Abstract

The objective of this text is to discuss practices, rules, horizons of hope and disenchantment in the composition of community autonomy in San Isidro de la Libertad, Chiapas, based on my ethnographic experience and the experiences of three young community members. Certain local practices confer political power to the autonomy project: making milpa, celebrating saints, holding assemblies, eating as a family, among others. The re-signification of these practices in a collective narrative of the past, present and future of the locality is an unfinished process that I call "utopianization of traditional life". In turn, these practices shape the ideal subject of their community utopia, one that embodies hope but also reflects, generates and comes from multiple fragmentations.

Keywords: autonomy, certainties, community, fragmentation, everyday utopias

making and unmaking community utopias: the dreams and disillusions of autonomy

The aim of this article is to discuss the practices, rules, hopes, and setbacks associated with building community autonomy in San Isidro de la Libertad, Chiapas, based on my own ethnographic experience and that of three young community members. Certain local practices lend political power to the project of autonomy, including milpa farming, saint celebrations, citizen assemblies, and shared family meals. The redefinition of these practices in a collective narrative of the past, present, and future of the town is an ongoing process that I refer to as the "utopianizing of traditional life." These practices, in turn, give shape to the ideal subject of the community utopia, one who embodies hope but also reflects, provokes, and comes from multiple fragmentations.

Keywords: everyday utopias, certainties, fragmentation, autonomy, community.

Introduction

In this text I do not approach community as a radical anarchic exercise nor do I follow the idea of political prefiguration as the all-unified ontological bastion of the local envisioned future, more discussed from studies of new social movements or decoloniality. Nor do I discuss the various typologies of autonomies to define a new organizational type. Rather, I will discuss the hope and despair embodied in the singular exercise of an autonomy associated with and nurtured by Zapatismo,1 but which finds legitimacy through their own condition and persistence to live a present and a future distanced from governmental oppression and party control. Finally, my methodical attitude led me to consider the emotions and reflections of the community members as an open and inconclusive process, a product of dreams and collective experiences of past fragmentation.

This article shows the results of my doctoral study conducted before the pandemic in a small valley in the municipality of Zinacantán, Chiapas, in the autonomous community of San Isidro de la Libertad (sil). I use my ethnographic experience, observation and accompaniment in the community's own activities that define to a large extent the exercise of their autonomy: their Catholic religiosity, the agricultural tequio (through their own cooperative), individual commitment to the collective, autonomous education, community assemblies, family formation. All these activities are practices of their way of life (Wittgenstein, 1999), the particular characteristics of their "autonomous being", which, when cradled in daily life, become certainties, secure structures to face the uncertainties of the future.

The process of be autonomous is not exhausted in the public demand to receive recognition from the State -legally and constitutionally based- (González, 2002), it requires a politicization of daily life (Gravante, 2023).2 In this particular case, everyday life and the past are revalued as political and narrative resources to distinguish that be, and their respective practices, from other populations, even from relatives and cohabitants of the locality, in ideological, ethical and political terms. Here the personal is political precisely because a good starting point has been their own daily life, which they value as a form of rebellion or protest (Federici, 2019). From my experience with the community, instead of having a proposal for radical social change, in sil change means conserving and reproducing certain daily practices that are politicized or utopianized, without evading nuances and contradictions.

What is the purpose of this re-evaluation of your daily life? Contrary to wait for I believe that giving a political and cultural value to these practices facilitates the utopianization of everyday life or the everydayization of utopia, which allows them to historically situate their utopia, their hope for change in the present, to live it in everyday life: it is an autonomy that only works if it is embodied, which poses a public and collective demand to demonstrate the commitment of all its members.

I visualize utopias working on different scales: as a horizon of hope for the community; in fact, "the utopian function of hope" is to rethink the way one lives and relates to time and shapes the (im)possible (Dinerstein et al., 2013: 170); a constant motivator to improve their living conditions on an individual and collective level; a change in motion that already exists in germ in their present (Bloch, 1977); a hope embodied3 that demands and motivates us to keep our spirits and political consciousness active, and to continue aspiring and anticipating the desired future. I also understand utopias as a cultural resource (Appadurai, 2013) that has its own local historical composition, based on the experiences of collective unions, agreements and disunions, and on the model structures of the group, that is, on its certainties of life, which provides the ideal values and actions expected of the autonomous community subject. Finally, I suggest to see that this autonomy is sustained in a community with fragmentations and that it requires a utopianization of everyday life to overcome the dynamic tension that exists between individual nonconformities, community rules and certainties, collective hopes, doubts and daily decisions in the conformation of this utopian project.

