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Territories of resistance: the impact of the Zapatista Rebellion on artistic practices in Mexico City, 1994-1995

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Territories of resistance: the impact of the Zapatista Rebellion on artistic practices in Mexico City, 1994-1995

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Territories of Resistance: The Impact of the Zapatista Rebellion on Artistic Practices in Mexico
City, 1994-1995

by
Daniela Lieja Quintanar

A thesis presented to the
Faculty of the USC, Roski School of Art and Design
University of Southern California
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
Masters of Art and Curatorial Studies in the Public Sphere
May 2015

Lieja Quintanar 2
DEDICATION
For La Ezcuelita Zapatista, the Caracol of la Realidad “Madre de Todos los Caracoles,”
Votán, Maxi and his family, and the Zapatista autonomous village of Santa Rosa.

Lieja Quintanar 3
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Any work such as this would not have been realized without the generous support of
several people I wish to thank. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my readers:
Amelia Jones for her generous advice and insight in this project; to Noura Wedell for bringing
clarity to my ideas and for instilling confidence in my writing and A.L. Steiner for invaluable
advice. Thank you Irene Tsatsos for unwavering encouragement and tremendous insight she
provided.
My sincere indebtedness to the artist Taniel Morales who provided a wealth of
knowledge and valuable insights. Thank you Enrique Arriaga for sharing with me all your ideas
and information about these topics.
My sincere indebtedness to the individuals who provided a wealth of knowledge for this
project and my academic career: Rhea Anastas, John Tain, Bruce Hainley. To my classmates
Selene Preciado, Sam Gregg, Lucia Fabio and Heber Rodríguez. Thanks to Anthony Carfello,
Toro Castaño and Michelle Águilar Vera for the tremendous help with my writing and
translations. My appreciation also goes to the incomparable resources and helpful individuals at
the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities and Centro de
Documentación Ex Teresa. Thanks to Foundation JUMEX and FONCA for support my studies.
I would like to extend my most sincere gratitude to my lovely family: Altamar, Arturo,
Claudia and Ricardo –for fostering my curiosity and supporting my scholar endeavors. Thank
you to my friends in Mexico and in LA and to Oliver Sweet for their love and encouragement.

Lieja Quintanar 4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication 2
Acknowledgements 3
Abstract 5
Introduction 6
Zapatismo: A Brief History 11
The Mexican Art Context 18
La Panadería: La Feria del Rebelde 27
Ø Planning the Project, Constructing Ideas and Concepts 38
Ø Many Paths Crossed All the Time 39
Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone 44
Ø The State: Still Present in Artistic Practices 46
Ø Critical Intervention in Public Space: Newspapers 49
Ø Performing Reality with Symbols 55
Conclusion 58
Bibliography 62

Lieja Quintanar 5
ABSTRACT

This thesis introduces the reader to the relationships between arts and politics in
Mexico in a specific moment of the 1990’s, during the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and its
aftermath in the years that followed. To explore this relationship, two main art projects are
analyzed: an event called La feria del rebelde (The Rebel’s Fair, 1994) organized in the
alternative space La Panadería in Mexico City, and the project Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone
(1995) realized by Chicano and Mexican artists in different venues in both Los Angeles and
Mexico City, with a specific focus on the art space X’Teresa Arte Alternativo in Mexico City.
This thesis has been written from a curatorial perspective that calls for creating new tools and
methodologies to approach artistic practices. It posits research itself as a territory of resistance to
global neoliberal governance, and wishes to establish a critical and political position to approach,
interpret and analyze artistic practices. By using the Zapatista philosophy and setting the
Zapatista uprising as the main axis of this investigation, I am attempting to move away from
dominant academic and theoretical discourses, from a sole reading of artistic practice through an
economic lens, and from an ongoing canonical history. Through its method and its objects, this
thesis attempts to make a trace within a territory of resistance, a territory that is built through
ideas, discourses, artistic practices and everyday life, and one that is not constrained by the
physical borders of nation-states.

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INTRODUCTION

“This is the weapon, brothers and sisters. We say: the word remains. We speak
the word. We shout the word. We raise the word and with it break the silence of
our people. We kill the silence by living the word. Let us leave power alone in
what the lie speaks and hushes. Let us join together in the word and the silence
which liberate.”
From the mountains of southeast Mexico, Clandestine Indigenous
Revolutionary Committee EZLN, October 12, 1995.
1

This study attempts to show how the Zapatista uprising of January 1, 1994 was, and still
is, a significant factor in the relationship between art and politics in Mexico. On the one hand,
the uprising called for a radical resistance against a world ruled by globalized neoliberal policies,
such that the Zapatistas rejected state institutions and created a project of autonomy and
resistance. On the other hand, in 1995, the relationship between contemporary art and the
cultural institutions of Mexico grew stronger. As a consequence, a number of artists secured a
place for themselves in the global art world, particularly in the part of that world located in the
United States,
2
while others placed their bets on social or pedagogical projects. The Zapatista
struggle stood against the perceived decadence of the capitalist system, its rising social inequality
brought about by the excessive exploitation of both land and people, and its exaggerated
differences between classes and in terms of national development. The Zapatistas offered another

1
Subcomandante Marcos and Juana Ponce de Leon, Our word is our weapon: Selected writings. (New
York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), 77.
2
Daniel Montero, El cubo de Rubik, arte mexicano en los años 90 (Mexico City: Editorial RM, 2013), 139.
He gives as evidence the exhibitions: Lavatio Corporis de Semefo (1994) in Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Acné
(1995) and Paseos/Walks by Francis Alys (1997), both in the Museo de Arte Moderno, and the opening of X’Teresa
Arte Alternativo.
Lieja Quintanar 7
possibility, arguing for the redistribution of wealth and the autonomous self-management by
indigenous peoples. Such diverging options created tension in artistic discourses and practices,
forcing artists to reevaluate and renegotiate both positions.
In this text, I will use the political philosophy of the Zapatistas and the historical moment
of 1994 and the years that followed as a point of departure to approach two important art
projects: La feria del rebelde (The Rebel’s Fair, 1994) and Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone
(1995). Both focused on opening a space of dialogue and developing discussions about social
and political conditions through art. As John Holloway and Eloína Peláez mention in
"Reinventing Revolution," the introduction to their 1998 book Zapatista!, “The Zapatista
uprising opens a world that appeared to be closed, gives life to a hope that seemed to be dead.”
3

In the same way, artists intended either to build a discourse closely related to that of the Ejército
Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN or Zapatista Army of National Liberation), or to detach
from it. Either way, artists paid attention to the radicalism of the EZLN and the movement’s aim
to gain national and international support through communicational mechanisms focusing on the
power of ideas. The Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos, in a communiqué from August 8, 1997,
stated “We don’t want to struggle for power, because the struggle for power is central to the
world we reject; it does not form part of the world we want.” And as Holloway and Peláez noted,
“the fact that a revolutionary organization such as the EZLN say that they are struggling not to
take power but to abolish power makes them very ordinary and thereby very extraordinary.” This
fundamental position established a significant distance from other movements and guerrilla-
identified groups. The Zapatistas highlighted this strategy as a better way of asserting their

3
John Holloway and Eloín Peláez, ed., Zapatista! (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 1.
Lieja Quintanar 8
resistance, and with it, they legitimized their movement and gained international support from
other civilian resistance organizations.
4

The Zapatista platform emphasized post-colonialist forms of political engagement based
on personal identities and rights, embracing feminism, antiwar movements, and gay rights, and
also calling for solidarity between groups. “Let’s build a world where I can be, and not to cease
being me, where you can be, and not have to cease being you, and where neither I nor you will
force another to be like either me or you. […] A world where many worlds fit.”
5
The movement
has maintained its existence since 1994 through exchange with other struggling groups, and a
transnational Zapatista solidarity network has emerged with the strategy of encuentros or
conventions.
6
It is endebted to the history of politics after 1960, where grassroots efforts
“anchored in still-forming notions of protest (against war, imperialism, or corporate crime) and
ethnic, gender, and sexual identifications of the “personal” began to define multiple public
discussions that gave voice to difference and heterogeneity within the collective.”
7
More recent
connections are visible in activism focused on urban protests, from ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to
Unleash Power) beginning in 1987, to the anti-World Trade Organization social movements of
1999/2000, each of which had points of intersection with Zapatismo.
8

La feria del rebelde (The Rebel’s Fair) opened on December 1, 1994 in La Panadería,
an art space in what used to be a bakery in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City. The main
intent of the organizers of the event was to generate a space of conversation, through visual arts,

4
Ibid., 4-5.
5
Marcos and Ponce de Leon, 169.
6
For more information about the transnational Zapatista solidarity network, see Thomas Olesen,
International Zapatismo: The Construction of Solidarity in the Age of Globalization (London and New York: Zed,
2005), 2-8.
7
Claudia Mesch, Art and Politics: A Small History of Art for Social Change Since 1945 (London:
I.B.Tauris, 2013), ProQuest ebrary, 1.
8
For more information about this history and its relationship to the Zapatistas, see Benjamin Heim Shepard
and Ronald Hayduk From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization
(London: Verso, 2002), 282-289.
Lieja Quintanar 9
music, and radio proposals, about the political events during the past year in Mexico. The title
was a straight reference to the movement that had begun eleven months earlier. Itala Schmelz
and Vicente Razo coordinated the fair, with contributions and ideas from artists Gustavo Artigas,
Mariana Botey, Miguel Calderón, Colectivo Galería Manteles, Andrea Ferreyra, Luis Figueroa,
Jorge Juanes, Jerónimo López (Dr. Lakra), Taniel Morales, Yoshua Okón, Vicente Razo, and
Pilar Villela.
9

Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone (1995) was an experimental art exchange between
Mexico City and Los Angeles, curated by Josephine Ramírez, Lorena Wolffer, and Guillermo
Gómez-Peña. The event took place during the month of February with Los Angeles-based artists
including Luis Alfaro, Elia Arce, Nao Bustamante, Rubén Ortíz, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña,
and for the Mexican side, with Felipe Ehrenberg, Eugenia Vargas, Elvira Santa María, César
Martínez, and Lorena Wolffer. A number of performances and projects were developed in
Mexico City, primarily at X’Teresa (now Ex Teresa) and its surroundings in the city’s Historic
Center, and in Los Angeles, at various locations including the University of California, Los
Angeles, 18
th
Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, and other public spaces in areas such as
downtown’s Olvera Street (the original site for the founding of the city in the eighteenth
century). The socio-political conditions of both countries (Mexico and the US) were the principal
subjects of the event, with dialogue being an extremely important element of the project—for
example, three days of the program were dedicated to discussions and roundtables at X’Teresa
(though, curiously, this part of the project wasn’t open to the public). The references to the
EZLN movement were inevitable and pertinent in the different projects realized in this context,

9
Alex Dorfsman and Yoshua Okón ed., La panadería, 1994-2002. (Mexico City: New York: Editorial
Turner de Mexico and CONACULTA, 2005), 50.
Lieja Quintanar 10
as the Zapatista call for the struggle against neoliberalism and injustice around the world was
entirely part of the moment.
I have chosen these two case studies, La feria del rebelde (The Rebel’s Fair) and
Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone, because of their historical moment and the significant
proposals they each made. I intend, though, to emphasize the importance of continued research
into these two projects and to present them as rich case studies for the relationship between
politics and art from a curatorial perspective. Focusing closely on particular aspects of these
projects will allow me to develop a methodology in progress, and to construct a curatorial
discourse that will, I hope, provide a model for addressing situations where art and politics
become dramatically intertwined.
The method for approaching the two case studies is based on Zapatista literature and
practices, reading and deploying them as a form of theory, and on the Zapatista uprising as a
historical moment. Background on Mexican political and art history in relation to Mexican social
movements will function as contextual material through which to understand and reflect upon
artistic practices, presented in this text within the culture of Mexico City in the 1990s and
focusing on the specific conditions of living in a territory of resistance, with a history of struggle
and political activism.

