"Roads of Dignity" Speech.

• Author: Guillen Vicente, Rafael Sebastian

[Presented by the insurgent subcomandante Marcos in the intercultural meeting "The Roads of Dignity: Indigenous rights, memory and culture patrimony" celebrated March 12, 2001.]

In order to speak like Zapatistas about roads of dignity, we will tell a story called : "The Other Player."

A group of chess players is engrossed in an important high-level chess game.

An indigenous person comes by, watches for a while and asks what it is that they are playing. Nobody answers. The Indian approaches the board and contemplates the position of the pieces, the serious and scowling faces of the players, the expectant attitude of those around them. He repeats his question. One of the players takes the trouble to respond: "It's something you wouldn't be able to understand; it's a game for wise and important people." The Indian keeps silent and continues to watch the board and the movements of the contestants. After a time, he ventures another question: "And why do you play if you already know who is going to win?" The same player that responded to him before says: "You will never understand. This is for specialists; it's out of your intellectual reach." The Indian doesn't say anything. He continues to watch, and goes away. In a little while he comes back bringing something with him. Without so much as a word he approaches the table and puts right in the middle of the chessboard a n old boot covered in mud. The players are perplexed and look at him angrily.

The Indian smiles maliciously while asking: "Check?"

The End.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an English poet from the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, wrote: "If a man walked across Paradise in a dream, and if they gave him a flower as proof that he had been there, and if, upon awakening, he were to find that flower in his hand then what?"

In this March for Indigenous Dignity, we the Zapatistas have seen a part of the map of the national tragedy that doesn't get on prime time radio or TV.

Any one of those present can argue that that isn't worth anything at all, and that a march was not necessary for people to realize that the Mexico of the downtrodden is great in number and in poverty.

But I do not come to speak to you of indexes of poverty, of constant repression or of deceit.

On this march we the Zapatistas have also seen part of the Mexico of rebels; we have seen them see themselves and see others. This, and nothing else, is dignity. The downtrodden of Mexico, particularly the...