This dissertation examines the crossover between politics and aesthetics in the context of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. The findings draw on ethnographic observation and informal interviews, along with political documents and communiqués, children’s drawings, political murals, and photographs of violence. Utilizing these data, the dissertation focuses on the way that various forms of imagery combine together to project an understanding of politics, change, and violence specific to the Zapatista movement.

The findings show how particular visual and textual images elucidate the presence of magic and the sacred within the context of traditional Mexican State politics as well as the Zapatista movement. It argues that the Mexican State and the Zapatistas are both deeply entwined with magic and the sacred. However, the various imagistic elements identified point to how their engagement with these forces takes on radically different trajectories. While magic and the sacred are an essential part of the fetishism and inviolability granted the State, they are also key features in the creation of the anti-State politics inherent to the Zapatistas movement.

In exploring the two approaches to magic and the sacred, the intent is to highlight how the incorporation of spiritual and magical life of indigenous communities into the original Zapatista Marxist-Leninist framework has been crucial to the creation of the movement’s anti-State politics, practice of autonomy, visual pedagogy, and non-violent form of guerilla warfare. This study calls not only for a new way of understanding the magic of the State and its relationship to contemporary forms of violence in Mexico as well as the significance of creating a life that is disconnected from the logic that informs such violence, but also how the power of imagery and myth is bound to political creation.