Lieja Quintanar 11
ZAPATISMO: A BRIEF HISTORY

The Zapatistas rose up in arms to fight for democracy, freedom and justice for all
Mexicans (later they said “for all the struggles in the world”
10
) on the early morning of January
1, 1994 in Chiapas. The EZLN stunned the world, taking over the National Palace of San
Cristobal de las Casas and six more municipalities.
11
The EZLN chose the day that the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) first came into effect, a project that removed many
tariffs and restrictions on trade between Canada, the US and Mexico. The agricultural
agreements were celebrated as beneficial to the US, but would greatly affect Mexican farmers’
local production capabilities. The Zapatistas knew that the trade agreement would allow
international companies to exploit Mexican farmers and their productive territories, and that
NAFTA symbolized a death sentence for forgotten indigenous groups. That is why the Zapatista
movement felt the need for an immediate worldwide visibility.

San Cristobal, New Year’s Eve, Chiapas, Mexico, 1994. Photograph by Antonio Turock.
However, the common-held view that the movement erupted suddenly is not accurate. The
EZLN actually started building its structure in the 1980s as a revolutionary group, and it is

10
See Marcos and Ponce de Leon, “First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (January 2, 1994)” and “In
Our Dreams We Have Seen Another Word” in Our Word is Our Weapon, 17-18
11
Holloway and Peláez, Zapatista!, 1.
Lieja Quintanar 12
important to mention the influence of Lucio Cabañas' group on this development. At the end of
the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, Cabañas, a well-known teacher who studied at the
Ayotzinapa Normal School,
12
lead a rural guerrilla group in Guerrero, Mexico, based on the
ideals of Emiliano Zapata.
13

Ser Pueblo, Hacer Pueblo, Estar con el Pueblo (Being people, making people, being with people). Mural
with words and the image of Lucio Cabañas, 2015. Photograph by Livia Radwanski.

Also influential in its development were the revolutionary struggles in Nicaragua, El
Salvador, and Guatemala, the last which borders the Mexican state of Chiapas. It is worth
mentioning that the Central American guerrillas were often photographed by Mexicans artists,
such as Pedro Meyer, Pedro Valtierra, Marta Zarak, and Antonio Turok; the latter also captured
the Zapatista uprising (the Mexican guerrillas of the 1970s actually could not have been
photographed in the same way due to the intense repression of that moment, known as “The
Dirty War,” where several assassinations put an end to those movements).

12
Last year, this historical school suffered an attack from the Mexican government, police and army: since
the confrontation, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School are still missing.
13
From the 1960s to the 1970s in Mexico, urban guerrilla groups began to develop, such as the Grupo
Popular Guerrillero in Chihuahua, the group led by Génaro Vázquez Rojas (from the Ayotzinapa Normal School) in
Guerrero, and La Liga Comunista 23 de septiembre. For more information see Adela Cedillo and Fernando Herrera
Calderón, Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico: Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964-1982 (New
York: Routledge, 2012).

Lieja Quintanar 13

Nicaraguan guerrilla and future politician Nora Astorga, 1978. Photograph by Pedro Meyer.
The EZLN has given November 17, 1983 as the specific date when they set up their first
camp, named “The Nightmare,” in the Mexican mountains—“imagining” the scene as described
by the Zapatistas:
A group of people in some clandestine house were preparing the tools they
would take to the mountains of southeast Mexico (…) night came early under
the large trees and the men and women turned on their flashlights, set up
plastic roofs held up with ropes, hung their hammocks, looked for dry
firewood and made a bonfire.
14

The group included three indigenous people and three mestizos; one was a woman and
five were men.
15
Little by little this group passed along messages in villages and small groups of
people who were already struggling against the government started to be integrated into the
EZLN.
16
From 1983 to 1993, the Zapatistas prepared for the War,
17
learning history and political

14
Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, trad. Laura Carlsen and Alejandro Reyes Arias, The Fire and the Word: A History of the
Zapatista Movement (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2008), 20-21.
15
More recently the demographics of the group have changed: as Subcomandante Marcos explained in an audio
message in 2003: “Today twenty years after that November 17th, the percentage is probably 98.9 indigenous and 1
percent mestizo. The proportion of women is close to 45 percent.” (ibid., 23).
16
Maximiliano, better known as Maxi, is one of the oldest Tojolabal persons in Santa Rosa, a small town in the
Lacandon jungle which belongs to “La Realidad."
Lieja Quintanar 14
and military strategies. This decade was marked by both extensive sharing of knowledge and
exploration of Chiapas territory.
During that period, the whole country was living through the consequences of a long
dictatorship disguised as a democratic nation by the dominant political party, the Partido
Revolucionarie Institucional (PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party).
All over Mexico people were discontent. It is not a coincidence that some of the
members of the group that went to the mountains were mestizos interested in indigenous forms
of organization and in joining the struggle with them; it is also perhaps not a coincidence that the
EZLN spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, was a mestizo. EZLN ideology demands justice for
all Mexicans, mestizo and indigenous alike.

Chiapas el fin del silencio (The End of the Silence), 1992. Photograph by Antonio Turok.

17
“War” has to be understood not in terms of violence: “They declare war on the Mexican government, ‘not to usurp
power, but to exercise it,’ sending a forceful reminder that the forgotten indigenous populations are, after all,
Mexicans, and that they too are entitled to exercise their political and civil rights. It is the first show of popular
resistance to globalization to actually make headlines. ‘The war for the Word’ writes Marcos, ‘has begun.’” Marcos
and Ponce de Leon, xxv.
Lieja Quintanar 15
After approximately ten years of preparation, the EZLN came to public light in 1994,
with around 4,500 combatants. Concurrently, the Zapatistas took over seven municipal seats in
Chiapas. With their manifesto “War!,” the EZLN astonished the world with the poetic and
symbolic way in which they announced their resistance.

War!
First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle
JANUARY 2, 1994
To the people of Mexico
Mexican brothers and sisters
WE ARE A PRODUCT of five hundred years of struggle: first, led by
insurgents against slavery during the War of Independence with Spain;
then to avoid being absorbed by North American imperialism; then to
proclaim our constitution and expel the French empire from our soil; later
when the people rebelled against Porfirio Diáz’s dictatorship, which denied
the reforms, laws and leaders like Villa and Zapata emerged, poor men just
like us who have been denied the most elemental preparation so they can
use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t
care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a roof over our
heads, no land, no work, no health care, no food or education, not the right
to freely and democratically elect our political representatives, nor
Lieja Quintanar 16
independence from foreigners. There is no peace or justice for ourselves
and our children.
18

This declaration of war made a connection between their movement and Mexican history
since colonization, emphasizing the Revolution of 1910 organized by Emiliano Zapata and
Francisco Villa. They draw on this past history to explain the situation of the 1990s and their
choice of methods and terminology.
19

While the project of globalization had begun its process of ostensibly opening borders
for new trade, it continued segregating people. In response, the Zapatistas called for a recovery
and recollection of oral history, and for recognition of an indigenous history of resistance. In the
words of the Portuguese writer José Saramago:
On the other side of the heights of Chiapas lies not only the
government of Mexico but the whole world. No matter how much of
an attempt has been made to reduce the question of Chiapas to
merely a local conflict, whose solution should be found within the
strict confines of an application of national law-hypocritically
malleable and adjustable, as has been seen once again, according to
the strategies and tactics of economic and political power to which
they are surrogate-what is being played out in the Chiapas Mountains
and the Lacandon jungle reaches beyond the borders of Mexico to the
heart of that portion of humanity that has not renounced and never

18
Ibid., 13.
19
The history of colonization and the discovery of the Americas was a topic that artists in the city were
exploring: in 1992 the radical group of artists SEMEFO (Servicio Médico Forense or Forensic Medical Service)
participated in a marathon at UAM-Azcapotzalco (Mexican Autonomous University) marking the 500
th
anniversary
of the discovery with an installation of a skinned horse head accompanied by burned pieces of plastic dolls over corn
husks, an altar to the Spanish conquerors from the conquest wars. Mariana David coord. and María Alós ed.
SEMEFO 1990-1999, From the Morgue to the Museum (Mexico City: El Palacio Negro A. C. and UAM, 2011),
118.
Lieja Quintanar 17
will renounce dreams and hopes, the simple imperative of equal
justice for all.
20

This constellation of thoughts, ideologies and practices that the Zapatistas built are
located within a culture of resistance in Mexico and other parts of the world.
21

20
Marcos and Ponce de Leon, xxi.
21
For an example of urban muralists and Zapatistas communities see Cristina Híjar, Rastros coloridos de
rebeldía, desde Chiapas hasta Palestina. Entrevista con Gustavo Chávez Pavón. (Revista Digital, CENIDIAP,
January 2008, No10.) http://discursovisual.net/dvweb10/diversa/diventhijar.htm. Also for a recent reference in Los
Angeles see the 2012 exhibition Rigo 23: Autonomous InterGalactic Space Program at REDCAT.
http://www.redcat.org/exhibition/rigo-23-autonomous-intergalactic-space-program.
Lieja Quintanar 18
THE MEXICAN ART CONTEXT

The relationship between art and politics has had a significant history in Mexican culture
and the artists mentioned in this thesis are continuing that relationship, as the theorist and
historian Alberto Híjar shows in the book Frentes, coaliciones y talleres: grupos visuales en
México en el siglo XX (Fronts, Coalitions and Workshops: Visual Groups in Mexico in the
Twentieth Century), in which he presents the proposals of forty-seven visual collectives that
emerged from 1922 to 1994. The long heritage of this relationship, confronting the State through
culture, is most obvious with the Mexican muralists of the early to mid-twentieth century,
although Híjar also presents avant-gardes such as the Estridentistas (Germán List Arzubide,
Manuel Maples Arce, Fermín, and Silvestre Revueltas among others). As much of this earlier
history is well-charted and belongs to a modernist era with particular conditions, I will focus on a
more recent history departing from the very important student movement of 1968. This more
recent moment was key for informing the Zapatista-inspired art of the 1990s and 2000s.
22

In 1968, the PRI’s new politic attempted to represent a different Mexico to the world
through the Olympics Games, held in Mexico City. The Olympics were to provide Mexico with
the opportunity to present a “new place” to the world, as a modern country.
23
However, the social
movements of the late 1960s became a problem for politicians worldwide, and in this case, the
students challenged the nation’s image as stable and advanced. By the fall of 1968, just before
the Olympics were held, the student movement had grown very strong in Mexico. Students from

22
For more information on Estridentistas, see Alberto Híjar, Frentes, coaliciones y talleres: grupos visuales
en México en el siglo XX (Mexico City: Casa Juan Pablos, CONACULTA, INBA, Cenidiap, 2007).
23
For more information see Elena Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco: Testimonios de Historia Oral
(Mexioc City: Ediciones Era, 1981). And for more information about the design, art, and cultural projects that hid
the massacre and the difficult situation of Mexican society at that time, see Luis M Castañeda, Spectacular Mexico:
Design, Propaganda, and the 1968 Olympics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
Lieja Quintanar 19
different schools participated; as Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón has described in La visualidad del
68 (The Visuality of ‘68) students from CUEC (Center of Cinematic Studies) of the UNAM
(Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México / National Autonomous University of Mexico)
documented the movement with a specific perspective: they did not film the leaders’ speeches;
rather, they documented the diversity of people in the movement, and not necessarily only
students. These documentaries allowed for the dissemination of the movement’s ideas. For
example, Únete pueblo (Join us), a film by Óscar Menéndez, was distributed by the CNH
(National Strike Council), which emerged at the UNAM.
24

