Matt Morin makes a very, very welcome return appearance to the blog with his contribution to the festschrift. If you’ve read Matt’s work before, you already know you’re in for a treat. If you haven’t, read on, as Matt combines RATM, the writings of Subcomandante Marcos, and the bit in “Conceiving Parenthood” related to Lysol and feminine hygiene. Best wishes to each of you for a safe and restful Thanksgiving holiday, from KNS and ALH.
We in wit the wind below
Flip this capital eclipse
Them bury life wit IMF shifts, and poison lips
Yo they talk it, while slicin’ our veins yo so mark it
From the FINCAS overseers, to them vultures playin’ markets
She ain’t got nothin’ but weapon and shawl
She is Chol, Tzotzil, Tojolobal, Tzeltal
The tools are her tools, ejidos and ovaries
She is the wind below
-Rage Against the Machine, “Wind Below”
In his 1992 essay titled “A Storm and a Prophecy,”[1] the anonymous EZLN rebel known as Subcomandante Marcos tells of a powerful “wind from above.” This wind—neoliberal economic and governmental policy—with its strong gusts of foreign tourism, harsh penal code, police brutality, and corruption among high-ranking officials, has swept through Mexico, leaving a trail of destruction throughout the communities of indigenous campesinos. Every day, “Pemex [the national oil company]… sucks outs 92,000 barrels of petroleum and 517,000,000,000 cubic feet of gas,” Marcos writes mournfully. And as the company ravages Chiapas’s Lacandona Jungle with impunity, the starving “campesinos are not allowed to cut down trees to cultivate. Every tree that is cut down costs them a fine that is 10 times the minimum wage, and a jail sentence.”[2]
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