ABSTRACT
Brightly colored posters lined the cobblestone streets of southern Mexico just a few months after the Acteal massacre of December 22, 1997. Glued to telephone poles and concrete walls, the cartoon-like graphics depicted faces of government officials leering over the silhouette of a bloody church. The poster text demanded rights for residents of Acteal, an indigenous Tzotzil village in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, and justice for the 45 members who were massacred by paramilitary forces while in a prayer meeting. “If we don’t organize, they will wipe us out like they did in Acteal,” Chiapan activists responded in 2012 when asked why they had organized a series of workshops on indigenous rights (Anonymous, 2012). The activists’ explanations capture how one community includes memories of violence in grassroots mobilization as they try to gain state protection for their rights as minority citizens. Indigenous Chiapan activists, like their Kurdish and Nahua counterparts in Turkey and El Salvador, believe that community organizing is important for physical and cultural survival, implying that well-organized communities stand a better chance of self-preservation in the face of state or paramilitary violence.