On October 2nd of that year, thousands of students from different schools and
universities met at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Three Cultures Plaza, also known as
Tlatelolco) in Mexico City. This meeting was one of the most important of the movement, and
President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, in collaboration with the Interior Secretary Luis Echeverría,
ordered the violent repression of students. The paramilitary group Batallón Olimpia (Olympia
Batallion), the police, and the Mexican army implemented a strategy by which tanks and soldiers
gathered around the plaza while, at the same time, soldiers from the Batallón Olimpia were
undercover and secretly armed among the students. People who were present at the march
remember a flare in the sky before the fire started and there is evidence that snipers started to the
fire at the students from atop buildings in order to start a student “riot,” so as to provide the
police and the army with a justification to begin shooting as they had planned to do to anyways
to quell the movement. Up to the present day, there is no official number of the missing and dead

24
For more information about Tlatelolco massacre see Scott Sherman, “Remembering Tlatelolco,” The
Nation, December 7, 1998,22, accessed March 26, 2015, Academic OneFile. Also Julio Scherer García, Carlos
Monsiváis, and Marcelino García Barragán, Parte de guerra, tlatelolco 1968: Documentos del general marcelino
garcía barragán : Los hechos y la historia.(Mexico City: Nuevo Siglo/Aguilar). Also Olivier Debroise, Pilar García
de Germenos, Cuauhtémoc Medina, and Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón., La era de la discrepancia: Arte y cultura
visual en méxico, 1968-1997 / The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968-1997 (Mexico
City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Turner and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Museo
Universitario de Ciencias y Arte, 2006), 37-39.
Lieja Quintanar 20
students, although the government has claimed that 2,000 people were arrested and 27 to 500
killed that night, an incongruent number in comparison to the 10,000 people that attented and the
use of garbage trucks to pick up the bodies. This case still has many unresolved elements,
including the contribution of the CIA to the massacre.
Students from the art schools were of course also active in the movement. Some artists
from the ENAP (National School of Plastic Arts) located in San Carlos, which is part of the
UNAM and the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado La Esmeralda (National
School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking), designed and produced linotyped posters,
stickers, and flyers and distributed them all around the city, as well as at the meeting on October
2nd. Historian Christina Híjar has indicated that the ENAP, located in the Academia de San
Carlos, in the Historic Center of Mexico City, became a production workshop for the
movement’s graphic materials, eventually setting a precedent for the guerilla groups of the
1970s. For example, Arnulfo Aquino and Jorge Perezvega were part of the class of 1965 from
the ENAP, and created many graphic materials; both became part of the group Mira and are
today owners of the only two collections of 1968 graphics that exist in Mexico.
25
As Vázquez
Mantecón notes in The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968-1997,
some of the artists were aware of other social movements around the world, which then inspired
the graphic works: “While some of the posters adopted an iconography of socialist realism
typical of the Taller de Gráfica Popular in the 1930s and 1940s, many appropriated the graphics
adopted by French movements in 1968, parodied the design motifs of the XIX Olympic Games,
or drew from a wide gamut of Op and Pop styles.”
26
The local and global visual resources used in
the student movement helped to spread and connect with other movements in other parts of the

25
Cristina Híjar, Siete grupos de artistas visuales de los setenta (Mexico City: UAM and
CONACULTA/INBA, 2008), 10.
26
Debroise et. al., 67.
Lieja Quintanar 21
world, but it was also a moment of resistance and response to the “new” image that the
government had developed with their own group of architects, designers, and artists.

Graphic with the logo of the Olympic Games, 1968.
The generation of artists of the following decade, as well as those who had participated in
the 1968 protests, focused their energies on collective work, evincing a deep interest in social
and political issues. Some of these grupos (groups), as they are known in Mexico, took their
practices into the streets. Topics were centered on denunciation of government policies, asserting
(political) memory against oblivion, working with communities, and also the role of strikes and
solidarity actions. These discussions focused on Mexico, as well as other Latin American
societies that were suffering as a result of the many dictatorships across the continent.
27
Vázquez
Mantecón has described this dynamic:
Between 1977 and 1982, over a dozen associations of artists and critics emerged
in Mexico with the goal of renovating the prevailing art system: the most
important of these grupos were Tepito Arte Acá, Proceso Pentágono, Mira, Suma,
Germinal, Taller de Arte e Ideología (TAI), El Colectivo, Tetraedro, Março,
Peyote y la Compañía, No Grupo, Taller de Investigación Plástica (TIP), and
Fotógrafos Independientes. Unlike other earlier collectives, like the Liga de

27
Híjar, 20.
Lieja Quintanar 22
Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (League of Revolutionary Writers and
Artists, or LEAR), founded in 1933, the Taller de Gráfica Popular, founded in
1937, or, more recently, the Salón Independiente, the grupos of the 1970s were
organizations less focused on the promotion and representation of individual
artists.
28

An example of the international visibility of the meaningful political activism that the
grupos were developing is the inclusion of works by Proceso Pentágono (Pentagon Process),
Grupo Suma (Suma group), TAI (Taller de Arte e Ideología/Art and Ideology Workshop), and
Tetraedo (Tetrahedron) in the Mexican section in the 10e Biennale de Paris. Manifestation
Internationale des Jeunes Artistes (10
th
Paris Biennial. International Exhibition of Young Artists)
in 1977, through the invitation of the artist Helen Escobedo, who was in charge of coordination.
29

An example of a direct critique of the Mexican government, and more generally all the Latin
American regimes, was the installation by Proceso Pentágono: they built a small pentagonal
room that represented a torture chamber, with different elements referencing the methods used
by police and the army against the students in Mexico. Newspaper clippings from the tragedies
of October 2nd were shown inside, clearly alluding to the relationship and support for the regime
in Mexico and for the dictatorships in Latin America shown by the United States.

28
Debroise, et. al., 197
29
Other collectives participated in the biennial as well, such as Códice and No grupo, the latter presenting
its first artwork: a group of masks with their faces were sent to the exhibition.
Lieja Quintanar 23

Pentágono, 1977, Replica of the installation presented simultaneously at the 10e Biennale de Paris. Manifestation
Internationale des Jeunes Artistes and at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte of the UNAM, Mexico. 200 x
360 x 360 cm. Photograph by Kathy Binder.
Additionally, critique was not limited to the narrative within the installation; it was also a
direct critique of the art system in collaboration with the capitalist system that used biennials as a
form of legitimization for dictatorial structures. For example, the Mexican artists openly rejected
the Uruguayan curator Ángel Kalembergs invitation—allegedly a supporter of the Uruguayan
dictatorship—and rejected the invitation to be included in his monographic curatorial proposal
(therefore the grupos were shown separately). They also demanded that Octavio Paz or Jorge
Luis Borges not be allowed to be the writers for the Latin American section of the Biennial,
because of these writers’ friendly relationship with the dictatorial governments.
30

The artists proclaimed that the inclusion of Latin America in such global art events was a
strategy to legitimize these cruel despotic states. In 1980, Proceso Pentágono joined forces with
other artists and published Expediente: Bienal X La historia documentada de un complot
frustrado, where they gathered the correspondence and documents of proof on which they relied
in promoting the boycott.
31

30
For more information see Híjar, 66-72.
31
Fernanda Nogueira “El cuerpo político más allá de sus límites. Clemente Padín y el flujo postal" in
Arte Correo ed Mauricio Marcín, (Barcelona: RM Verlag; D. R. Museo de la Ciudad de México, 2011) 77–92.
And Sergio Arau et al., Expediente: Bienal X. La historia documentada de un complot frustrado (México/Londres:
Editorial Libro Acción Libre/BGP, 1980) 83.
Lieja Quintanar 24
The relationship between art and politics also became tighter when artists dedicated more
time to participating directly in social movements, far from the art system; the case of the artist
Francisco Toledo is an example of this expanded practice and he continues to make art in an
activist mode, including his direct participation in the construction of social movements.
Through Casa de Cultura de Juchitán, Oaxaca (House of Culture in Juchitán), a space that
Toledo opened in 1972, he provides a place for art and education alongside revolutionary
debates, particularly for the COCEI (Coalición Obrero Campesina Estudiantil del Istmo, or
Worker Peasant Student Coalition of the Isthmus). In 1981, the COECI won the municipal
elections, effectively removing the PRI from power in Oaxaca. A unique and unusual moment,
this was the first time that the dominant PRI had lost a municipality in Mexico, and this fact
attracted the attention of many journalists, intellectuals, and sociologists who soon arrived in
Oaxaca to document the situation. The writer Carlos Monsiváis became chronicler of the
movement and artists such as Graciela Iturbide, Pedro Meyer, and Rafael Doniz provided
documentary works.
32

Another example of an artist involved in Mexico’s social movements is Melecio
Galván, who was based in Mexico City. This legendary artist belonged to the Class of 1965 of
San Carlos. Galván was an active member of Grupo Mira that created murals and graphics
related to the Chicano movement of the 1970s, and founded Escuela Popular de Artes en la
Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. He extended his artistic practice to collaboration with unions
and community organizations. Through the deployment of “communicational graphics,” he used

32
Debroise, The age of discrepancies, 253 and see the article La Casa de la Cultura de Juchitán festeja 42
años;el Gobierno de Oaxaca suspende apoyo dice su director, by Diana Manzo (La Jornada, Meixco City, Friday
March 21,2014) http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2014/03/21/cultura/a04n2cul
Lieja Quintanar 25
low-cost resources and materials, drawing direct visuals that communicated the ideologies of
these resistance movements.
33

From 1980-1981, Galván created Militarismo y repression (Militarism and repression),
a series of ink drawings on paper that depicted sinister tyrannical figures. These characters were
a combination of soldiers, police, and politicians, some holding machine guns, representing the
persecutors of a free Mexican society. Galván’s tragic death at the hands of Mexican police in
1982, and the imprints of torture left on his body, emphasized what he was denouncing in his
artwork and exemplified the extreme risks taken by artists addressing these repressions directly.
There is no direct proof that the realization of these drawings was the cause of his murder;
however, his death is nonetheless evidence of the difficult conditions that any Mexican lived in
at that time, and of the necessity for constant resistance and critique of the political situation.

Melecio Galván, Militares (Soldiers), from the series Militarismo y Represión, 1980, ink on paper.