My continuous coexistence for more than three years with the inhabitants of sil allowed me to see how the utopian was lived in everyday practices, in its dimension of the horizon of community being, in the dialogue and negotiation between the individual and the collective. Henri Lefebvre (1991) considers that the everyday is a site of utopian possibilities because it is plagued by actions that can signify different forms of resisting the global system. Lefebvre sees in everyday life the maximum space of unknowing, whereas with Ludwig Wittgenstein it can be seen that this notion of unknowing is more of a hingea non-knowledge, a certainty of daily practice, something that one "knows" to be true, which allows, albeit hidden, that every day we are able to magnetize ourselves from/with reality without the need to question it.4

It is in these hinges, what is taken for granted, that the community members have distinguished the value of their traditional life for their own autonomous struggle. Therein lie the values that they now highlight as fundamental to exist, resist and continue. The problem with visualizing these certainties, as we will see later, is that they also open up to the public, to the questioning of the traditional, to the internal questioning of one's own way of life.

The information I present in this article is a synthesis of dozens of informal conversations, of daily coexistence, of annual and circumstantial celebrations, as well as of punctual and organized interviews. Therefore, I will limit myself to show some stories and life stories of community characters that demonstrate the desired futures, hopes, difficulties and fragmentations of the community utopia. In these stories there are daily practices that alert us to a form of utopianization of the traditional life of the community, and serve to think and reflect on the becoming of the community subject, which I take as an intersubjective existence in constant dialogue between the ideal (structural), the real (daily practices) and the felt (experiential),5 which does not define the subject but rather composes it, it is learning to be oneself with others (Das, Jackson, Kleinman and Singh Bhrigupati, 2014: 114).

The composition of the autonomous community

The inhabitants of sil They proclaim themselves to be "an autonomous and independent community", with ideological formation within Zapatismo, but they never became a support base for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (ezln). They maintained a relationship of obedience and tension with the decisions of the Good Government Councils and later with the National Indigenous Congress. It is an autonomy without permission from the State, as Miguel González (2002) called the Zapatista communities.

If the communal autonomy proposed by several authors, most of them Oaxacan, is reflected in exercising self-government, managing their own resources and preserving their ancestral territory (Velasco Cruz, 2003), in sil meet the first two criteria. However, the geographic territoriality in sil is neither exclusive nor defended as such, since there are two other communities that occupy the same geographic space, Chactoj and San Isidro. Their exercise of autonomy is rather inspired by a Catholic freedom of worship (Indian theology), reproducing the Zapatista demands for free self-determination (here they add their ethnicity and language as criteria of particular autonomy), collective production of food and resources (milpa, cooking, health, education, savings, weaving), resolution of internal conflicts through community assemblies and by their yearning, with a Catholic base, to keep their families united. These practices of their daily life are the most important to preserve and remember, the ones that become referents of what they are-without-yet-being, the ones that are utopianized; and they are the ones that regulate the most.

Viewing autonomy as an unfinished and open-ended process is both a perspective of analysis (Dinerstein et al., 2013) as a real exercise in the community, and in this daily dynamic flow the contradictions, internal discussions, fears, expectations, prides and needs of the co-munitarians. It is in this space where the people of the community transit and, as Mariana Mora points out, the anti-capitalist collective political identity is constructed (González, Burguete Cal y Mayor, and Ortiz-T., 2010) although, as I show in the text, it is not necessarily unified, linear and absolute, as it contains its respective fragmentations and contradictions.

The "new revolutionary proposals" such as the struggle for women's rights and environmental conservation are still elusive in practice for this community, although they serve as a collective political narrative of what they wish to achieve and to distance themselves from the same traditional practices that still generate tensions and attachments: machismo, environmental destruction, authoritarianism, among others.

