Aesthetics of Indigenous Affinity: Traveling from Chiapas to Palestine
in the Murals of Gustavo Chávez Pavón
AMAL EQEIQ
My first encounter with the murals of Gustavo Chávez Pavón
was on December 31st, 2013, when I arrived with a Palestinian
delegation in the autonomous Zapatista community in Oventic in the highlands of
Chiapas in Southern Mexico to attend the celebrations of the twentieth
anniversary of the Zapatista Uprising. We were also attending the graduation
from our first grade at La Escuelita[1],
the Little School that the Zapatistas have been organizing since August 2013 as
an annual global camp for indigenous education and autonomy from below. My
companions and I were intrigued by a mural of a Zapatista rebel wearing a
pasamontaña, the iconic ski mask of the Zapatistas, designed like a black and
white kuffiyeh, the traditional
Palestinian peasant scarf that has become a popular symbol of Palestinian
national identity. Although there was
no actual artist signature, we recognized the big bold slogan "To Exist is to
is Resist," printed on its left corner. It was a very familiar translation of
the spirit of ṣumūd from Palestine. Painted in thin black brush underneath
were the small captions in Spanish: "De Chiapas a Palestina, la lucha por
libertad nos hermana" (From Chiapas to Palestine, the struggle for
liberation unites us). We concluded that this mural must have been collectively
signed by the Zapatista community in Oventic. For the next four years, I would
use a picture that I took of this mural as a background image in my academic
presentations as a visual proof to explain my rationale for studying
contemporary Mayan and Palestinian literatures within comparative indigenous
studies. Until one day, and after a quick research of murals in Palestine, I
came across an identical image of the same mural painted at the Apartheid Wall
in Bethlehem. While searching Google Images in English and Arabic didn't yield
any specific results besides vague references to the work as Latin American,
searching in Spanish led to several interviews in the Mexican press with the
artist behind the mural: Gustavo Chávez Pavón.
Figure
1: Gustavo Chávez Pavón, Mexico City, 2017. Photo by Amal Eqeiq
Figure
2: "To Exist is to Resist" mural in Chiapas. Photo by Amal Eqeiq,
2013.
In 2004, Chávez Pavón arrived
in Palestine together with Juan Erasto Molina Urbina, from Chiapas and Alberto
Aragón Reyes from Oaxaca. They were officially invited by the Lutheran Bishop
of Jerusalem, Dr. Munib Younan, to participate in an international artists
residency and give lectures and children art workshops at the International
Center of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jerusalem. During the month of the
residency, Chávez Pavón painted murals in Qalqilya, Tulkarem, Bethlehem, and
Abu Dis, where he also painted a big portrait of Che Guevara. All of these
murals are signed at the bottom with four letters: EZLN, Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Army of National
Liberation). Although the mural of "To Exist is to Resist" disappeared from the
Apartheid Wall in Bethlehem sometime between 2011 and 2017, most likely due to
the increasing appropriation of the Wall as a popular murals site frequented by
global street artists such as Bansky (Eqeiq, 2018), Chávez Pavón continued to
paint murals of solidarity with Palestine on different walls across the world.
In fact, since 2004, the brush of the Mexican muralist and Zapatista cultural
promoter did not dry. In addition to painting murals in public schools in
Mexico within the independent program, Los
Muros en la Educación (Walls in Education), Chávez Pavón crossed many
physical and imagined borders from Mexico to Palestine, Venezuela, Argentina,
and Chile, sometimes independently and sometimes as a member of an
international brigade of artists called Murales
contra muros (Murals against Walls) to paint very colorful murals that
feature unequivocal and explicit messages of indigenous and global solidarity
with Palestine. Despite the powerful presence of his murals in the embassies of
Palestine in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, and the kuffiyeh that he usually wears as a headband when he climbs walls
to paint solidarity with Palestine, Chávez Pavón remains largely unknown in
Palestine. Moreover, in comparison with other internationalist artists, more
specifically, those of Euro-American origins, who did work in Palestine, his
work is largely absent from books and magazines that review or cover
Palestinian art and visual culture. In this essay, I introduce the murals of
Chávez Pavón based on three interviews that we conducted in Spanish over the
phone in May 2017 and in-person in Mexico City in October 2017 and August 2018,
respectively. Through this dialogue, my goal is to shed light on key visual
elements of Zapatista solidarity and the ways in which they represent
collective visions of indigenous liberation in the traveling murals of Chávez
Pavón. His enthusiastic participation in these interviews and permission to
share his personal archive publicly provide a visual and oral testimony of an
untold chapter in the history of indigenous solidarity between Mayan
communities in Chiapas and Palestine. This solidarity is transnational at heart
both in its vision of mutual indigenous liberation and the global anti-colonial
and anti-capitalist struggle.