33
For More information see Daniela Lieja, Archivo Melecio Galván (Mexico City: Revista Registro,
November, 2012) http://registromx.net/ws/?p=1049
Lieja Quintanar 26
During the 1980s other types of relationships between art and politics developed in
Mexico, as filmmakers and photographers explored social issues in relation to the accelerated
growth of the city, which was creating poor areas where people in a race for survival had to
calcify their identities. For example, filmmaker Sarah Minter in Nadie es inocente (Nobody is
Innocent) from 1986 explored the difficult lives of young punks growing up in Ciudad Neza, a
peripheral area of Mexico City, through a fictionalized documentary. They belonged to the punk
gang Los Mierda (The Crap), and the film showed the miserable conditions throughout different
areas via the experiences of the teenagers. Pablo “el Podrido” (the Rotten) Hernández, riding in a
train as it moves around the city and the landscape of small aluminum houses painted with the
PRI symbol, says in an inner monologue: “Goodbye to those crazy minds, goodbye to the
thieves, to the uniformed […] the fuckin’ government that raised up the price of the sugar, son of
a bitch […] goodbye to the crap band.”
34

How conscious of these moments were the Mexican artists in the 1990s, recognizing that
the work of building this memory has taken many years? How conscious were these artists of
the importance of the Zapatistas, understanding that the movement exploded in 1994 and has
since had fluctuations in terms of presence, most recently becoming a reference for artistic
practices?
I reiterate the importance of understanding artistic practices in relation to their specific
moment and surrounding conflicts, arguing that, above all, it is important to read these practices
not only from the perspectives of those who embody power, but also from the point of view of
those involved in resistance movements, those that generate a response to power, and work to
create new alternatives. What follows are two case studies.

34
Text taken from the documentary Nadie es inocente. Directed by Sarah Minter. 1985-86. Mexico City:
Sarah Minter, 1987. U-Matic, 58 min.
Lieja Quintanar 27
LA PANADERÍA: LA FERIA DEL REBELDE

La Panadería was an art space founded in 1994 by Yoshua Okón—who had returned to
Mexico City from Montreal, where he earned his BFA at Concordia University—and Miguel
Calderón, who had likewise just finished his BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. Emerging
with projects such as El Salón de los Aztecas (Salon of Aztecs), Galería Pinto Mi Raya (Gallery I
paint my line), La torre de los vientos (The tower of the winds), Art Deposit, and Curare all
activity was located in Mexico City. Historians and curators also point out that La Panadería was
related to two other operations: La Quiñonera (1986-1992) and Temístocles 44 (1993-1995).
35

All three of these venues have become key reference points in contemporary Mexican art history,
because they arose with proposals that were independent from the national cultural institutions
and thus qualified as alternative spaces. They established a different art language and tendencies
that were deeply connected with contemporary art of many forms, while most of the museums,
galleries, and art critics gave attention to only traditional practices, a favorite being the paintings
of Neomexicanism, a figurative tendency attempting to create a new Mexican narrative.
36
Adding
to the critical importance of these spaces is the central role their participants have played as

35
For more information about this projects and the art scene in the 1990s in Mexico City, see the article Sol
Henaro, Apuntes sobre espacios independientes de los años noventa en México, Revista Errata #6, “Museos y
Nuevos escencarios del arte”. http://revistaerrata.com/ediciones/errata-6/apuntes-sobre-espacios-independientes-de-
los-anos-noventa-en-mexico/
36
Sponsored by the Mexican State in 1990 the galleries Galería OMR and Galería de Arte Mexicano, from
Mexico city and Galería Arte Actual from Monterrey organized “Parallel Project” where they showed this type of art
in rented spaces in NY, San Antonio and Los Angeles, as was part of the blockbuster exhibition “Mexico: Splendors
of Thirty Centuries”. For more information see Debroise, The age of discrepancies, 279 and for more information
about neomexicanism and recent exhibitions and readings of it see Medina, Cuauhtémoc. 2011. EL OJO BREVE /
ficciones identitarias de los 80. Reforma (Mexico D.F., Mexico) 2011. And Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico).
2011. Neomexicanismos?: Ficciones identitarias en el méxico de los ochenta : [exposición] 26 may - 7 nov. 2011,
museo de arte moderno. Mexico, D.F.: Museo de Arte Moderno.
Lieja Quintanar 28
artists, curators, and critics in tracing the roots of recent art history in Mexico (a canon now in
itself) to such projects.
In 1994, Okón saw the opportunity to create a new meeting point for the artistic
community in an old building in Mexico City’s Condesa district, formerly a bakery. He mentions
in La Panadería 1994-2002 that the project began with the idea of establishing a collective
model. Many artists were interested and became involved, including Miguel Calderón, Fernando
Ortega, Itala Schmelz, Andrea Ferreyra, Taniel Morales, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Eduardo
Abaroa, Sofía Taboas, and Daniel Guzmán.
37

After a year of working within a somewhat dysfunctional collective model, in Okón
decided to abandon the collective and took responsibility for directing the space, as he states,
“maintaining a collective spirit in the exhibition process, but simplifying practical aspects.”
38
For
Okón, La Panadería, in its transformation, was following a common reaction of Mexican society
to the decadence of governmental institutions:
Society at large became aware that it could organize itself efficiently
and independently from the State. We became aware that if that
situation was to be improved, we had to build organizations aimed at
carrying out projects in a direct and immediate fashion. This
phenomenon was not only limited to the field of visual arts […] but
was also felt in different spheres, as with the creation of NGOs for the
defense of human rights or the EZLN uprising, among others.
39

The EZLN reinvigorated the notion of collective organization and activism a Zapatista
testimony: “The first accomplishment is that civil society understood us and not only that, but

37
Dorfsman and Yoshua Okón 7.
38
Ibid., 7.
39
Ibid., 8-9.
Lieja Quintanar 29
also began to make the same demands and confront the government with us.”
40
The Zapatistas
refreshed the memory of the important struggles in the Mexican history of resistance, and
reengaged the discussion regarding social change, political actions, and activism. It was not just
an empty hope for Mexican society; rather, they explicitly activated this passive memory.
Collective organizing had been present in Mexican art history as well, specifically with the
grupos of the 1970s who were interested in creating a collective without individual authorship;
however, in the era that followed, these collective practices seemed to lose their strength.
Okón mentioned the Tlatelolco Massacre as a reference point for political changes in
Mexico and as a cultural consequence for the city, he also mentioned: “During the 70’s and 80’s
there were few meetings places for artists and intellectuals and most non-conventional artistic
endeavors were marginalized, leaving them easily isolated”
41
It is important to highlight that
there is a constructed Mexican art history, as well as a collective consciousness enhanced by the
student movement and other important moments, such as the massive 1985 earthquake. Such
instances have been agents of politicization in Mexican society, including that of the art
structure. Zapatismo again brought light to that collective consciousness, especially as it had
somewhat disappeared in the early 1990s. Okón’s analysis of his own project, from a
considerable distance (the text quoted above was published in 2005),
42
emphasizes that social
change can only occur via civilian organizations, which provide something that the state does
not. He understands these structures as unique spaces outside of the official Mexico City art
institutions, as constructions (understanding construction not as a fantasy, but as a revaluation of
the different circumstances of the past, like the re-solving of a puzzle, with connections and
relations) of Mexican history and discourses regarding its collective consciousness. These

40
Muñoz Ramírez, trad. Carlsen and Reyes Arias, 83.
41
Dorfsman and Yoshua Okón, 8.
42
Ibid., 7-12.
Lieja Quintanar 30
conceptions correspond to a Gramscian idea, by which subaltern classes and intellectuals can
function as agents of social change: “Where a society is characterized primarily by the exercise
of hegemonic power instead of coercion, a prolonged cultural ‘war of position’ is more
important.”
43
The Zapatistas reinforced a repoliticization of the artist and society in general.
They opened a dialogue, but their critiques were more radical than an attack from inside the
institution; Zapatismo’s radicality was in the rejection of the system that had rejected them and
their indigenous position. The constant creation of critical and political discourses has
characterized Zapatismo, and it’s in following this critical method/strategy that this curatorial
text is developed.
Yoshua Okón’s positions are not only applicable to his specific situation—rather his ideas
exemplify an understanding that has dominated the relationship between art and politics in
Mexico. Okón understands his position as an agent who could contribute to social change from
this zone of art and culture. La Panadería is then, in this sense, the example of a project
reinserting new art languages into Mexican institutions and galleries, languages aligned with the
idea of contemporary global art. Sol Henaro mentions in her 2011 text for the exhibition Antes de
la Resaca (Before the hangover) at the MUAC (Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo,
Universitary Musuem of Contemporary Art) that La Quiñonera, La Panadería, and Temístocles
44 could function as points of departure to understand how artists self-initiate a process of
professionalization before entering the global art system. Miguel Calderón, in an interview with
Alex Dorfsman, explained:

43
Mark C. J Stoddart, Ideology, hegemony, discourse: A critical review of theories of knowledge and power
(University of Kansas: Social Thought & Research 28, 2007), 202.

Lieja Quintanar 31
Even though Mexico City is one of the biggest metropolitan areas
in the world, in 1994 it was full of limitations: you had to wait
days to go to a party; there were hardly any concerts […]
Museums and galleries were controlled by old school ideals of
painting and sculpture and the openings were very formal […]
Our ethics were really very simple: we were not going to wait
around for something to happen. The last thing on our agendas
was to take our CVs and slides to a gallery to see if they were
willing to give us a chance and let us show our work. Thus the
place [La Panadería] was born out of pure necessity.
44

Calderón thus puts the emergence of La Panadería in the context of professional needs
amongst artists, but also as an act of repudiation in response to what was happening in Mexico,
where there was a lack of spaces to foster artistic manifestations and explorations beyond
classical traditions. The gallery was founded out of necessity, from the founders’ common
interests in their art community.
I argue that La Panadería and some of the artists who participated in the space
approached the development of their artistic practices by various means: within a political state-
sanctioned framework which was interested in following neoliberal logic, but continued within a
controlled system of repression (repression that was directed to those marginal groups and not
necessary the whole art scene);
45
and, adjacent to the Zapatismo movement, active in a grassroots
project of critique in relation to these systems, while offering its vision of resistance and
autonomy as a unique alternative, that imply a long term struggle. It is worth noting that all

44
Alex Dorfsman and Yoshua Okón La panadería, 1994-2002, 31.
45
Even if the Mexican government signed a pact of peace with the Zapatistas, the hunting and repression
continue, an example of it si the Acteal Massacre in 1997.
Lieja Quintanar 32
these discourses were recounted after many years, and that the artists were certainly not
completely conscious of all of these issues at the time.
La Panadería has been tagged with two concepts that demonstrate the understanding of
the project in different moments: first it’s placed together with Temístocles 44 and La
Quiñonera, which were first called by curators and critics “alternative” spaces and then
“independent” spaces. These terms were contested, as Daniel Montero elaborates very well in El
cubo Rubick, arte Mexicano en los años 90:
[The galleries] were not really “alternatives” in terms of staying at
the edge of the institution, they attempted to change the institutional
logics for their benefit. They were interested in changing the modes
of doing and of artwork distribution, and because the art circuit that
was operating at that moment was not interested in their practices,
they had to pressure from what I call the other place, they were just
filling the gaps that the institution was leaving.
46

Okón had conceived his place as an independent one, since he decided on what to show
according to an specific contemporary art discourse of his choice, apart from the tendencies
promoted by the state and/or the official cultural institutions; yet, he did not fully oppose them, at
some points La Panadería worked with both public and private resources.
Going beyond the general aim of La Panadería, for this case study it is crucial to focus on
the spaces’ very early moments, when the artists involved intended to apply the collective model
and attempting to trace an artistic and political direction.

