Abstrakt
In my paper, I explore European youth activists' experience with the Zapatista Revolution during their temporary connection to neo-zapatist networks by staying in Chiapas. I argue that experiencing the revolution of indigenous peasants accelerates and intensifies the process of internal transformation of activists.
Since the majority of the contemporary generation of pro-zapatist supporters is recruited from European middle classes, the process of internal transformation takes the form of a struggle against their middle classness inscribed in their habitus. I see this struggle, using concepts of Pierre Bourdieu, as crucial for life trajectories of middle class activists.
I argue that this struggle takes in Chiapas form of overcoming the discrepancy between the middle class habitual disposition to political imagination and the lack of individual experience with the imagined. In Chiapas, activists - as Subcomandante Marcos puts it - "see, what they can be" in an imaginary, Zapatista mirror.