Imagining Ramona: The Mythologization and Martyrdom of a Zapatista Resistance Fighter

Abstract

During the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN/Zapatista) campaign, images of insurgent leader La Comandanta Ramona circulated across Mexico and the globe, encouraging popular support for the Indigenous resistance movement, which was launched from Chiapas’ Lacandón jungle on January 1, 1994.1 Deemed “the petite warrior”2 and a “modern-day David battling Goliath,”3 the masked Maya woman, according to political scientist Karen Kampwirth, captured “[m]ore than any other single Zapatista woman…the imagination of millions.”4 Indeed, by challenging the Mexican government and defending the rights of Indigenous peoples, Ramona became one of the most important revolutionary women in the country’s history. In an official pantheon of virile heroes and hypermasculine icons, including Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, Comandanta Ramona exists, however, as an enigmatic figure—largely overlooked and dismissed in the nation’s revolutionary canon. For instance, while an extensive body of literature explores the Zapatista uprising and its strategic use of imagery, there is a paucity of work interrogating Ramona’s significance in this resistance movement. This dissertation argues that discursive representations in Mexico’s national press render Ramona within archetypal and bifurcated framings that reproduce dominant ideologies in textual and visual news sources. While these imaginings attempt to weaken her political agency and diminish the complexities of history, gender, and race in the theatre of resistance, Ramona ruptures and subverts such ideological trappings, wresting herself from the stranglehold of mediated determinations. In doing so, Ramona defines herself as a dissident agent in the counter-archive of women’s insurgency.