46
Montero, Daniel. 153-154.
Lieja Quintanar 33
There is an anecdote about the gallery obtained through an interview in February 2015
with the artist Taniel Morales, who was one of the first of La Panadería’s collaborators, which
highlights an important gesture of political art in public space: after cleaning the space, which
was full of trash, a group of artists including Morales and Okón produced a giant dinosaur
sculpture out of that trash and took it to a concert by the Mexican rock band Santa Sabina that
was taking place in Parque México, a park nearby. When they arrived with the dinosaur in the
park plaza, the band was performing and asked the crowd to destroy the giant sculpture. The
dinosaur is the symbol of entrenched state power; Mexicans identify the PRI party as the
dinosaur that has controlled politics in Mexico over the years, and “PRInosaurio” is a
portmanteau of PRI and dinosuario (dinosaur). Morales remembers that the people at the concert
were very excited to destroy the dinosaur that represented censorship, cultural limitations, and
the many innocent dead—the destruction was a cathartic experience.
Morales also described a video that he and Okón produced about President Zedillo
making a strong commentary against government corruption. The artists were responding with
artistic tools to what was happening in Mexico; they had a genuine interest in taking part in the
politicization of the city, in which different segments of society were participating, especially
young people.
The first event at La Panadería occured on June 16, 1994, a collective show (Marisa
Cornejo, Jorge Dorantes, Jonathán Hernández, Yoshua Okón, Fernando Ortega, Xavier
Rodríguez, Abraham Zacarías and Livma Zacarías) of work by eight artists and included art
objects, installation works and performances with a variety of discussions. The second event was
a performance night, presented as Performance (Easy to Digest) on November 3, 1994 with Nao
Bustamante, Andrea Ferreyra, and Miguel Calderón, who was responsible for organizing the
Lieja Quintanar 34
program. Bustamante performed her work America, the Beautiful, in which she played the
American patriotic song by blowing on a caguama beer bottle (a large, 940 ml bottle) and shaped
her body by wrapping it with adhesive tape. Ferreyra presented a performance of significant note
because of its direct implications in the political situation: in El Gran Vidirio (The Big Glass), a
viewer could see the artist’s silhouette in a glass, on which she wrote the phrase “México bronco
despertar cívico” (México harsh civic awakening), a phrase making reference to Porfirio Díaz,
when he said “Don’t wake up the rough Mexico,” referring to the indigenous as angry, wild
people. It is a phrase that many politicians have used alluding to any social movement that puts
at risk the stability of the political class and, when the EZLN revolted, this phrase was often
repeated. In that year, the Zapatistas embodied that “rough Mexico.” With this word game,
Ferreyra removed the negative charge attached to the idea of a rough or wild Mexico, giving it a
different value: with the addition of “civic,” she was highlighting the moment when Mexican
society wakes up from a bad dream and transforms into a political and active populous. The
performance finished when she crushed the glass, smashing it in many pieces.
On December 1, 1994, La feria del rebelde also called La preposada del inconforme o La
kermes del descontento (Feast of the Discontent and the Banquet of [nonconformity]) opened,
organized by curator Itala Schmelz (who at that time was a philosophy student at the UNAM)
and artist Vicente Razo, well known because his Museo Salinas project
47
. Here I will focus on
Schmelz’s voice because she has written more about the event, and they are important texts that
reflect the beginning of a curatorial practice. Even though this project was collectively
organized, Schmelz stated in 2005 that La Feria del Rebelde had been an experiment to create a
new form of political art: “The country was, without a doubt, in the midst of a moment of

47
For more information see Debroise, 428.
Lieja Quintanar 35
agitation and we thought it was important to present a strong and aggressive proposal that would
take the work of the artists outside of the borders of the bourgeois shelter, outside the limits of
art decoration or the simple aesthetic experience.”
48

The opening was purposefully planned on the day that the PRI President Zedillo took office;
former PRI leader Luis Donaldo Colossio had been assassinated only eight months before, by his
own party. This event aligned with the emergence of the Zapatistas and the strong, charismatic
figure of Subcomandante Marcos, whose inspiringly poetic speeches seduced many people to
rethink the revolutionary processes. “Non-conformity” and “discontent” were ideas that the
Zapatistas started to circulate in the day-to-day vocabulary of Mexicans; the government, in
order to discredit the emerging political movement, called the Zapatistas “the group of non-
conformity.” Marcos, in a communiqué, demanded that the government recognize them as the
EZLN, and acknowledge that “non-conformity” exactly defined how Mexicans felt.
The La Feria del Rebelde
49
was planned to be rigorously anonymous, thus the
installations did not have any labels and the event was promoted under the umbrella of a
collective effort to strongly reflect the different circumstances and facts affecting Mexican
society. The exhibition presented installations, videos, a collectively-made collage, fanzines,
music, performances, and a live pirate radio transmission; material from various resistance
groups was also sold at the event. There is some existing documentation shown in the book on
La Panadería, and many anecdotes from different people who either participated with their work
or attended. The importance of La Feria del Rebelde for this study is, first of all, that it was a

48
Alex Dorfsman and Yoshua Okón La panadería, 1994-2002, 39.
49
It is no wonder that La feria del rebelde has recently garnered attention: with the celebration of the
EZLN’s 20 years of resistance in 2014, and the strong similarities to the conflicts of our present with the return of
the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), it is an urgent review of recent Mexican history. Over the last year, the
cooperative Cráter Invertido has done research about this show, and the curators at the Institute of Contemporary Art
of Philadelphia (ICA) are preparing an exhibition.
Lieja Quintanar 36
planned event driven by a specific and genuine interest in the exploration of the relationship
between art and politics. Secondly, that the Zapatista uprising was the motivating cause for its
organizing. And, thirdly, that this event is a point of departure from which we can analyze the
different ways in which artists and artistic practices functioned in this moment of high political
tension.
The specific artworks in La feria del rebelde require description, beginning with a poster
by Vicente Razo, wherein a blonde woman wearing nothing but a bandolier holds a gun while
posing; in the background one can read “La ciudad es una gran selva. Ataca a tu enemigo. Todo
el poder para el poeta enmascarado que vive en la selva.” (The city is a huge jungle. Attack your
enemy. All the power for the masked poet who lives in the jungle). The city and the jungle in
that moment became similar places of struggle and of renewed hope. Onsite at the event,
Jerónimo López, now known as Dr. Lakra in the global art scene, participated with drawings and
drew tattoos. Photographs show as well the inclusion of a variety of media used to spread
political ideas from different resistance groups, such as T-shirts, stickers and zines. Itala Schmelz
has mentioned that the objective was to promote subversive acts, an invitation to discuss the
repressive roles of the PRI and Televisa (the largest Mexican private television conglomerate,
which worked in collusion with the government), both symbols of repression. To this end, there
is also documentation of a drawing in the show by artist Pilar Villela, referencing and mocking
the TV news (the most popular form of official information in the country), where two
significant figures from Televisa—whose profession as journalists is far overshadowed by their
alliance with the government. Schmelz has also mentioned that the aim of the collective
organizers was to provide a “Zapatista base,” coinciding with Taniel Morales’s description of
Lieja Quintanar 37
their taking a collection of food and other needed material to send to Chiapas.
50
The artist
Mariana Botey invited a group of anarchists to “occupy” the space and perform punk music; they
covered the windows with black flags. In the words of Schmelz, Botey was more interested in
radical activism than in art, and it was evident because she invited this anarchist group rather
than present any particular art object or project. Melchor “the Magician,” an older local homeless
man known by some of the participants, presented a performance in which he inserted a bottle of
President (a brand of rum) into his anus. These two last acts put the organizers—who were not
pre-warned about the impact of these two actions—under pressure because the space had been
rented by Yoshua Okón’s parents, and number of people attending actually drew a police
presence, to check if everything was in order. After these two subversive acts, a different group
of punks (Sindicato de Costureras, (Union of Seamstresses)) came to the space, expressly invited
by Morales to participate in the pirate radio program happening in the basement. When Okón and
Calderón saw the punks arriving at the gallery, they decided to end La feria del rebelde. Morales
mentions that the punks from the Sindicato de Costureras were “intellectual vegetarian pacifists.”
Part of the organizers were not familiar with punk culture, and misinterpreted it, understand it as
destructive, and not paying attention to its constructive aspect of self-organization, something
that was well represented by Sindicato de Costureras. A class problem also appeared, in terms of
differences in accessibility. Certain artists who had access to travel and study overseas did not
have access to countercultural manifestations, putting them in an unknown and uncontrolled
situation.

50
Interview with Taniel Morales, February 2015.
Lieja Quintanar 38
Planning the Project, Constructing Ideas and Concepts
The descriptions of the event elaborated by Razo and Schmelz are useful to understand
how they conceived the relation between art and politics in La Feria del Rebelde. In the planning
text, “Toda decision estética es una decision moral. El que produce bienes estéticos crea
también enunciados morales.” (Any aesthetic decision is also a moral decision. The one that
produces aesthetic assets also creates moral statements.), they questioned artistic practices in
Mexico: “Is it possible to have a real creative contemporary process that has never spoken about
the PRI or Televisa (for example)?”
51
They argued that artistic practices should consider the
political concerns of contemporary life—in the case of Mexico at the time, those such as
repression, censorship, anti-democracy, ideological control, propaganda, drug trafficking,
corruption, and revolutions. Their position was that this was a moment of great importance for
art because artists could actively take on the relationship between arts and politics; it is clear in
the text how they were trying to reformulate this relationship, and put it back on the table, so to
speak. Their critique pointed to the Neomexicanismo art, which was “officially” exhibited in
Mexican museums and galleries. Razo and Schmelz thus aimed to bring artistic practices closer
to everyday life, and experiences of political power as they existed in contemporary Mexico. One
of the strategies that La Panadería explored with this event was to include different projects that
were not necessarily art; it was a multidisciplinary event. This greatly expanded the audience.
For example, there is evidence that people from the Tianguis del Chopo—a legendary place in
the Santa María la Ribera neighborhood of Mexico City where people meet in the street and
exchange music and buy manufactured articles such as t-shirts, vinyls and cassettes—
participated as well.

51
Equipo editorial, “Feria del Rebelde”, ¿México?¿Me lo repite por favor? (Mexico City: Revista Cartucho
#9), 96.
Lieja Quintanar 39
In the museographic proposal that Razo and Schmelz wrote, recently republished by the
magazine Cartucho #9, it is possible to identify important concepts about this project: “political
art,” understood as artistic manifestations that explore political themes; an “historical moment,” a
moment that, they argued, would change many things by giving information to the viewer about
the crisis of the political situation in Mexico; and “civic-political events,” highlighting the
importance of civilians politically organizing together (also, the word “civic” indicates a
category that is often relegated only to mainstream politics). This document also reflects an
interest in giving “subversive information” to the people, that is, in providing tools for conscious,
critical, and active engagement in the moment. Arte conceptual en México: los años noventa
(Conceptual Art in Mexico: The 90s) is a text by Schmelz, published in Curare in 2007, where
she mentions that La feria de Rebelde was a laboratory of many things to come, a “rediscovery
of art as a critical tool.”
52
This statement of rediscovery is key, as events like La feria del rebelde
become very significant because of their potency and the participation of many actors. We have
to consider that this event as a spotlight on the strengthening relationship between arts and
politics at the time. This can then shed light on other projects that arose from similar contexts; at
the same time, an awareness of this example could darken other artistic manifestations.
Many Paths Crossed All the Time
La Panadería had a basement where the bread baking ovens used to be. This is where a
pirate radio show by Acción Virus was transmitted, a project that Taniel Morales started with
people from different faculties of the UNAM in 1994. He was studying art at the ENAP, San
Carlos at the time, after four semesters of mathematics. The Zapatista movement motivated the
emergence of the Acción Virus collective. They started holding meetings where they discussed

