Those Who Come Striking With Stones
2025-04-06In Una lucha más / Another Struggle, I wrote about the weight of carrying history: how every day is part of a struggle that started long before us. This reflection picks up from there but now focuses on how we live while we fight.
Over a century ago, two of Zapata’s manifestos were translated into Nahuatl, a Native Mexican language, and circulated among Indigenous villagers in Tlaxcala. The texts are powerful and worth reading because of how they interpret the cultural, ethical, and political message for people with a very different lived reality. The translator didn’t use the word “revolution.” Instead, he envisioned it as netehuiliztle — the will to struggle — and revolutionaries as netehuiloani, those who come striking with stones. It was a declaration not of ideology, but of moral clarity and collective will.