ISBN: 978-1-942173-05-2 LCCN: 2016952178
Common Notions
131 8th Street, #4
Brooklyn, NY 11215
Design and typesetting by Morgan Buck and Josh MacPhee
Antumbra Design | www.antumbradesign.org
Printed in the USA by the employee-owners of Thomson-Shore
CONTENTS
Marc James Léger and David Tomas
EDELO
with Emory Douglas, Saúl Kak, and Mia Eve Rollow
by Rigo 23
One-Way Ticket: An Interview with Caleb Duarte Piñon
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense Ten-Point Platform and Program
Position Paper on Revolutionary Art
by Emory Douglas
Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle
Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle
by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
Omar Inzunza Perez (Gran OM), Zapantera Negra poster showing the two half faces of Zapatismo and the Black Panther Party, created for encuentro, November 2012. Courtesy of EDELO.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THANKS ARE DUE TO THE Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, and its Director Michèle Thériault for hosting the exhibition Zapantera Negra as well as providing facilities for the interviews with Emory Douglas, Mia Eve Rollow, and Saúl Kak. Thanks to the latter for an inspiring series of meetings and to Caleb Duarte Piñon and Rigo 23 for following up on these with further insights on the story of Zapantera Negra. Thanks to Malav Kanuga and everyone at Common Notions who supported this project from the start and understood its contribution to creative militant research.
Thanks to Emory Douglas for the permission to reprint his revised “Position Paper on Revolutionary Art” and to Billy X Jennings and the Black Panther Party archives for invaluable research material, including the 1966 “Black Panther Party for Self-Defense Ten-Point Program” (modified March 29, 1972) as well as the “Outline of Responsibilities by Rank and File for Black Panther Party Members” (itsabouttimebpp.com). The “Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle” and “Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle” were sourced from Wikipedia under a Creative Commons 3.0 license and cross-referenced with other versions. EZLN materials are not copyrighted. Marcos’ “The Other Player” was sourced from Subcomandante Marcos, Our Word Is Our Weapon, ed. Juana Ponce de Léon (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), which stipulates that the original works of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos are not copyrighted. In keeping with the wishes of the editors of Our Word Is Our Weapon, royalties from this publication have been donated to EDELO for future solidarity projects.
EDELO would like to thank the following communities, organizations and individuals for their participation, support, and creativity, which helped form the Zapantera Negra project. We recognize that our process is slow and at times mixed with a chaotic urgency associated with the process of “not knowing.” This is in the spirit of the Zapatista walk and of artistic process. This work—and its associated cultural movements, communities and individuals—is a clear testament of human endurance, beauty, creation, and celebration that stands in confident parallel to the violent systems that discourage it. We thank the following for allowing us to be witnesses to that extraordinary act of creation: Iztali BiNeza Duarte Martinez, Caracol Morelia, Caracol Ovantic, Colectivo de Bordados Zapatistas, Familia de Pintores Zapatistas Morelia, Las Escuelitas Zapatistas, Comunidad Moises Ghandi, Comunidad Elambo Bajo, Universidad De La Tierra, Doctor Raymundo, Juan Gallo, Omar Inzunza, Regina Galindo, Santiago Mazatl, Grafitti Poetico, Jose Luis, Antun Vaz, Manik B, Muk’ Ta Nab, Aureliano M. Gutierrez, Santiago Armengod, Piña Palmera, Bartolo Martinez, Banlu Lu, Jacobo Alejandro Lagos Melendez, Brenda Obregon, Santiago Marcial, Jaguar De Madera, Favianna Rodriguez, Montserrat Blanco, Carla Astorga, Rael Myrick-Hodges, Paliakate, Centro del Instituto Hemisférico, Diana Taylor, Concordia University, Doris Difarnecio, Rosy Velasco, Grace Remington, Veronique Herbert, Pablo Milan, Florencia Niz, Mercy Verdugo, Jay Davis, Ramiro Martinez, RafaSz, Cindy Urrutia with California State University Fresno, David and Laurie Duarte and Pinta. A special thanks to our Kickstarter supporters.
PREFACE
Marc James Léger and David Tomas
ZAPANTERA NEGRA IS A PROJECT defined by the social, cultural, and political experiences of several art activists who brought together the ideological and aesthetic frameworks of the Zapatistas and Black Panthers. The project coalesced around the alternative architectural site known as EDELO (En Donde Era la ONU [Where the United Nations Used to Be]), a centripetal community and artistic space of collective activities and freewheeling creation founded by Caleb Duarte Piñon and Mia Eve Rollow in 2009 in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.
This book is a medium for those experiences as they reveal the various social spaces that are negotiated through Zapantera Negra, from the Black Arts Movement and the anticolonial, revolutionary politics of the Panthers, to Indigenous cosmology and the communal struggles of the Zapatistas. Voiced and refracted through interviews and personal recollections, and depicted through poetic fantasy and artistic self-determination, the different elements of this book come together to assert an optimistic resistance to social and cultural repression, economic austerity,