52
Itala Schmelz, “Arte conceptual en México: los años noventa” (Mexico City: Revista Curare, January-
June 2007) 11.
Lieja Quintanar 40
different political issues and their intention to create pirate radio stations in order to extend their
discussion to other publics, rather than keeping it amongst themselves. They produced stickers
and attempted to make connections with a range of other organizations and groups. Acción Virus
worked in collaboration with Tele Verdad, another pirate radio station that transmitted from a
small cabin located in the intersection of Avenidas Insurgentes and Reforma in Mexico City. The
core motivation driving both projects was the encouragement of dialogue but also to call people
to organize and start their own social mobilizations. Morales coordinated the pirate radio
broadcast at La Feria del Rebelde, which indeed transmitted programs during the event; he
installed the antenna on the roof of La Panadería.
Morales mentions in an interview that the Sindicato de Costureras was an important
reference for him to being political. The Sindicato de Costureras was a group that emerged after
the earthquake that shook the city on September 19, 1985, around 7:19 am, with a magnitude of
8.1, killing around 10,000 people and leaving thousands more without houses. This group was
comprised of the sons and daughters of seamstresses who worked in a factory in San Antonio
Abad; many seamstresses died during or after the earthquake, as they could not escape the
building because the owner had locked them in due to his mistrust of his own workers. The
Sindicato de Costureras occupied the former factory space, and organized different events in this
destroyed building, using pieces of the roof that had fallen down during the earthquake as
settings for musical performances. Many unions and organizations appeared during this difficult
moment and after, such as the Union de Damnificados (Union of Victims of the Earthquake),
Los Francisco Villas, and Organización de Azoteas (Organization of Rooftops). The model of
organizations like these is part of a shared heritage continuing in Mexican society since the
earthquake catastrophe.
Lieja Quintanar 41
Morales also mentions that his generation’s process of politicization started with the
UNAM strike of 1988 and with the creation of the CEU (Congreso Estudiantil Universitario), a
group of students in charge of looking after the policy changes that the government wanted to
implement at the UNAM (even though the organization was eventually criticized because many
of its leaders became politicians and maintain different positions nowadays with the
government). Morales notes that, apart from this problem, this movement was very important in
its origin because it exemplified an intense moment of political organization of assemblies.
To understand that moment of politicization that the artists of La Feria del rebelde were
living, when President Salinas de Gortari was finishing his term it is important to revisit the
years before, when his term had just started. On July 6, 1988, a major electoral fraud had
happened, the vote counting system crashed and, upon repair, the PRI candidate Salinas de
Gortari was announced as the new president, leaving behind the candidate of the PRD (Party of
the Democratic Revolution) Cuauhtémoc Cardenas, who had been the heavy favorite to win.
Taniel Morales remembers that the day after the crash, thousands of people were upset and met
in the Zócalo in Mexico City where Cardenas tried to pacify them by announcing that he was
going to try to get justice through legal methods. Morales adds that following this incident, for a
month or so, it was impossible to find any marijuana in the city, and all of a sudden a new drug
came around: cocaine, a hard drug that destroyed a full generation. From Morales’s point of
view, as a consequence of this type of demoralized environment the Zapatista movement was
experienced as an intense injection of new hope. He and his colleagues were fascinated by the
Zapatistas as a “live text:” “it showed us how to rethink politics, how is possible to reconsider a
revolution of low intensity, rethink the way to change the world, believe again in the utopias, in
Lieja Quintanar 42
the power of the small, rethink and work with the people and not with the idea of people as an
abstraction, such as masses or public, rather than think of people that cannot be named”.
53

La feria del rebelde reflected the many intentions and ideas that artists were exploring in
Mexico City at the same time and amongst different backgrounds. As noted, this event finished
with fights and a divergence of paths. Schmelz explains that Okón felt that some of the
collaborators put his space and project at risk; she also notes that Razo thought that working with
Okón was a betrayal to his political positions. Her comments make clear that the artists were in a
moment of commotion, and many understood that the situation necessitated choosing one way
over another.
The Zapatistas injected tension directly into the moment when the economic situation of
the country was about to change with the induction of NAFTA, and into an environment of
murders and betrayals representing conditions of hopelessness. They exposed the conditions of
poverty in which Mexicans were living, but also showed that other worlds and paths were
possible. They showed that with organization, creativity, and hope, a new form of revolution was
possible. Yoshua Okón and Miguel Calderón both had the opportunity to attend art school
outside Mexico and this fact allowed them to understand their practices in a one particular way.
Because of the awareness gained through their study, it was easier for them to construct
languages that were more similar to those of the international contemporary art discourse, and
also to insert themselves and their work into a new art system.
The other path artists could take in Mexico was linked to a call that the EZLN made, to
start an “intergalactic revolution;”
54
some artists took up this idea in order to create their own

53
Interview with Taniel Morales, 2015
54
Holloway and Peláez explain that the Zapatistas “claim not just to be an indigenous or Mexican
movement, but to be truly ‘intergalactic’, to be struggling for humanity. Holloway, John and Peláez, Eloín, ed.,
Zapatista!, ix.
Lieja Quintanar 43
language, in some cases moving over to pure politics, abandoning their art practice entirely or
moving it fully to the outside of the conventional art system. In the case of Taniel Morales, he
left the art scene for a moment in 1995 to go directly into the Zapatista communities to install
radios. He then returned a months after to continue making art but working within a pedagogical
framework. Morales considers his workshops as live events of contemporary art. He has also
continued to explore public spaces, such as those offered by pirate radio, as well as intervening
in public spaces with radio transmissions. For example, he executed radio interventions on public
buses where he asked the drivers to play a recorded tape he’d made at the exact hour in which a
radio show regularly starts, Sin Cabeza: Necropsia (1999).

Lieja Quintanar 44
TERRENO PELIGROSO-DANGER ZONE
Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone, arranged between Los Angeles and Mexico City in
1995, is an important project because of the sheer magnitude of the influence of the
performances, texts, roundtables, lectures, and the many contributions that Chicano and
Chilango
55
artists made; as noted above, it was curated by Josephine Ramírez, Lorena Wolffer,
and Guillermo Gómez-Peña.
56
The diversity of content that artists generated and the contrasts
presented by the works from the two similar-but-different metropolises, made the project
valuable for understanding the relationship between art and politics in the context of
contemporary Mexican art.
In this case, although I am going to focus on the general project as a unique space and
format in order to explore the relationship between art and politics, I will focus on the project
ASALTO from Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone, in order to analyze how the Zapatista movement
informed the structure of this project, and a performance at X’ Teresa by Mexican artists Elvira
Santa María and Eugenia Vargas, realized in both cities, though I will analyze the Mexico City
iteration, because there exists complete video documentation. It is important to note with
Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone that there is a dislocation in some of the works being in Los
Angeles, and I intend to stress that the territories of resistance relevant to Mexican contemporary
art do not respect official borders, and can be expanded through different supports such as texts

55
This is a popular term used for call people from Mexico City.
56
Ex Teresa Arte Actual's documentation center, directed at the time by Maribel Escobar, has been rescued,
organized and recollected in a specific archive: Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone. In 2014, I curated the exhibition
“Territorial Actions,” which explored the political situation of Mexico through the concept of territory. In this
exhibition the artists Luis G. Hernández (L.A.-Mexicali) and Enrique Arriaga (Mexico City) conducted a revision,
exploration and reinterpretation of Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone, in order to have a historical view for the new
exhibition. As part of this project, we digitalized two Hi8 videos: the press conference, and the documentation of a
performance by Elvira Santamaría and Eugenia Vargas. Research on the 1995 experimental event took place in
collaboration with “Aesthetic experiments and Social Agents: Renegade Art and Action in Mexico in the 1990’s,”
directed by the curator Irene Tsatsos for the Pacific Standard Time (PST) LA/LA (Latin America/Los Angeles).
Lieja Quintanar 45
published in English and Spanish that cross official borders and are available throughout the
various sites in question.
The opening of different paths of communication between Chicanos and Chilangos
started before the project, with Mexican artists participating in other US contexts. But this was
the first project in which the artists sustained a dialogue about common topics (such as cultural
relations between the US and Mexico, as Gómez-Peña mentioned in the text he wrote for his
project in ASALTO), with specific attention paid to the idea of the relationship between politics
and art: principal themes across the included projects were California’s Proposition 187,
NAFTA, and the EZLN.
57
It’s also significant that in this experimental exchange, there were
other political themes explored: those of the female body, gender, queer identity stereotypes, and
AIDS reflections and realities. Nao Bustamante presented her performance America, the
Beautiful—the previous version presented the year before at La Panadería—which offered the
potential for examination regarding the affect of repetition within a diversity of venues and
publics, even in the same city. Luis Alfaro presented El juego de la jotería, in which
autobiographical and poetical elements were used to construct a performance that deployed a
political, sexualized body, confronted by issues of racism and classism.
58
Felipe Ehrenbergh
presented No man’s land, a reference to contemporary identity, in which the individual is a
construction of many cultures: "My main reference is Xipetotec, an Aztec god of renovation

57
Guillermo Gómez Peña, Terreno Peligroso (las relaciones culturales entre chicanos y chilangos en el fin
de siglo), (Mexico City: Centro de Documentación Ex Teresa, 1995). About Proposition 187 it is an initiative to
establish a state-run citizenship screening system and prohibit illegal people from using health care, public
education, and other social services in the U.S. State of California.
58
Joto could be translate as faggot use in Mexico in a derogatory way, but also gay people used to call each
other like that in a fun way. Alfaro translated joto to queer. Nowadays in Mexico the word queer has been adopted in
the spanish language, because there is no exact word for it.
Lieja Quintanar 46
(who) changes skins and wears somebody else's," he said. "I'm going to cut myself in half and
suggest the possibility of taking my skin off and changing skins.".
59

Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone was a fully multidisciplinary event in which the artists
took as much advantage as they could of the opportunities that the institutions provided them,
and of the work of the curators. For example, the press conference that the curators and artists
organized at X’Teresa aimed not only to promote the event, but also to provoke a performative
dialogue with the journalists present. Each artist made a performance, César Martínez
performance had a direct reference to the EZLN, he read a political speech about it, he said
“every group of people has the right of invent their future, they have their memory…”
60
next to
him a red wax head sitting on the table with a black ski mask.
The State: Still Present in Artistic Practices
Lorena Wolffer wrote in her text Atajos para un encuentro en terreno peligroso: ¡en sus
marcas, listos!... el diálogo comienza (Shortcuts for a Meeting in a Dangerous Terrain: Ready,
Steady and go!... the Dialogue Begins): “The year 1995 is announced in Mexico not with the
sounds of trumpets but with the blowing of a raspberry. The year 1995 arrived with the effects of
a announced joke: the echo of a spooky laugh resounds in any society stratus, transforming the
recent dream promised in a nightmare […] we woke up with the news that our well-being was
not assured to the family.”
61
With this comment, Wolffer was making a sarcastic reference to the
government of Salinas de Gortari, which promised better economical stability for Mexican
people, his promise based on the National Program of Solidarity, which promised to bring well
being to families by making Mexico a country for investments. It did indeed become that but the

59
http://articles.latimes.com/1995-02-08/entertainment/ca-29475_1_mexican-artists
60
Video documentation of Press Conference, Terreno peligroso/Danger Zone.
61
Lorena Wolffer, “Atajos para un encuentro en terreno peligroso: ¡en sus marcas, listos!...el diálogo
comienza, espectáculos”, La Opinión, Sección Espectáculos (Los Angeles, Feb 3, 1995) 9.
Lieja Quintanar 47
benefits just went directly to foreign companies while the labor became cheaper and environment
more violent: the clearest example is the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, where many
women factory workers have been killed, the continuing feminicide starting in 1993.
62

