The Archive as a Battlefield for the Future: Anti-colonial Struggles and Insurgent Temporality

It is not the historian but, rather, the insurgents who cite past and make current that which might have been, transforming it into critical arsenal for the historian and the present. An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (2019) On January 1, 1994, the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, guerilla soldiers from Ejercito Zapaknown as the Zapatistas-seized rural towns in Chiapas and launched an insurgency that would challenge the post-Cold War neoliberal global order. Drawing on indigenous, Marxist, and anarchist thought, the Zapatistas offered a response to the seemingly inevitable reign of neoliberal capitalism. In their first manifesto, the General Command of the EZLN (2002: 218) declared war against the Mexican state, describing their movement as the "product of 500 years of struggle" against slavery, imperialism, and authoritarian