The Common on the side of a mountain. (An operating room in the Lacandon Jungle)

Jun092025

The Common on the side of a mountain. (An operating room in the Lacandon Jungle)

The Common on the side of a mountain.
(An operating room in the Lacandon Jungle)

In the construction of what will be the headquarters of one the COMMON operating rooms, there is something not made explicit in the images. Among those working on the construction are political party members, compañeros from the National Indigenous Congress, and Zapatista compas; of various religions or no religion; of different generations, languages, roots, and histories.

And not only that. In this budding building, there is the work, support, and solidarity of individuals, groups, collectives, organizations, and movements from various parts of the world, including Mexico, who, with their effort, creativity, and inventiveness, secured payment for the materials. Even fellow Indigenous peoples from the Lacandon Jungle offered support with pay when they couldn’t make it to work. And there was no shortage of people offering gravel benches and even dump trucks to haul the materials.

In the architectural design of the building, the following occurred: a professional architect was consulted, who offered to carry out the project… for nearly 500,000 pesos. The Zapatistas of Interzona thought: “If we did not depend on great theorists and thinkers in order to create a new and better world, but rather we are doing it with our own thoughts and our own practice, then let’s make a building in accordance with what we want and with our own knowledge.” Thus, the knowledge of indigenous communities was brought together, regardless of whether they are Zapatistas or not, or what religion they profess, or their political party, or their language, or their color, or their affective, sexual, emotional, or social identity, their size, their weight, their calendar, and their geography.

It’s not finished, that’s true. And although walls, rooms, bathrooms, roofs, equipment, instructors, and the apparatus to go under the knife and laboratory are missing; all the colors are already in its foundations. It’s not just a work of Zapatistas, but of the COMMON.

In those ditches; the mixer whose bearing failed (and the mechanics have already dismantled the part and a commission has been sent out to procure the replacement); the bricks; the pozol; the rods; the worker who fainted and was treated by the Zapatista autonomous health service (nothing serious, just too many worms); the simultaneous courses in Herbalism, Bone-Setters, Midwifery, and General Health; the electric and mechanical bicycles of the health promoters who look after those working in construction; the workshop to repair them because they break down when they fall; the buckets for hauling sand, gravel, cement, and water; the temporary satellite internet installed so that workers could keep an eye on their families, their cornfields, their pets; the jokes and pranks in different languages and ways; the practical masonry workshop that the most diligent ones teach to young people who want to learn; Hope rekindled by the first rains that wet them, yes, but also give drink to the earth from which corn, beans, vegetables, grass for livestock, and pumpkins (ugh!) will grow; the life that streams and rivers need; and the women and male thirds documenting in image and sound.

In that whole, each part has its who, its what, its when, its how.

Every piece of the puzzle is necessary to complete it. Everyone is who they are and never ceases to be, but it becomes part of the common to build something, a whole that benefits the parts without subordinating, co-opting, recruiting, lecturing, or absorbing them.

-*-

Perhaps someone will, one day, theorize the Commons. With words that are more or less harsh, more or less complicated, more or less confusing. Even great theses, profound reflections, publications in articles, magazines, books, specialties, roundtables, presentations, symposia, etc., may be written. In short, those things that are done at tables and desks while, outside, life and death struggle.

But if you ask the parts that now converge on those foundations of an operating room in the Lacandon Jungle; if you ask them who or why they did what they did; why they contributed with their labor; why they sweated under the sun? Why did they get wet in the rain? Why did they give their time and even pay? Why did they organize activities, fundraisers, festivals, exhibitions, and I don’t know what else, to raise funds that cross oceans and borders? And why, regardless of languages, geographies, and calendars, did they became Common? Why did they persist in something that seemed like a delirium, a nonsense, a dream?

Perhaps they will respond—in many languages, in many colors, in many geographies, on many calendars, in many ways— “Because of life.”

Because, it often happens that small, seemingly insignificant things —like a building with no apparent defined profile, in the middle of that nothingness that geographical maps indicate as the «Lacandon Jungle» (far from social media, academia and opinion journalism, mass media, political circles, the churches of political parties, coffee-shop revolutions and counterrevolutions, the Bibles and catechisms of capitalism and its supposed alternatives, the medium, large, or small islands of each person’s daily life, individual sorrows and joys, a multiverse that repeats the same nightmare in its variations)— have a big soul and a collective heart.

And I tell you this because, watching the videos from the last RebelArt and RevelArt meetings, I saw a small model, a wooden house with the words «Common Operating Room» on the front. That was a little over a month ago. It was that (a small wooden house), just a few weeks ago, what is now hinted at in the Lacandon Jungle. The Common made it grow, walk, groom, prepare itself, and sit on a thicket, at the foot of a mountain that, years ago, became a vessel for life.

-*-

Who keeps track of the sweat, the tears, the sleepless nights, the illnesses, the hunger, the doing the math, the cartel, the promotion, the organization of those who work today, near and far, in that corner?

Well, at least we, the Zapatista peoples.

Because, as SubMoy says, «He who does nothing is he who sees and hears nothing, and only looks at his navel and still claims to know the world.»

Well. Cheers, and yes, maybe we don’t know how to put into words what the Commons is, but we are learning to put it into practice. Isn’t that so?

From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.

The Captain.
June, 2025.

P.S. – If the struggle is for life, then may life finally catch a breath to flourish in that geography called Palestine, far away but so close to the mountains of the Mexican Southeast