This government worked very closely with private companies like Televisa and their
policies were designed to promote Mexico to the outside world. For example, in 1990 the
Mexican government presented the exhibition México: esplendores de treinta siglos (Mexico:
Splendor of Thirty Centuries) at the Metropolitan Museum of New York (the show then travelled
to San Antonio, Texas, Los Angeles, Monterrey, and Mexico City). Along with the symposium
México Today, the show was charged with representing the cultural variety of Mexico, its arts,
crafts, folklore, and food to the outside world. As Daniel Montero has argued, such cultural
events supported the NAFTA program that the governments of the US, Canada, and Mexico
were preparing. Colors, flavors, and music helped to construct an exoticized image of Mexico
that was not at all accurate in relation to the situation for the country’s poor.
63

The cultural politics of the government were changing inside of Mexico as well. On
March 2, 1989 the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA, National Fund for
Culture and Arts) was created and instituted as part of CONACULTA (Consejo Nacional para la
Cultura y las Artes or National Council for Culture and Arts). FONCA is a mechanism for
funding and promoting artists; this institution is still working in Mexico and has become a form
of legitimization for artists. Mexico was a country where the majority of the economical capital
for art came from the government, and then a transition to integrate private investment, with
institutions like CONACULTA and FONCA then becoming important agents of the cultural
production in the ‘90s and nowadays. It is not surprising that La Panadería, after the moment

62
Lorena Wolffer realized a performance that denounced this feminicide. For more information see While
we were sleeping, Ciudad Juárez in http://www.lorenawolffer.net/
63
Montero, 58-61.
Lieja Quintanar 48
that analyzed above, and Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone, received support from
CONACULTA, as well as funds from the US-based National Endowment for the Humanities,
Rockefeller Foundation, and the U.S./MEXUS Fund for Culture.
64
Daniel Montero explains that
the opening of economic capital to other countries implied an opening of symbolic capital, as
well. He notes that the art market had changed in the United States—the principal connection for
Mexican artists—to favor a more conceptual art, allowing the Mexicans artists that were working
with such artistic languages to receive support from these institutions. Artists across Mexico City
took these opportunities to produce with economic support, while an army in the south of
Mexico, the EZLN, was mounting a fight against the government with a project focused around
autonomy for the people. Zapatismo discourse highlighted the patriarchal history of the PRI, in
which the government was to function as the father who provided all to the people.
In 1993, X’Teresa Arte Alternativo, now Ex Teresa Arte Actual, had been founded in
Mexico City by artist Eloy Tarciso in collaboration with the INBA (Instituto Nationale de Bellas
Artes or National Institute of Fine Arts). An old temple that was part of the cloister of Santa
Teresa in 1616 has hosted this project for more than twenty years. In 1994, artist and cultural
activist Lorena Wolffer, who was Tarciso’s assistant, took the position of director. The space
was founded with the idea of creating a space for performances, installation, sound art, and
multidisciplinary manifestations. After the directorship of Tarciso, then Wolffer, and again back
to Tarciso, the space became, in 1996, a museum that belonged completely to the INBA. Tarciso
had attempted to work with artists like Maris Bustamante, Mónica Meyer, Felipe Ehrenberg, and
Víctor Muñoz, but INBA had not allowed it.
65
During the 1990s, X’Teresa maintained an

64
Michelle Habell.Pállan, Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture (New
York:New York University 2005) 103.
65
Mónica Mayer, Escandalario (los artistas y la distribución del arte), (Mexico City: Ana Victoria Jimenes
ed, 2006) 18.
Lieja Quintanar 49
international visibility within small art communities through its International Festival of
Performance, which included the work of acclaimed artists such as Ron Athey and Tania
Bruguera.
Terreno Peligroso-Danger zone was sponsored on the Mexico City side by the
government through INBA; at that moment X’Teresa was an initiative for artists who used the
State to generate their own artistic practices without being restricted, censored and limited. In
this sort of space, one could argue that the Zapatista ideologies were being betrayed, but for a
community of artists living in profound crisis in the city, it was important to take advantage of
such opportunities while remaining critical and political, even if they were inside of the
Institution.
Critical Intervention in Public Space: Newspapers
As part of Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone, the artists Luis Alfaro, Elia Arce, Nao
Bustamante, Rubén Ortíz, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Felipe Ehrenberg, Rogelio Villareal and
Lorena Wolffer realized ASALTO (Assault), a set of interventions in the newspapers La Opinion,
published in Los Angeles, and Reforma in Mexico City. They produced a series of insertions that
were, for the most part, critical and political texts, urban chronicles, poems, and images,
modifying the newspapers’ designs.
In the text mentioned above by Lorena Wolffer, published in both newspapers, she
constructed a critique of the Mexican government, mentioning Marcos with an “unfinished war,”
NAFTA, and Proposition 187. Then, supporting the discourse of Gómez-Peña, she said: “Behind
the actual crisis the hidden force calls us to understand—but not to define—our present and
manifest it through art.”
66

66
Wolffer, 9.
Lieja Quintanar 50
This important statement explained how some artists were committed to the creation of
art that showed their reality, from a critical position. They were not interested in producing an
objective analysis of what was happening; rather, they sought to critically manifest situations
through their art. Thus, Wolffler’s statement does not deviate from art into activism, even though
it is worth noting that she and Gómez-Peña visited the Zapatista communities,
67
just like Taniel
Morales did, as mentioned. Now, Wolffer dedicates herself to a feminist art practice, as well as
community-based activism.
In Felipe Ehrenberg’s newspaper intervention, he wrote a text called Territorios hartos
peligrosos (Very dangerous territories); inserted as part of ASALTO, part of his critique was
related to academic painting in Mexico. Art schools were still emphasizing classical traditions of
Mexican painting and denying new forms of production. Ehrenberg appealed to non-academic
and autodidactic artistic practices, and worked in dialogue with Wolffer’s proposals to insist on
an end to defining or limiting artistic explorations. California’s Proposition 187 and the EZLN
are themes that he also pushed: “The Mayan war in Chiapas and the Proposition 187 in
California expose the cultural precariousness of the whole continent: in the sense that both
phenomena are the culmination of self-management struggles that challenged our capacity to
describe ourselves.”
68
Ehrenberg described very well the new situation of the relationship
between art and politics in Mexico. While the Zapatistas established an autonomous project with
the support of people, but never of institutions, the artists mentioned had always worked within
the institutional landscape.

67
Guillermo Gómez-Peña Dangerous border crossers: The artist talks back (London ;New York:
Routledge, 2000).

68
Felipe Ehrenberg, Territorios hartos peligrosos, La Opinión, Sección Espectáculos (Los Angeles, Feb 3,
1995) 10.
Lieja Quintanar 51
At that time, many artists were driven to restructure their comprehension of art practice
according to two possible avenues: to take the difficult way and build a new autonomous art
project, in the spirit of the Zapatistas; or to work within the institution but use it for their own
projects and remain critical. Many Mexican artists of course understood that new opportunities
for support were being offered to them by the very system that the Zapatistas sharply criticized;
furthermore, there was evidence of inconsistencies and corruption in the postmodern project,
which tended to forget about the human in its embrace of a capitalist system.
In the case of the artists in Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone, it is possible to interpret that
they recognized these uncertainties as they were trying to figure out how to resolve contradictory
issues through their artistic practices. Rubén Martínez explored this in his text El terreno
peligroso en el que vivimos (The Danger Zone in Which We Live). In this work he described the
experience of being a Chicano, his story from Los Angeles, his research for a connection with his
mother’s homeland in El Salvador, and his travels to Mexico. Published as part of ASALTO
project, he wrote that “the world seems to spin faster everyday; analyze these dizzy movement is
a desperate work.”
69
From Chiapas, to South Africa with Mandela, to Bosnia and communist
Hong Kong, he described an apocalyptic moment: the comprehension of a whole world placed
the artist in crisis. For him, the best way to approach this was through questions more than
through answers. He located himself as a Chicano artist: “We have to be clear: in terms of
political and artistic power we are marginal in LA and marginal in Mexico […] through ideas
and images desperately and we contradict constantly.”
70

For Martínez, Terreno Peligroso attempted to encourage a public dialogue, something
that was more effective in the Los Angeles context, because the program in that city was always

69
Rubén Martínez, El terreno peligroso en que vivimos, La Opinión, Sección Espectáculos (Los Angeles,
Feb 3, 1995) 11.
70
Ibid., 11.
Lieja Quintanar 52
public; the curators organized many roundtables and lectures and also they used different venues
such as UCLA, 18
th
Street Arts Center, World Arts and Culture, and Olvera Srteet. In the case of
Mexico, X’Teresa and the adjacent streets were the main venues but private discussions were
also organized inside the building.
Martínez notes as an example the performance that Elia Arce presented on a wall outside
of her apartment in LA, wherein she put a long paper with the phrase “LA ESTABILIDAD ES UN
ESTADO DE MOVIMIENTO” (Stability Is a State of Movement). There is no stability for the
world, and accepting this the artists, at that moment, continued to do art, recognizing that at any
moment their practices could fail or could be exploited. Martínez pointed out that there was a
search to reconstruct that destroyed world:
We are searching for a world that collapsed in front of us just a
few years ago: without Revolution (ideological, aesthetic or
sexual), without Romanticism (if not loveless, the way it has
been conceived during many centuries), without Nationalism
(although there are sprouts of this blindness in many parts of
the world even if many of us fall in its terrible claws). Where do
we go?
71

With these strong questions Ramírez is not simply worried about the situation and not
superficially asking what an artist can do to participate in a real movement of change.
Considering all the conditions that he has as an individual—Chicano, marginalized—he
recognizes his search. And he continues, “Our lives are defined by shortened dreams.”

71
Ibid., 11.
Lieja Quintanar 53
California Proposition 187 aimed at limiting the rights of the Latino migrant in the United
States. The cultural and political PRI-hegemony stops the democratization efforts of the south.”
72

And then in an effort to find the good side of the world, Martínez brings in the example of the
Zapatistas, reminding readers that they were a marginal group that caught the attention of the
whole world and gained access to the international media. It is worth making a parallel between
the artists’ situation and that of the Zapatistas; in a more modest manner this group of Chicano
and Chilango artists also used the media to proclaim, manifest, and explore their ideas in two
large newspapers, hoping to address wider publics. He notes:
Here are some clues of a better future for us. But for now we are in the
time of the oven. And all this political and cultural mess has not only an
impact in the level of the ethnics and “minorities”: we have to accept that
the biggest impact is on the human decadency in the individual field, and
there is where all the artists from Terreno Peligroso could find something
in common.
Our voices, poems, images, acts, come from the danger zone that we live
in, where the only thing that we could be sure of is that there is anything
certain. […] Nowadays, we all are in a Danger Zone.
73

These artists were trying different strategies, and the first step was to recognize the
situation and explore it in collective way. Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone was a collective effort
and a contribution to the construction of a new political and social consciousness. The artists and
organizers were as well very conscious of the grupos of the 1970s, as is clear with the text by
Rogelio Villareal, ¿Y qué fue de los grupos? (What Happened to the Grupos?). He mentioned

72
Ibid.
73
Ibid., 11.
Lieja Quintanar 54
the importance of that decade because of the emergence of grupos like Proceso Pentágono, El
Colectivo, Germinal, Taller de Arte e Ideología, No-Grupo, Taller de Invetsigación Plástica,
Suma, Tepito Arte Acá, Fotógrafos Independientes, Mira, Peyote and la Compañía, and Março.
But he also mentions that the idea of creating social change through collectivity was utopian
because in the end, all these grupos ended up working individually. He recognized that they were
a reference for the new generation, and it seemed that at that point they too believed in collective
work, but also privileged the idea of the individual. Even though for the Zapatismo there is a
different understanding of the collective an individual:
But the “other” and “different” are not looking for everyone to be like them. It is as if
each one is saying., “Everyone should do their own thing” (I don’t know how that’s said these
days). And in order for this to be possible, it is not enough just to be; you must be while
respecting the other. The “everyone doing his own thing” is two things: it is an affirmation of
difference, and it is respect for the other difference. When we say we are fighting for respect for
our “different2 and “other” selves, that includes fighting for respect for those who are also
“other” and “different” and who are not like ourselves. And it is here where this entire resistance
movement –called “underground” or “subterranean,” because it takes place among those of
below and underneath institutional movements- meets Zapatismo”
74
This communiqué from
1999 explain a more elaborated understanding of the concept of the other in a collective
resistance, that becomes very difficult to follow in a world that just homogenize collectives and
provides fake controlled elements to build some identities, it is possible to read in the art as the
figure of the artist as an individual creator, that could critic and be political through its own art.