AE: The murals "To Exist is to Resist" in Chiapas and Bethlehem are almost
identical, and in both you combine the kuffiyeh
with the maize. Why did you choose this particular image?
GCHP: When I received the
invitation to go to Palestine, I was painting a mural that was important for
Zapatista education at a primary school in an autonomous Zapatista community in
Chiapas. It was an important mural that would eventually make me half-famous. I
asked permission from the community to leave and when they knew that I was
heading to Palestine, they gave me their approval and asked me to deliver warm
greetings to the Palestinians together with a collective message of solidarity
that emphasizes that we have a lot in common: the struggle for land, freedom,
and dignity are basically the same for our peoples. So, I went to Palestine
with this image on my mind.
AE: But the subtitles are different. In Chiapas the subtitle is "De Chiapas a Palestina, la lucha por
libertad nos hermana" (From Chiapas to Palestine, the struggle for
liberation unites us), whereas in Palestine, you wrote, "Viva Palestina libre abajo el muro facsista" (Long live Palestine under the
fa(ck)scist Wall). Why?
Figure
3: "To Exist is to Resist" mural in progress, Bethlehem, 2004. Photo from Chavéz Pavón's archive.
GCHP: In Chiapas, our solidarity
with Palestine is firm and clear, and the words on the mural are only a daily
reminder of commitment to our common struggle. On the other hand, in the murals
in Palestine, I wanted to denounce the wall of shame by mocking it. So, in Bethlehem, I wrote the word facsista to make a joke of this wall and
say fuck fascists at the same time. In a mural in Tulkarem, for example, I was
more playful with words and wrote: "Viva Zapatata" instead of "Viva Zapata"[2].
Figure 4: the Zapata mural in Mexico City, 2017. Photo from Chavéz
Pavón's archive.
AE: Speaking of Zapata, in 2017 you painted a new mural in Mexico City
featuring a Zapata dressed up like a Palestinian fighter. We see here a shift
in your work with more explicit integration of Palestinian symbols of
resistance, such as the kuffiyeh and
the slingshot. Can you tell us more about this mural?
GCHP: I painted this mural on a
bulkhead wall borrowed from the Museo de
Memor’a here in Mexico City. We borrowed the wall from the museum to stage
it at a special event that the Palestinian embassy in Mexico organized to
commemorate the Nakba (The
Catastrophe). This mural is about life and memory: long live Zapata together
with the memory of Palestine, which is alive too. For me, this mural is
important because it generated support from the museum, and the ways in which
this act of collaboration between a Mexican institution and the Palestinian
people are significant.
Figure 5: Mural at the Palestinian Embassy in Buenos Aires,
2015. Photo by Khaldun Al-Massri.
Commemorating Palestine on
Latin American Walls
In August 2015, Chávez Pavón had another collaboration with
a Palestinian embassy. This time in Buenos Aires where he painted together with
artists from the collective, Muralismo
Nóamde and Arte x Libertad, a
mural with two head figures, wrapped in the same Palestinian kuffiyeh while their hands are tied
together and a flock of birds flying in front of them. At the top corner, this
slogan was written in Arabic, although it is not clear who wrote it: Ḥurrīyatunā tārīkh al-shuʻūb (Our freedoms is people's history). Two months after the
inauguration of the mural and in preparation for November 29th, the
International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, the Palestinian
embassy together with El Comité Argentino
de Solidaridad con el Pueblo Palestino (The Argentinian Committee for
Solidarity with the Palestinian People) launched a contest titled, Postales por Palestina (Postcards for
Palestine),[3]
which became an annual competition inviting Latin American artists to revive
the tradition of the Palestine Poster Project Archive[4] from the
1960s by designing posters and painting murals that depict the Palestinian
cause and struggle. This invitation led to the appearance of more murals of
solidarity with Palestine in the streets and public spaces of Buenos Aires
painted by collectives of Argentinian youth,[5] including
Fogoneros, Far, Junvetud Guevarista and MTR, who incorporated similar iconography
of rebellion and revolutionary art.