The origin of most of the inhabitants of this place comes from a nearby village (about five kilometers away) with more than 90 years of existence, Elan vo'.6 The inhabitants of Elan vo', as well as the other villages of Zinacantán (municipal center) and the Highlands of Chiapas, would be "indirect beneficiaries" of the assimilationist and integrationist project of the National Indigenous Institute (Instituto Nacional Indigenista).ini), with its Coordinating Center in Chiapas, ethnographic projects and the creation of cultural promoters since the middle of the last century (Lewis, 2020: 62); in addition, there was the promise of modernity of the State materialized in the form of schools, government offices, Catholic churches and highways -especially the Pan-American Highway in 1947- (Cancian, 1992: 108), as a continuity of the social experiments of post-revolutionary Mexico to solve "the indigenous problem", which was the productive rural problem (Calderón Mólgora, 2018: 155).

According to Cancian (1992), the vast majority of the hamlets (villages) throughout Zinacantán were caught up during the 1960s and 1970s in a wave of modernist administrative reforms, a process of state institutionalization through agrarian reform and the expansion of the cargo system: new political centers, new cargos, taxes and accompanied by political and educational figures who served as intermediaries between "the two worlds". The demand for occupying the new positions, says Cancian, was almost unappealable and generated tension in its users, particularly in those who had no political life.

These tensions accumulated during the 1970s and resulted in administrative, economic and geographic ruptures between small villages and large towns. In this logic of administrative decentralization (1992: 114-115) are the land seekers of Elan vo', carrying the experience of reorganization, who were located in Chactoj in that decade,7 a village outside the official records in the 1960s.

It is necessary to consider that before the Zapatista uprising the religious context of liberation theology already served as a strength and support for the communities interested in autonomies.8 In fact, in 1975 Chactoj had the first indigenous catechist in all of Zinacantán, who assumed the new orientation of the diocese -option for the poor- and "supported the Christian formation of his community", according to the words of friar Dominico Iribarren.9 The catechist represented the amalgam of interests between local religiosity -between Mayan ritual vestiges and traditional and institutional Catholicism- and the claim to receive education, health and especially to own ejido lands, bases of a community autonomy without state abuses, as was demonstrated with the First Indigenous Congress in 1974 (Sánchez Martínez, Parra Vázquez and Zamora Lomelí, 2022: 104), from which, in addition, a privileged community political education was generated (Harvey, 2000).

When the Zapatista uprising finally arrived in 1994, the Catholic institution had already germinated in the local people.10 the precepts of liberation theology, autonomy and the search for a better life. After a year of continuous religious discord and ideological differences, San Isidro was born, a moment considered locally as the beginning of the struggle for autonomy.

Political and religious splits were not new to these communities, and both the State and the Catholic Church were part of the reorganization of the villages in Zinacantán (Cancian, 1992: 202), but the internal separation usually arose from party or family conflicts or political disagreements with the government in power, predominantly the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional (pri)without considering local independence or autonomy. It was not until after the Zapatista uprising that many families and entire communities supported the recognition of their agents (local leaders who served as a bridge between the municipal rulers and the locality) and demanded autonomy from the government, public administration and the Catholic Church -up to a certain level-, as in the case of San Isidro.11

On the other hand, despite the increasing distancing from the ezln with the political parties, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (prd) still had strong support from civil society and peasant farmers in the mid-1990s, as the main opposition to the pri. Indeed, some families in San Isidro continued to benefit from party alliances - with the prd and others. At the regional level, the governmental transition went from an almost absolute dominance of the pri to a growing process of pluripartisanship and electoral democratization in the highlands, also driven by the Zapatista uprising (Viqueira and Sonnleitner, 2000: 163).

At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the century xxidisagreements between following the mandates of the ezln or receive the government's "supports12 and other parties led to new frictions and inequalities between two clear sides. In spite of this, the day-to-day administration of the community was solved jointly: cleaning wells, organizing patron saint festivities, to give examples; in addition, the two factions, despite the ideological disunity, were allied in some demands towards the government, such as not paying for electricity. However, new conflicts had arisen over the use of the community's water resources, which had been aggravated by ideological differences.

The new community fragmentation occurred with an increase in conflicts over water management in 2003: when young people from the Zapatista side of the community (San Isidro), who were trained in the cideci13 They came to dispute with bullets a piece of land with other young men from the other, non-Zapatista side. The former had pledged to give their all for the community, Ciro assured me,14 but "they were only lies, because as soon as they got what they wanted," they left them. That youth, seen as the generation of hope to keep families together under Zapatismo, fractured trust for the future.

