Interview by Patrick and Diana Zaachila, a small city south of Oaxaca, was the cradle of the Zapotec Civilization. There are approximately 25,000 residents, but now only the oldest community members speak Zapoteco. We grow corn, peanuts, and jicama, which is a fruit harvested around All Saints Day. A lot of people also raise beef cattle and hogs and many bake bread and mole, a spicy salsa known in the region. Fortunately, we also have an abundance of clean drinking water, which is rare in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, and becomes scarcer as the population increases. In Zaachila, as in all of Oaxaca, people struggle to make ends meet. When I was a kid, we didn’t have enough to eat and there weren’t a lot of jobs available. I started working when I was six or eight, planting and weeding corn, collecting trash, sweeping the market, and helping my mom sell tortillas. These are the some of the experiences and conditions that shaped the way I see the world. It’s different for kids who always got new shoes, who could go to college. We’re surrounded by lifestyles that don’t have anything to do with our own interests, aspirations, hopes or dreams. But why should we have to fight off someone always telling us what to think, to buy this brand of television or car? We can think and make decisions on our own. We’re victims of the few economically-privileged who make decisions that end up affecting lots of people. We have the right to ask why. And from this why we can look for answers and initiate a process of transformation. In Zaachila, there have always been people asking these questions. A few years ago, Coca-Cola wanted to build a plant here, which would supposedly bring lots of jobs to the community. But some people realized that they were going be using a tremendous amount of water, limiting what would be left for the rest of us. So a group of people organized and prevented the construction of the Coca-Cola plant. There have always been these activists; they just haven’t been able to reach the majority of people in most cases. Authoritarian regimes always construct campaigns to discredit organizers, and try to convince people that protesters are crazy. It wasn’t until the severe repression, starting with the violent removal of the teacher’s encampment on June 14th, that the majority of people started to see that there were fundamental problems here, and began to support the movement that has taken shape over the last year. *** When the teachers’ union was attacked, all the teachers in Zaachila starting organizing and brought people together. Early on in July, a month after the repression, people were called together by the ringing of the bells. The ringing of the bells in Zaachila is very symbolic, rooted in the tradition of blowing the conch shell. They’re only rung under very special circumstances. In this case they were used to bring everyone to the city center for the first popular assembly. There we determined what the position of the town was in regards to our mayor, José Coronel Martinez, who had upset many people by sending the city police to back up the governor on June 14th. He also made people mad by organizing a number of so-called “Peace Marches” along with the PRI, paying people to march around town dressed in white to show their support for Governor Ulises. So there were a series of meetings, where we discussed the movement and the role of our city government in the repression. We discovered things that we didn’t expect that added to our more immediate frustrations.

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