We don't need shoes where we're going!

 

No necesitamos zapatos donde vamos!

We Don’t Need No Shoes! Where We’re Going!”

The Determination, Commitment, and Courage of the Post-Modern Americanas Zapatistas Movement

Imagine this: 

you’re standing at the edge of a future no one has mapped yet. No guidebook. No well-trodden path. Just raw land—the kind of land that doesn’t ask for your credentials, your bloodline, or your permission. And right as you’re about to take your first step, someone asks, *“Aren’t you going to put on your shoes?”*

• And we smile.
• Not out of arrogance, but out of understanding.
• Because: **No necesitamos zapatos donde vamos.**
• We don’t need shoes where we’re going.

Shoes are for the old world—where roadways were paved for someone else’s comfort, where rebels were expected to walk quietly, neatly, politely. Shoes are for systems designed to keep your feet clean while your soul stays dirty.

But the Americanas Zapatistas?

• We walk differently.
• We walk to make our own ground.

Who are these post-modern Americanas Zapatistas?

They’re the inheritors of rebellion, but not the imitators of it.

They are a fusion of ideologies:

• * Indigenous autonomy
• * Afro-diasporic freedom traditions
• * Latin American liberation theology
• * Queer futurism
• * Mutual aid culture
• * Ecological stewardship
• * Cybernetic community networks

Think of them as a new species of protagonist—one who doesn’t wait for permission, one who understands history but refuses to be confined by it, one who builds systems not to dominate but to liberate.

• They know the old myth of America is dead.
• And instead of mourning it, they compost it.

Courage here isn’t loud.

It’s not screaming in the streets for the sake of spectacle—though sometimes it is.

More often, courage looks like:

• * planting corn in a world obsessed with concrete
• * choosing solidarity over spectacle
• * building communities where capitalism has left craters
• * saying “we” in a culture trained to worship “me”
• * refusing the ease of cynicism in favor of the discipline of hope

Their courage is not accidental. It’s cultivated.

Like maize. Like memory. Like rebellion itself.

Now, when I say “determination,”

 I don’t mean nostalgia dressed up as resistance.

I mean a gritty, forward-leaning, prototype-driven determination.

This movement understands something crucial:

**You don’t overthrow systems by screaming at them—you make them irrelevant.**

So they build:

• * parallel schools
• * parallel economies
• * parallel justice frameworks
• * parallel food systems
• * parallel myths and cosmologies

Not as escape routes, but as replacements.

As living proof that another world already exists—it’s just unevenly distributed

Walking without shoes is not a gesture.

It’s a philosophy.

It says:

“We are willing to feel the earth. We are willing to be wounded. We are willing to be changed by the impact of our own steps.”

• No abstraction.
• No buffer.
• Just skin against reality.

This is commitment:

Not the commitment of comfort, but the commitment of consequence.

The Americanas Zapatistas are not “Americans”

in the narrow nationalist sense.

• They are *of the Americas*—plural, continental, interwoven.
• They reject the colonial singular.
• They reclaim the continental plural.

Their America stretches from Nunavut to Patagonia, from the desert to the rainforest, from the barrios to the bayous.

• And in that expanse, they carry a single vow:

**To live as if liberation is not a dream but a duty.**

Where are we going?

• Not back.
• Not sideways.
• Forward—into the unmapped.

A future that demands:

• * imagination as infrastructure
• * solidarity as technology
• * rebellion as a renewable resource

We’re heading to a place where dignity isn’t a luxury item,

where autonomy isn’t exotic,

where community isn’t an afterthought—

it’s the DNA of everything.

And to get there…

Shoes will only slow us down.

So when we say, 

*“No necesitamos zapatos donde vamos,”*

• it’s not a joke.
• It’s a declaration.

• We won’t walk the paths designed for our compliance.
• We won’t cushion ourselves from the friction required to make real change.
• We won’t protect ourselves from the very ground we’re trying to liberate.

We *will* walk it barefoot—

because the future deserves our full contact.

• Our scars.
• Our sweat.
• Our wholehearted presence.

• This is the courage of the post-modern Americanas Zapatistas.
• Not the courage to fight for a better world someday.
• But the courage to build one *right now.*

Thank you.