Multiple newspaper reports,15 reports from the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center.16 and even Zapatista communiqués through The Day,17 The report gives an account of the conflicts over water and electricity at the internal level between neighboring Zapatista and non-Zapatista communities in Zinacantán. It is the continuity of a social tradition of social and political disunity, it is the fragmented community (Crehan, 1998), as much by structural impoverishment and political manipulation as by internal disagreements, differences by gender, class and even expressions of social commitment; and yet, connected by kinship relations, a relatively common past, and I must add, the nostalgia of a united community hope, of a common action.

The "perredistas", "priistas" or supporters of the "entero" (Chactoj) people gradually became the otherness, despite sharing history, geography, family, religion and ethnicity. These conflicts were the immediate antecedents for a collective of 30 families to decide to become "independent" of San Isidro, found their own "community" and name it San Isidro de la Libertad in 2003. The name relates the exercise of autonomy and the communal way of life to the deed of a revolutionary Jesus, the Jesus of the oppressed, the indigenous people. For these families, following their own ideological and life convictions meant living in dignity and freedom. A first mandate, therefore, was to reject local intolerance and partisan authoritarianisms and replace them with more assembly exercises of dialogue and less imposition. Families would not migrate to a "promised land" or change geography in this fragmentation; they would remain in their homes, but now united by the nucleus of the Vientos del Norte al Sur cooperative,18 from which agricultural tequios, collective seed collection, grain marketing and other collective activities are organized.

Now, the cooperative represents the formal platform for this collective of families to live in a new community. sil is not an ejido with its own polygon nor does it have individual geography or history; it exists as a community at the conceptual level and in the practices and networks of its members. Although Chactoj19 and San Isidro remain the heuristic web that binds them together (because of the elements they share), silas a collective, has developed a subjective distinction that allows its members to resignify their daily activities as worthy of a heritage to defend and reproduce. It does not reach, from my point of view, to be a new ontology because it is still a new ontology. to be community and ancestral is part of the proximate otherness.

Thus, the process of autonomy of sil has state administrative antecedents, family and local impulses motivated by liberation theology within the communities and the Zapatista uprising of 1994. Its autonomy is a continuity of other processes of social struggle at the economic and socio-political levels. The splitting of Chactoj into three communities is a practice of Los Altos that we can relate to emancipation or political and administrative liberation, but that does not end up reaching communal autonomy in its ideal dimensions, nor in the economic or social. That is to say, autonomization is in itself a utopian practice because it aspires to (im)possible levels of emancipation for the current conditions (without knowing if in the future they will improve or not), and I believe that it demands at least two efforts in the present: to associate more daily practices that legitimize this process and to continue cutting economic and educational ties with the institutions and platforms of governmental power.

Remaining themselves

When I passed by José's house,20 At around seven in the morning he very kindly asked me if I had had breakfast. He and Maria,21 his partner, were on their way out to Chenalhó. I asked him if we were no longer going to have the meeting at the community center. With her parsimonious "no" I understood that they had forgotten our appointment again, so I accepted their offer.

We sat on small wooden chairs around a small table near the stove. Maria served the food, but she ate her plate standing up while she continued cooking. Jose told me that they were not very used to foreigners; that some volunteers had arrived,22 but not that many. He smiled as he recounted to me the chili jokes he shared with some, showing the intimacy of those relationships. However, he said that now he did not the let "a lot of people" into the community because "they only come to take advantage, to get information". It sounded like a rejection of my own existence. Maybe that's why they avoided formal interviews. I thought it was a delicate point and since I also agreed, I said yes, I understood why not. us accepted so much. I accepted, by the way, the otherness in which I was placed.

We touched on the education of the only two students in the autonomous high school.23 Actually, it seemed to me that we were talking about the internal mechanisms of social cohesion, strategies to maintain or "wake up" people in the community. I told Maria that the girls were motivated and intelligent, but very shy; they hardly asked me any questions in class. José replied that it was good for me to come and help, that my task as an educator was "to improve what they already have," but that it would be good for me to tell them - "tell them as a recommendation," Maria interjected with unmissable assurance and seriousness - not to forget their roots, their culture, their language, where they come from. Her face was that of an authority undeniably committed to prevent both girls from becoming too interested in otherness; in my culture, for example. He told me that it was not good for them to "think too much of themselves," that it was fine for them to learn more about how to speak Spanish, that it would help them later on, when they were more professional. But he warned me, without losing his punctuality, to remind them of the importance of "continuing to be themselves," "tsotsiles," and not to think of themselves as kaxlanes (whites, mestizos, ladinos, non-indigenous).