74
Marcos and Ponce de León, 169.
Lieja Quintanar 55
In other scenario they are artistic practices like pedagogy or practices that involved community
dialogue that aligned more with the Zapatista thoughts.
Performing Reality with Symbols
As part of Terreno Peligroso, Elvira Santamaría and Eugenia Vargas decided to make a
performance in collaboration; they presented the same one in both cities and also made
individual projects. In downtown Los Angeles, Eugenia Vargas stopped traffic at 3
rd
Street and
Broadway while wearing a Zapatista mask. M.A. Greenstein described this as an “urban
happening” in her text Reflections On The Danger in Terreno Peligroso-Danger Zone.
75
In
Mexico City, Elvira Santamaría dragged a body wrapped up in a blanket from Ex Teresa to the
Zócalo plaza.
Together, in the dark temple of X’Teresa, Santamaría and Vargas both wore white
jumpers; a Mexican flag stood on the side with a sign that said “Prohibido faltar al respeto”
(Lack of Respect Is Prohibited), signage for the public. On a podium covered with a white sheet,
Vargas put down plastic gloves to start preparing a mixture of bloody meat and liquid that she
began to spread around, while Santamaría laid out another white sheet on the floor and placed
the flag of Guatemala in the middle—with its two blue strips on the sides and the green quetzal
in the center—as well as a red flag next to it, forming a columnar American flag. Right then,
Vargas started reading a Zapatista communiqué in which they denounced the Mexican army that
remained in Chiapas and made critical commentary about the extreme poverty suffered by the
migrants who crossed from Guatemala to Mexico, and about Proposition 187.
That communiqué was from the Jornada newspaper. After reading these Zapatista words
the artists started to put the meat over the flags and, after finishing this action, both of them

75
M.A. Greenstein, Reflections on the danger in Terreno Peligroso/Danger Zone, text from Ex Teresa
Archive: Tereno Peligroso/Danger Zone 1995. (Publisher Unidentified).
Lieja Quintanar 56
proceeded to cut in half of all three flags with the sheet underneath. In order to divide the totality
into two parts, they made two wrapped packages with half of the flags around the meat. Each
artist took one wrapped package and put it on her back and they then covered their bodies with
cow pelts, sitting opposite each other. The audience was quiet and attentive to this image of two
bodies covered from the head down with cattle pelts, standing as if ready to do something, yet
taking their time. After a while, Santamaría ran into a mirror, breaking it in many pieces. The
Archive of Ex Teresa has complete video documentation of the performance.
The artists used the content of a Zapatista communiqué as a resource to generate their
comment about the violence that migrants suffered, in terms of crossing borders but also through
the immigration policies that both countries, Mexico and United States, have used to limit
immigrants’ rights—ideological policies based on the idea of immigrants being the lowest level
of what is human, denigrating them and excluding them from state benefits, as Proposition 187
stated. The positioning of immigrants in conditions commensurate with slavery was a hidden part
of the new neoliberal world.
The use of the national flags was a subversive act, and the blood spattered on the
symbols of two nations, the US and Guatemala, with a red flag in between, could be read as the
path that Guatemalans had had to take to complete the American dream, which was just an
illusion anyways. The red flag was clearly a metaphor for a bloody Mexico: after the Zapatista
uprising many of the revolutionaries died in the subsequent 12 days of attack by the army, a
seeming continuation of the history of violence against indigenous groups.
The mirror in the back and the action of crossing it were elements suggesting
confrontation with a reality built of many illusions. Santamaría had used the glass and mirror
elements in her previous performances, such as her work at La Panadería.
Lieja Quintanar 57
The artists developed their practices in a literal danger zone that was also a territory of
resistance, a territory that they had to read, reinvent, and create, pushing further away from the
hegemonic structures that the government had established as venues.

Lieja Quintanar 58
CONCLUSION

Starting in 1994 and the years that followed in Mexico, artistic practices were certainly
marked by the Zapatista uprising. The relationship between art and politics is a relationship that
is connected to the condition of resistance that people from Mexico had developed since the
beginnings of colonization. The power relationships between those who assert the power and
those who create a new kind of power through resistance have defined contemporary artistic
production in Mexico. The cultural policies of the PRI government, particularly since the 1960s,
have been presented to artists and intellectuals as opportunities to create through governmental
funding, but in reality support their repressive tendencies. Stemming from an economic and
capitalist imperative, those policies are the ones that have dominated the artistic practices of
contemporary art after 1994, as the combination of funding from governmental and private
sources promoted the development of contemporary art scene in Mexico. While in 1994 artists
and producers tried to take advantage of this, they also took the opportunity to direct projects that
could be simultaneously funded and provide a measurable artistic freedom. They were producing
art that could be inserted into the global art market, but that maintained a critical edge.
From a reading not based so much on economic issues but more to the values of political
resistance, it is possible to say that the relationship between art and politics has generated many
new paths from the 1990s up to the present moment. This relationship is understood as a way to
produce critical and political discourses that foreground artistic practices. It is a model that
involves constant self-questioning and a continual renewal of strategies of resistance. The
success of this relationship is difficult to track due to the variety of possibilities that may result
from such efforts.
Lieja Quintanar 59
For example, the artistic practice of Taniel Morales has continually detoured to other
areas apart from the art system (as with the activist pirate radio), and he has therefore not
established a profile in the global art scene. His dedication to non-formal education puts his
pedagogical-artistic efforts far from the system, even though it is notable that he works at the
FARO de Oriente, a project used by the neighborhood of Iztapalapa in Mexico City but run by
the government. Lorena Wolffer is another example: her artistic practices explore different areas
of feminism and violence against women. Her art actions are often subtle and not well known,
such as her recent show in Ex Teresa, where she examined the violence, symbolic and otherwise,
inflicted on the museum guards, all of them women. Both artists continue making art but outside
of the realm of the global art market.
These examples are important for understanding that 1994 and after were points of
departure for artists as well as institutions, in defining the political nature of their practices. La
Panadería ended up becoming a project that suggested the possibility of having cultural policies
that were interested in art investments to promote the country. La Panadería is then an example
of how artists and projects turned a tight situation into an opportunity, as this new generation had
to convince the institutions that they were indeed professionals, and that they both needed their
support and, at the same time, creative independence, one that included being political and
critical. La feria del rebelde was a test model where many forms of approaching art and politics
at the same time were demonstrated. It could be argued that the mixture of all these varieties
caused the chaos of that event, or the chaos could be blamed on the mixture of classes, ages, or
the understanding of what can be considered art or not. The reality is that all these different
conditions that were exalted in La feria del rebelde revealed to the artists different paths for
approaching art. It was a moment where artistic practices diverged in different directions and,
Lieja Quintanar 60
twenty years later, the time has come when these paths have to be questioned and put back in
dialogue, also to remind us that the Zapatista movement gathered all of these potentials at the
same time. Their common interest and collective consciousness demanded that they explore the
situation of the country, practicing, as such, that same relationship between art and politics with
which the artists engaged.
The collectivity aspired to by the grupos for the 1970s was maybe as utopian as Rogelio
implied, but the Zapatista movement reaffirmed that collectivity and community, as those idea
had been practiced and developed during their 20 years of autonomy and resistance. Highlighted
again in 1994, that collectivity inspired artists to try to work from this model, though without
necessarily creating a literal model of collectivity. The beginnings of La Panadería and La Feria
del Rebelde showed them working as collectives and in the case of Terreno Peligroso-Danger
Zone, the Chicano and Chilango artists put their practices to work in a collective way that
resulted in many lines of research: transnational identity, gender, feminism, migration, among
others. While the channels of communication that they traced have been buried in oblivion, very
recently those channels have started to be dusted off.
In the critical moment in which these artists were living, the Zapatistas opened a door to a
different world, a world charged with hope, and with tragedy, as well as with the critique that it
would be just another utopia: a group of indigenous individuals that use the black ski mask to
become visible, to show how the world has forgotten indigenous groups, and to show that they
are not recognized as individuals in a group. They are treated as indigenous people that can be
objectified and exoticized by a neoliberal world, by the Mexican government and its potent
army. Instead, they fought with symbolic acts, a complex media strategy, knowledge, a women's
revolution inside the movement, and the construction of a history and a memory of resistance.
Lieja Quintanar 61
This moment pushed artists to take positions to experiment and improve new and old models to
approach and create art.
The relationship between art and politics in the celebrations of the twentieth anniversary
of the Zapatista uprising puts pressure on many of us to rethink the distant and more recent past,
and to reconsider our approach to curatorial practice as we seek to bring these projects back to
light through exhibitions. Cráter Invertido (Inverted crater), a cooperative of artists that uses
many references from the Zapatista ideology, has emerged with a special interest in collectivity
and political practices. But these projects cannot isolate Zapatista history, or the history of the
grupos of the 1970s. They have to consider them together and look back and observe how artists
have approached and reacted to this relationship between art and politics. However, the many
opportunities for connection to the global art world that resulted give artists less time to rethink
the best way to approach these histories—Cráter Invertido is participating in this year’s Venice
Biennale.
Exploring the recent past through these two projects and their different echoes through
the art world, helps us to understand the present and its artistic practices in a moment that seems
to be eerily familiar to the situation of twenty years ago: the return of the PRI in 2012 through
illegal elections, the missing 43 students from Ayotzinapa, the persecution of young people and
political organizations, the violence, the public insecurity, and the damaged freedom of
expression. But with this comes continued resistance: the Zapatistas appeared in San Cristobal de
las Casas on a silent march of thousands in December 2012, and a new project to expand their
word has resulted in the “The Zapatista School”; the Mexican art community has been involved
in the mass mobilizations to demand justice for the Ayotzinapa students, and museums have
been used as spaces for meetings and discussions.
Lieja Quintanar 62
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Asset Metadata

Creator Lieja Quintanar, Daniela (author)

Core Title Territories of resistance: the impact of the Zapatista Rebellion on artistic practices in Mexico City, 1994-1995

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Publication Date 05/05/2015

Defense Date 05/05/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1990s,aesthetics and politics,Danger zone,La feria del rebelde,Mexican contemporary art,Mexico City,OAI-PMH Harvest,Rebellion,Terreno peligroso,territories of resistance,zapatismo

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Advisor Jones, Amelia G. (committee chair), Steiner, A.L. (committee member), Wedell, Noura (committee member)

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