Who rebels?

 

Who Rebels? The Americanas Zapatistas!

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What does rebellion look like when it grows up?

Today’s topic—“Who Rebels? The Americanas Zapatistas!”—isn’t just a slogan. It’s a call to wakefulness. A flare in the night. A reminder that rebellion isn’t a relic sealed in 20th-century amber. It’s alive. It’s evolving. And it’s showing up in places most people don’t expect.

Let’s start with the obvious echo: “Zapatistas.”
When most folks hear the name, they think of Chiapas in ’94—masks, mountains, indigenous autonomy, and the refusal to bow to a world that treats human beings like disposable inputs. But the deeper meaning—the part that matters today—is that a Zapatista is anyone who chooses dignity over convenience, community over extraction, and freedom over the quiet suffocation of resignation.

So who are the Americanas Zapatistas?

They’re the ones who refuse to be lulled into numbness.
They’re the ones who treat democracy not as a spectator sport but a living organism.
They’re the ones who see the cracks in a system and say, “Okay then—let’s plant something in the cracks.”

You’ve met them, even if you didn’t realize it.

• They’re the neighborhood organizers turning abandoned lots into food forests.
• They’re the mutual aid hubs building safety nets where institutions failed.
• They’re the technologists who write code for liberation instead of surveillance.
• They’re the teachers who sneak real history into classrooms starving for truth.
• They’re the young people who refuse to inherit a burning world quietly.

And they’re the elders who held the flame long before the rest of us woke up.

What these people share isn’t ideology. It’s agency.
They understand that rebellion doesn’t have to be dramatic.
It just has to be intentional.

Rebellion today is less about marching with rifles and more about refusing to outsource your conscience. It’s choosing a life that increases the freedom of others, not just your own convenience. It’s crafting systems where dignity is the default state, not a luxury product.

The Americanas Zapatistas are rebuilding what empire compromised:
The belief that ordinary people hold extraordinary power—if we choose to act together.

They remind us that every system has leverage points, and some of the smallest changes—our choices, our conversations, our commitments—can create ripples that outlive us. They understand that being a good ancestor is not a poetic aspiration. It’s a daily practice.

These rebels don’t aim to burn the world down.
They aim to re-architect it.

To rebel today is to ask the 13th question—the question no one else thought to ask. It’s to recognize that the future isn’t waiting to arrive; it’s waiting to be authored.

So when we ask, “Who rebels?”—the answer is simple:

• Those who refuse to accept a world smaller than our collective imagination.
• Those who choose life over inertia.
• Those who see possibility where others see inevitability.

Americanas Zapatistas aren’t a demographic. They’re a verb.

• A way of walking.
• A way of seeing.
• A way of saying, “We can do better—and we will.”

And if you’re feeling that spark right now—the one humming behind your ribs—that’s your cue. That’s your mask without a mask. That’s your invitation to step into the lineage of people who didn’t wait for permission to make a freer world.

The question is no longer “Who rebels?”

The real question is:

“Will you?”

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.