Maria stirred the soup that was heating in the pot, while she bathed in the smoke emanating from the stove. She was always attentive to what we were saying. So much so that it was she who finished off her companion's words by warning the girls not to stop speaking in their language to each other or to other people, not to be embarrassed now that they already knew Spanish. The warning was not to reproduce it in the ears of the girls, but so that I would also act according to this ethical and political principle, this duty of the autonomous subject.

I felt that all the recommendations were a definite request: that they keep their Tsotsil identity, I was not to suggest otherwise. A clear strategy to remember or to develop a state of consciousness of their own and in conjunction with the collective. José remarked that my role was to provide a guide to what they already knew, because the awakening of consciousness, the politicization of the community subject, is associated with the commitment to the rules of autonomy, with the daily exercise of identity, such as maintaining the mother tongue in front of the other, to the kaxlan particularly; an exercise of resistance and defense of that otherness that looks dangerous, and even of that otherness that does not look suspicious but still needs to be observed. In this sense, a good community should follow these principles.

Determined to die

As we walked from the community center to the sil I asked Esteban how many families were part of the autonomy, and he told me, in a dry tone, how many families were part of the autonomy four or 32 years ago. With a dry tone he told me that four or five years ago there were 30 to 32 families, but now there were about 25-26.24 He confessed to me with a certain bitterness: "several families have left...they are looking for money; they are going to Chactoj, with the government". Other community members have pointed out the same thing to me, with a similar tone, between contempt and despair.

Already on the court he revealed to me, over a few drinks of pox He said that he wanted to continue in the struggle for autonomy, that he was not going away, that even if he remained poor, he was going to die poor, but in resistance. At 21 years old, the conviction of his words was one of the most encouraging and passionate I had ever heard to continue "the process of struggle" despite the economic, labor and health difficulties. His alcoholism did not discourage, in my opinion, his authentic feeling of belonging and loyalty to autonomy as a collective project; but neither did it favor it much considering that drinking alcohol is sanctioned, and worse in him, who was in public office that year (member of the educational committee).

His name is Esteban Gómez. For years I saw him participate in all the community events: assemblies, pilgrimages, tequio, agricultural, fiestas, among others, but always mimicking the rest, without distinguishing himself.

We played basketball for a while, alone, happy, with a deflated ball, without following any "official" rules. I asked him if he was going to send his two-year-old daughter to independent school and he said yes. His positive answer came with something that surprised me: he said he wanted to "learn more", he wanted to learn to play guitar, to study Spanish, to speak it "very well"; he wanted to continue studying in school, to finish his elementary school. The big wall he pointed out to me was "but with a wife and son, you can't do that".

I didn't notice any sadness about this, but I did notice an eagerness not to stay exclusively in the line of work; he repeated to me a couple of times that he wanted to keep learning more: he wanted to play guitar, dance, go to parties, drink, study. He was 15 years old and his wife was about 11 or 12 when they got married. Six years married and with only one daughter. I asked him about his work and he told me that he was doing well sometimes, sometimes not, but that he already had everything, wife, child, but he wanted more... and he repeated his yearnings.

A few months later he confessed to me that he had thought of emigrating "to the north" (United States of America), but his father would not let him go. Years later he no longer considers it, but he does believe that there one can earn a lot of money, as long as one avoids "drink and women", otherwise "one comes back poor". His self-regulation is supported by these community values in silThe program, with a clear catholic germ, promotes family life and the role of the father as a provider.

These little stories prompted me to see that he and other community members from sil do not absolutize their life to political work, nor that their only and strongest motivation in life is the struggle for autonomy. Esteban reflected a more realistic autonomous subject, one who remains loyal to the collective, but knows what are the non-ideal practices of autonomy (receiving money from the government, drinking alcohol, disintegrating the family), some referents of the anti-utopia (following the "bad government", betraying the community, allying with political parties) and ideals of the autonomous -young- subject (finding dignity in life even if one suffers from poverty, trusting in autonomous education, having hope and conviction for one's own family, for autonomy, even in helplessness and uncertainty).

