruments than the ones we have up to now been using, at least in the Río de la Plata region.

7. [Seringueiros is Portuguese for the itinerant rubber tappers in Brazil's Amazon forest.]

8. During the Bolivian insurrection of October 2003, the rebels destroyed pedestrian overpasses from which the military surveilled and fired on the population. To control the asentamientos – flat spaces spread out over wide areas – the repressive apparatus must now gain entry to the barrio, as there are no longer any “high points” from which it can keep watch.

9. Semi-entrepreneurial units have fewer than four workers, one or two of them being relatives, including the owner (who also works) and the other(s) being employed.

10. [Gathering of representatives of Indigenous peasant, teacher and student organizations aimed at creating an autonomous peasant movement to voice both economic and cultural demands. To mark its distance from the officialist National Confederation they formed the Centro Cultural Tupaj Katari in memory of Julian Apaza, the leader of the 1871 Aya uprising who took the name of Tupaj Katari (resplendent serpent).]

11. [The @ symbol has come into use in Spanish to merge the masculine “-o” with the feminine “-a.”]

12. Ranajit Guha, referring to colonial India, compares the politics of the elite with “the politics of the people.” He points out that “mobilization in the sphere of elite politics was carried out vertically, while that of the subalterns was carried out horizontally.” He adds that the former was “more cautious and controlled,” whereas the latter was “more spontaneous” and was based on traditional territorial and kinship organization (Guha 2002: 37).

13. [Followers and activists that coalesced around the Centro Cultural Tupaj Katari with the goal of creating an autonomous indigenous movement. See note 10.]

14. On the steps being taken by the “marginados” of Montevideo, see Brecha 2000, 2003.

15. Statement of Venezuelan economist Asdrúbal Baptista, cited by Moreno (2000: 173) to explain how the popular sectors can go on with their lives despite all predictions. For Moreno, the explanation is that “the people have their own forms of survival based on the system of relations centered in the family, which in turn has its own very distinct characteristics.”

16. In the Ecuadoran case, the long-term underground project of the Quechuas of the Sierra was the “reconstruction of ethnic territories” (Ramón Valarezo 1993: 188–203).

17. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871), Section III. (The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R.C. Tucker, 2nd edn [New York: Norton, 1978], p. 635f.)