Plural Worlds and Aztec-Chicano Serial Poetry

Abstract

Writing about the EZLN, one of many globally publicized “indigenous insurgencies at the turn of the twenty-first century,” historian and cultural critic José Rabasa remarks that any thoroughgoing historicism—as well as any detailed ecology of present social forms—requires confronting past cultures and localities with a critical awareness of both (their and our) past and (their and our) present “backgrounds and habitus.” Properly critical thinkers, that is, need be familiar with at least two worlds, two modes of organizing what counts as real, at once. This eye to ontologies in the plural makes up a minimal condition for intelligibly reading the process of globalization and the forms of transnational dissent that arise in so-called global cores and peripheries. In its call for cultural plurality, Rabasa’s critique seems to strikes a familiar chord. Calls for “multiexperiential” complexity echo throughout discourses of the new—New Historicism, modernist (anthropological) relativism, postmodernism, liberal tolerace and national multiculturalism, postnational global consumerism—and even backward in time—to Romantic subjective humanism. The difference lies in Rabasa’s vision of the poetic and plural nature of “worlds.”

Many words walk in the world. Many worlds are made. Many worlds are made for us…In the world, we want many worlds to fit. The Nation which we construct is one where all communities and languages fit, where all steps may walk, where all may have laughter, where all may live the dawn.

—Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Indigenous Clandestine Revolutionary Committee General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Mexico