Esteban's longings, apart from that of militancy until death, are linked to his past and the tradition that marks him, that inexorable condition of responsible adult man who learns to reject those "youthful" individual desires and assumes an economic paternity with his family, and a symbolic one with autonomy. However, the tradition itself provides a conceptual security for this longing "to learn more" that Esteban has, which is also presented as a nostalgia for the other life: it is the certainty that community life is life with meaning. In the end, this authentic expression of nonconformity with his collective responsibilities submits to the role that favors the sense of community life to have "everything".

Despite his enthusiasm and dedication to the present and future of autonomy, the hopes for generational change were not placed in Esteban. I don't know if it was because of his "passive presence" in public, but the ideal figure of the new generation was one of his brothers, who had a social distinction favorable to autonomy: charisma.

The leader who was not

When the driver of the "vocho" (Volkswagen) got out, I noticed something unusual in his behavior, was it his walk, his not shy smile, his command of space? From the beginning he was hilarious with those of us who were waiting for him, his catechism teacher, two catechists from the Vochojvo' community (both between 20 and 25 years old) and me. He greeted with encouragement, especially with me, being a foreigner, as he joked. He was cheerful, enthusiastic and after offering serious apologies to his teacher, who did not take kindly to the delay, we set off on our journey to sil.

JXun is quite a character! During the trip he was restless, jovial and talkative; unlike his classmates, who remained silent most of the trip and hardly said a word to me (the three of us were in the back seat). jXun, on the contrary, kept talking, animated by sharing everyday situations, without any strict message, it seems to me. Definitely different from his companions. The catechist didn't take much pleasure in his comedy, but she seemed to be putting up with it. For my part, I was becoming fascinated by his peculiar way of entertaining and socializing.

The truth is that jXun seemed to be a typical interlocutor in his community. His parents were born in Chactoj, but his grandfather had come from another nearby community. jXun was married to a local girl, younger than him, with whom he had three children. When I met him he was 24 years old. He was a catechist in sil and had been the education promoter for the autonomous school for five years. Although he knew how to cultivate his milpa like most of his community neighbors, other trades occupied most of his time and from them came most of his economic income. In his orality he maintained a discourse on the importance of autonomy, speaking Tsotsil and being Catholic. So far, some characteristics of leadership and peculiarity stood out, although his profile was a traditional one, very similar to that of other community members.25

That same day, on the return trip -in the same vocho-, he told me about his life. He had worked as a translator, an educator, a pharmacist apprenticed as a homeopath, preparing concoctions and selling them, a singer-songwriter musician in a band in the streets of San Cristobal, playing in local bars, a waiter in restaurants, a day laborer in milpas in Tierra Caliente and Los Altos, among others. He told me about his different love affairs, his conquests and his first marriage, as well as the problems of his first marriage and the separation with his first daughter; he described with serious comedy the way he bought the car, among debts, doubts and juggling to pay for it; and his "problems with alcohol", as well as some unfortunate consequences in the vocho (accidents). During the tour he told me with enthusiasm about the passion he put into every job he did, the mistakes he admitted to have made in his social and work relationships, his new projects, the people he had met, his travels and even his dislike for living where he does, in sil. All this in half an hour of conversation.

The different jobs he had held and his travels around Chiapas and other states in the country showed his artistic gifts and personal interests, his mastery of Spanish and his eagerness to learn more foreign languages were worthy of a student subject. In his narrative, jXun was the main character, the hero, although he seemed to be more of a recovering anti-hero because he acknowledged having made decisions unbecoming of a catechist, of a public figure in his community. However, it is also true that he attributed to himself as many virtues as possible. I listened very attentively to his stories, which one third might be exaggerated, one third might not be his own, and one third might be motivated by his ego exposed to a stranger; but I did not meditate on the veracity or not of the stories, but rather on the narrative he himself constructed of his life, with which he reflected how he wished to to be seen, different from the others.

I got out of the car and said goodbye. It would be the last time I would talk to him for so long.26 After the close of the school year in 2016, which he did not attend, jXun would become an elusive character in the public life of the community, assuming his role as a catechist, but increasingly distancing himself from community assemblies. His presence and that of his wife and children became more absent. The following year he would leave the autonomous community for good, joining San Isidro as the main catechist. In 2018 I learned from a community member that he was no longer even in Chiapas, but had gone to Guerrero to work, according to what I had heard in the parish meetings in Zinacantán.