Reflecting on the meaning of his work in
this context of Palestinian cultural diplomacy in Latin America, Chávez Pavón
remarks, "When I was invited to paint at the walls of the Palestinian embassy
in Buenos Aires, I was asked to paint again the mural of 'To Exist is to
Resist.' But, instead of replicating the same one, I decided to recreate it by
amplifying the message of solidarity it was conveying. This mural is almost
double the size. So you see, two kuffiyehs
instead of one. I also wanted to evoke the spirit of Zapata and the collective
story that we have in Mexico that says that he is not dead, but alive somewhere
in Arabia. I wanted to send a strong message that reminds us that despite our
different languages we are similar people because we are brave at heart as our
common legacy of resistance in Mexico and Latin America shows."
Between Rivera and Freire
In Mexican art magazines and reviews, Chávez Pavón is often
described as an "artist of the people," (Berdeja, 2008) belonging to the
Mexican School of Muralism, his art reiterating the works of Diego Rivera, José
Celemente Orozco, and David Siquerios. Although he embraces this recognition
and confirms that indeed his art is a continuation of the revolutionary Mexican
muralism from the 1920s, Chávez Pavón asserts that his work is not merely a
copy of these muralists. He affirms: "It is a recuperation of their values
concerning struggle and criticism of the oppressive system" (Ibid). This vision
was particularly visible in Palestine in the techniques he used: bold brush
strokes, national colors, and a series of red handprints stamped along the
Wall.
Figures 6 & 7: Mural in Abu Dis 2004 & 2018.
AE: The EZLN signature and the
imprints of your hands are present on all the murals that you painted in
Palestine. Can you elaborate more on these artistic choices?
GCHP: When I arrived in Palestine,
there was graffiti on the Wall, but not so many murals. Unlike graffiti, murals
can't be painted clandestinely, especially when one has to paint for two or
three hours in a row and carry liters of paint along. But we did it. Murals
have the ability to reverse the logic of the Wall. Murals can change the wall
with ideas, forms, and colors. Murals have lots of colors, and colors are life.
Colors cheer you up. For example, in the mural at the Wall in Abu Dis, which
was very gray in comparison with the Wall in Bethlehem, I painted with the
colors of the Palestinian flag flowers and long hair attached to a screaming
head. However, I painted a big portrait of Che Guevara in black and white to
accentuate a bare, yet personal message of resistance to colonialism and
imperialism.
AE: How do you describe your experience of painting in Palestine?
GCHP: As I mentioned before, I came
to Palestine while I was in the middle of painting a mural that celebrates the
indigenous struggle and Zapatista movement in Chiapas. I was painting from the
heart of our people and arrived in Palestine in this mood. At the Wall, we had
to paint almost clandestinely. We had two or three hours to paint maximum each
day before the Israeli soldiers arrived. We didn't want to paint clandestinely,
but we didn't run away either when the Israeli army came to chase us away. We
come from a long legacy of fighting back against blows. We are colonized and
our resistance as an indigenous movement is still going on. We resist by
speaking our native languages, Nahuatl, Zapotec, Tzotzil, Purépecha, and
painting murals too. In the social struggle, walls are incredible trenches. The
same walls that are being constructed to separate us and segregate us, we use
them to create bridges of humanized colors. On these walls, we dig at the
rhythm of the sun radiating with internationalist solidarity all the way from
Palestine until infinity.
AE: Was there anything in
particular that surprised you or called your attention when you arrived in
Palestine?
GCHP: Although the war against the Palestinian people is more obvious and the
reality of the checkpoints is brutal, I was reminded of Mexico when I arrived.
In Mexico there is a subtle war against the Indians and the poor. Yet, wherever
there is more struggle and resistance to this war, such as in Chiapas or Ayotzinapa,
the government, police and army treat us with similar forms of oppressive
violence that the Israelis use. So I wrote 'to resist is to exist' as a message
to the Palestinians because it also reminded me of my people. I saw the same
words written at a barricade that indigenous people were carrying to resist the
attacks of the Mexican military in Juchitán, Oaxaca a few years ago. When I
came to Palestine, I was reminded of this history of rebellion and the way in
which indigenous people in Chiapas and Oaxaca have been dominated and
immobilized by a similar military and physiological apparatus seeking to
control them and break them down.
AE:
Going through the pictures of the murals in your archive, one can notice
that you are almost always surrounded by people; whether they are there to
physically give you support while you are up on the ladder painting, or with
brushes and colors in their hands painting with you. Do you ever paint alone?
