Professors on the run: How Marcos's narratives of Zapatismo refashion North American Cold War anxiety

This article examines the communiqués issued by Subcomandante Marcos during the early years of the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico (1992-1998). It addresses a double voice, and a double mission, of these internet pronouncements: first, as a tool for a local Indigenous uprising in the state of Chiapas; second, as a part of a much broader anti-neoliberal and antineo-imperialist struggle. The article argues that the unusual interlacing of a local, almost intimate struggle with a much broader ideological struggle has its sources, models and origins, paradoxically, in U.S. Cold War anticommunist discourse of the 1950s. Both discourses featured almost priestly, technocratic, master-explainers of an unseen enemy; both resorted to normative narratives of domesticity and infantilization; both relied on masked anti-heroes.