Although no one mentioned him openly, when they spoke of JXun there was a certain amount of suspicion and regret. It was not for less, since he was one of the most charismatic exemplars of the community and, as Friar Iribarren rightly refers, the hopes of a generational renewal were staked on him: "He had strength in the religious, social, political, in education, he was like the animator [...] I do not know if they wanted to lower his guard at some point and then, he rebelled" (Friar Pablo, 2018).

JXun's departure, although gradual and procedural, had a strong impact on the mood of the population. It was not only that a potential leader left, but his departure was associated with a weakening of his conscience, with betraying the collective to satisfy economic needs, which he did have. In addition, he became linked to political parties, which community members read as "counterinsurgency work". What was worse, according to a comment by Gregorio, another community member, is that he "let himself be deceived" by being a catechist, accepting the offer of the "political parties" (i.e., accepting to be a beneficiary of government social projects) and convincing another catechist as well (Gregorio, 2017).

This idea of "letting oneself be deceived" is completely related to several elements that I have set out above with respect to the practices that place in a horizon of hopelessness or anti-utopia: those practices that discourage the distinction of their community. The emotional blow was twofold because of who left and how they did it. There were no reprimands for the departure of both students; the internal policy is not to demand permanence but to recommend it. But once the decision was made, there was no turning back. Both became the other.

jXun represented a youth born and raised in the struggle for autonomy; he was a young man who had seen the internal conflicts between communities, a young man who came from a politically active family. He was seen as a leader interested in his community, formed for his community: catechist, educator, tsotsil, charismatic. The despair provoked by his departure marked a severe observation for the one who would replace him in his educational work: Carmela.

The successor

My sister is the first one who wanted to go to elementary school when she was little and I didn't want to go. When I went alone I went accompanied [to accompany her] and she stopped studying and I stayed [in elementary school]. Yes, I really like [learning], the only thing I don't want to stop is studying [she says it laughing and smiling] (Carmela, 2017).

It is well seen in sil The most concrete desire is for children to attend school -many of the young people between 15 and 30 years of age, including Carmela, studied their primary education in official schools-, although the most concrete desire is for them to receive an autonomous education, despite the fact that the management and planning of this education rests especially on foreigners.

According to the authorities of those years, formal study does not favor meaningful learning, as they associate state education with violence. As Maria commented to me at the school year closing activity in 2017, teachers in formal schools are violent with indigenous students and do not care if the children learn Spanish well or not. That is why they opted for a local "teacher", jXun, and when he left they continued that same logic with Carmela.

Carmela seemed to be the perfect successor because of her charisma and attitude towards autonomy. In her parents' house her father spoke to her in Spanish and about his work outside the community, in her maternal grandmother's house everything was traditional and in Tsotsil. Her curiosity led her to learn about both the external and internal world, as she told me. Certainly, she was one of the few women - and young women - who claimed to want to continue studying beyond elementary school, to see the pyramids in Chiapas, to walk in San Cristobal and, at the same time, to respond to the community's gender expectations.

Despite the differentiation that she herself sees and establishes with her longings, a daily day for Carmela is not far from the practices or roles she has as a member of this community or as a woman: getting up at five or six in the morning, preparing food, lathing, cleaning, taking care of her little brothers, the animals, washing her clothes and those of her male siblings, weaving, going to the milpa and repeating (Carmela, 2017).

Carmela's childhood event (epigraph) was a turning point for her: she created a new possibility of life, an alternative life line. It is no coincidence the way she relates it (rehistorization), proud and happy, reflecting the significant commitment she has with education.27 This would always distinguish her from the rest of her cohabitants and would also foster a critical sense of the rules that limited her in the pursuit of her desires. Her daily life, as she described it, associates her more with the ideal role expected of her as a young woman. Submission to the role, unlike Esteban, in this sense is stronger than her distancing from the role when she criticizes the authorities (Goffman, 1961). For example, when she is not allowed to establish relationships with outside agents herself or to propose her own ideas for teaching the classes, or when she refuses to attend the cideci,28 among other decisions seen as individualistic (such as putting on lipstick or dyeing one's hair).

In 2017 I asked Carmela what her plan was for the future. She laid out for me the two possibilities she saw, "What am I thinking, should I stay in school or would I rather get married?" The second possibility is the usual one of sil and other rural communities in Chiapas: girls stop studying when they "get together". For her, at 18 years old, there was no doubt about her plan: to continue studying. However, two elements weighed on her: tradition and the desire to remain autonomous. Suffice it to say that during the two years she remained as an education promoter she was criticized countless times for her "individualistic" decisions in her way of being, speaking, dressing and relating to strangers in the community. She was not responding to the community's duty to be.