GCHP: As Zapatistas, wherever we go,
we go because we are invited, not because we are bohemians or good people. As a
Zapatista cultural promoter, when I get invited to communities, I go with the
intention of learning and receiving feedback. I don't go to teach anything. You
would be surprised at how many artists can be found in a community. Just give
people a brush and see how many of them who don't necessarily self-identify as
artists, mostly marginalized groups of women and children, are actually capable
of expressing themselves in the most artistic ways.
We don't get to see this happen everyday
because of how capitalism flattens our identities and fragments our
communities. As a form of public art, murals socialize art and turn it into an
exercise in democracy. For me, muralism can build up communities through a
visual critical pedagogy rooted in the liberation philosophy of Paulo Friere[6]
and what he taught us about using collective art to create a new culture of
participation.
Sprawling Solidarity
The fusion of the Palestinian kuffiyeh and the Zapatista pasamontaña became deeply entwined with
the revolutionary spirit of public art in a mural that Chavéz Pavón painted in
Santiago, Chile, in 2015. He collaborated with a local group of artists called
Brigada Ramona Parra to paint a mural on a wall in Pincoya, a neighborhood
renowned for its rebellious history. This reputation gained more popularity as
the neighborhood became a major site for the muralist movement of Museo a Cielo Abierto[7]
(The Open Sky Museum).
Figure 8: Boitcut mural in Chile, 2015. Photo from Chavéz Pavón's
archive.
While the iconic image of the masked figure from "To Exist is to Resist" remains the blueprint for the mural, there are several elements from the Palestinian resistance culture that appear alongside it: the slingshot as well as the keys, which symbolize the Right of Return. Next to the image, there is a vivid painting that portrays a Palestinian prisoner in bed being force-fed and a painting of prison bars being transformed into a barcode, with the words "Made in Israel" and "Boicot" sealing it. This part of the mural explicitly evokes the Palestinian prisoners' hunger strike and the ongoing violation of Palestinian human rights in Israeli prisons and beyond. The "Boicot" also alludes to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). The detailed narrative of solidarity that this mural exhibits is further accentuated with the slogan in Arabic at the top right corner: āshat Filasṭīn ḥurrah (Long Live Free Palestine). What is particular about the rich textual and visual features of this mural is its very explicit and vivid representation of political iconography. In this case, the call for solidarity with Palestine is clearly written on the wall.
Figure 9: Palestinian Girl at Pancho Villa School Mural, Chiapas, 2018. Photo from Chavéz Pavón's
archive.
Figure 10: Pancho Villa School Mural, Chiapas, 2018. Photo from
Chavéz Pavón's archive.
Figure 11: A Zapatista boy co-painting the Pancho Villa School Mural, Chiapas 2018. Photo from Chavéz Pavón's
archive.
Figure 12: The Palestinian Mexican Flag at the Pancho Villa
School Mural, Chiapas 2018.
Photo from Chavéz Pavón's archive.
This trend of making solidarity with
Palestine more visible is also evident in Chávez Pavón's most recent murals. In
early January 2018, he finished painting a new mural in another autonomous
Zapatista community in Chiapas. This time, the mural is painted on the wall of
an educational center named after Pancho Villa, another prominent figure from the
Mexican Revolution. He painted Zapatista children happily reading books amidst
colorful magical landscape. Behind them, there is a portrait of a beaming girl
holding tightly onto the trunk of a tree, with a flower in her purple hair and
a kuffiyeh around her neck. This
girl, Chávez Pavón confirmed, resembles his own daughter Violeta when she was a
child. Like her father, Violeta is interested in reclaiming indigenous
traditions and she is now a folkloric dancer. Under her feet in the mural, the
flags of Palestine and Mexico are tied together in a celebratory dance of
solidarity between Chiapas and Palestine across generations.
On the final destination of his traveling
murals, Chávez Pavón concludes, "I wanted my murals to deliver a message to the
Palestinian resistance, and for the Zionists to know about it, from the heart
of our people in Palestine. The message of 'To Exist is to Resist' had to come
to the heart of Palestine for people to know it, live it, and savor it because
of our common struggle. In our indigenous lands we have been painting murals,
singing, writing poetry, dancing and combating the colonizer enemy for the past
500 years. My murals came to share this message of resistance with Palestine" (Facebook
Private Message, Oct. 7, 2018).
Ultimately, what Chávez Pavón illustrates is that the walls do speak,
against all odds and despite borders, to remind us of what binds indigenous
peoples across time, histories, and geographies.
*Special thanks to Gustavo Chavéz Pavón, Omar Tesdell and
Khaldun Al-Massri for contributing to this essay by sharing photos from their
private archive.