Sowing Indigenous Autonomy: Building a Common Political-Ethical Territory of Struggle with Zapatista Seed Pedagogics

Abstract

This article inquires into the workings of Zapatista Seed Pedagogics’ (ZSP) building of a political-ethical commons outside the movement’s autonomous territories. Parting from a previous theorization of ZSP as a decolonizing educational process, this writing draws on interviews with external activists of neozapatista networks who have encountered and/or accompanied the movement in the last three decades. These evolving conversations reflect on their learnings in what is a life-long pedagogical process. These include: 1) an ongoing struggle for dismantling internalized hierarchies and vanguards in habits of thinking, being, and doing; 2) the recuperation of historical ancestral memory that builds collective subjectivity; and 3) the organization of collectivities that participate in a common political-ethical territory of struggle transcending nation-state identities. This exploration of ZSP reveals reflexive conscientization in subjects willing to learn and listen differently, suggesting the emergence of a transgeographic political-ethical subject immersed in a co-construction of knowledge with Zapatismo itself.