Her greatest desire, she confessed to me one day, was to study law, but she was completely unaware of how the system of secondary school, high school or university degrees worked. Her parents were supportive of her continuing to study and teach at the charter school, but internal tensions and personal angst kept mounting. By the end of 2018 her family became yet another to drop out of the autonomous project. They didn't move, they didn't disperse, they didn't sell their land, they didn't stop believing in Zapatismo. They simply got out of sil. Of the concept, alliances and rules.

Closure. The fissures of the future

When I asked Mariano, who at the time was one of the leaders of silwhat community meant in his language, he told me "[...] Community means that the families are always united; [...] it means lek svoloj baik, what they do make in common" (Mariano, 2018).

That "families are always united" is both an ideal and a leitmotiv to legitimize the importance of collective, communitarian work. Without this principle or rule, the legitimacy of living in autonomy, of doing things in common, would lose its utopian power. Given the experiences of disunity, counterinsurgency, impoverishment and territorial tensions, the parameters of participation/commitment to autonomy are strict. This is the bet to resignify life in autonomy, to live under community rules endowed with that particular sense of life, in constant tension between the Zapatista ideal of horizontality and the deep local hierarchical roots.

I consider these conceptions (autonomy, community, family) to be dialogical in the way of life of silwhich are expressed as a symbiosis in constant definition, not by representing past or present, tradition or modernity, but by the utopian power with which it acts on the lives of these people. Following these narratives or conceptions speaks to us of the becoming of the communitarian subject (becoming), of the utopization of everyday life as a platform to legitimize autonomy.

In Very different" strugglesdifferent authors refer to autonomy as the unity between personal wills and collective interests. For example, Stahler-Sholk speaks of Zapatista autonomy as one that "does vindicate ethical principles and the right to make one's own decisions regarding the relationships that are close to each instance and group" (Baronnet, Stahler-Sholk and Mora Bayo, 2011: 412). These strata must be put to the test in their particularities. At silAs the stories I shared show, the three young people's own interests and decisions were assimilated and reduced to individual emotions that did not favor collective needs.

The dreams of Esteban, jXun or Carmela, their desires, their horizons of change and of restraint, were always in dialogue with the ideals of the autonomous being. By recognizing their individual renunciations to continue living the communitarian utopia, they expose the certainties or assumed rules of their society: they are the Wittgenstenian hinges exposed to questioning, it is the border of non-knowledge, the fissure that shows what did not have to be asked because it was taken for granted, without the need to be aware of it. Let us remember that the exercise of collective autonomy is personal and this implies recognizing the social position of each individual in the community, since he or she lives in a matrix of intertwined social structures, an intersectionality that also shapes and affects his or her political position (Raekstad and Gradin, 2020: 160).

All three lived internal struggles, debating their emotions and decisions in relation to what they were expected to deliver for autonomy. While Esteban chose -and still chooses- to put his practices at the service of the daily life of the community utopia, jXun and Carmela, by following their own rhythm, became hopelessness, became the fear of fragmentation, the otherness outside the desired horizon of autonomy.

Although the values of autonomy: collective work (cooperative), community decision making (assembly), positive valuation of an ancestral Tsotsil legacy, practicing Catholicism in their own way, distancing themselves from political parties or governmental projects, electing their own authorities are the daily exercises of their current way of life, they are also the fundamental bases for considering that they live autonomy, their utopia, in the present; therefore, to remain loyal to these daily practices is to give body to hope and to the autonomous subject.

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Delázkar Noel Rizo Gutiérrez. Nicaraguan. D. in Social Anthropology from ciesas-Southeast (2019). Assigned to the Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, Chiapas. Candidate to snipostdoctoral fellow at the unam (2020-2022); postdoctoral fellow by conahcyt (2022-2024). Lines of interest: ethnography, futures, utopias, environmental narratives; temporalities, ethics, humor. Member of working groups and seminars: Network of Studies on Communities, Utopias and Futures (riocomun), Working Group of the Latin American Anthropological Association; Seminar on Anthropology of Outer Space; Working Group on Humor, Laughter and Hierarchies.