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The Chiapas Support Committee is inviting you to the fifth annual “CompArte: The Emiliano Zapata Community Festival,” celebrating the Zapatistas’ 26th year of indigenous rebellion, land justice and self-determination with poetry, art, music and community.

Sheltering-in to stay healthy and safe from the novel coronavirus has not meant that our communities and their struggles and movements against racism and war and for deep justice and liberation have stopped. We are transforming sheltering-in into a time and space for critical and liberatory reflections and to broadcast our demands for justice, as millions continue mobilizing to end racism and police violence against black and brown lives.

Sheltering-in-place is a space for self-gestation, to flourish in community-based visions of justice and liberation. We are raising our voices and our shared visions from where we live, work, study, worship and play with art for liberation, with solidarity with the Zapatistas and indigenous struggles and in resistance to the ravages of capitalism.

“CompArte 2020 for the 26th” will take place between your home and ours in three online gatherings, August 26, September 26 and, culminating in a big online CompArte with a program of music, art and poetry, on October 26!

¡Join us!

CompArte is a space to share our dreams of a different and more just world as we honor the Zapatistas in their 26th year of building autonomy and liberation.  

You are invited to share your art work and art-activism through our CompArte Zapatista instagram. Email us to compartecsc@gmail.com and we will post your poem, a screenprint, a song, a painting, a performance, a photograph, anything on our IG account. Tag us @compartezapatista in your IG posts and use the hashtags: #comparte #zapatistart

Register here for the August 26 CompArte

Register here for the first online CompArte gathering August 26. 

For more information: Visit the Chiapas Support Committee blog: www.chiapas-support.org

Your Invitation to CompArte | ComradesShareArt 2020 for the 26th!

Put these CompArte 2020 dates on your calendars: August 26, September 26 and October 26:

1. Our first online gathering is on Wednesday, August 26, 6:30-8:00pm PST.

The first gathering will focus on community building. This will be a working session to collectively envision creating art and make plans to bring in more people to the next sessions.

Register here for the August 26 CompArte session.

2. Our second session, on Saturday, September 26, 6:30-8:00pm PST, also in 26 minute culture sets.

We will build on the collective work of our first gathering. Members of the Chiapas Support Committee will provide updates and education on the Zapatistas and the ongoing struggles in Mexico. We will invite participants to bring a poem, a song, a video or art to share online. Registration will be sent out at the beginning of September.

3. Our culminating CompArte gathering will take place on October 26, 2020.

From 6:30-8:30pm PST, the CompArte space will be filled with performances and sharing in 26 minute segments. We will go as long as we have poets, painters, artists and musicians to share. Registration will be sent out at the beginning of October.

CompArte | ComradesShareArt 2020 for the 26th

CompArte | ComradesShareArt 2020 for the 26th is taking place while everyone shelters in place and during a historic moment in the U.S. struggle for racial, social and environmental justice.

CompArte shelter-in-place means creating a space where we strengthen our relationships, deepen our values rooted in solidarity and resistance to capitalism and to find ways to work together to stop daily capitalist violence and how it extracts profits through racism, militarism and poverty.

Under the impact of COVID19, the capitalist world was forced to slow down in all but its vile exploitation of life. But COVID19 did not slow down our hearts’ desire for justice and liberation.

We are living through and participating in the biggest rebellion in U.S. history, as the Black Lives Matter movement has galvanized communities worldwide to demand justice and accountability from the police and other government forces for the violence and killings of Black and Brown lives. The call for universal healthcare, living wage jobs or income, clean water, air and soil, and an end to racism and state and police violence is coming from a massive chorus of multi-racial, multilingual and multi-national voices, reinforcing the demand for defunding policing, and justice for those who suffered at the hands of police and the criminal “justice” system.

CompArte: Comrades Share Dreams of Justice & Liberation

While capitalism slowed down because of severe economic setbacks, the institutions that govern and keep workers and other oppressed classes and people of color and indigenous people enslaved carried on with business as usual. The police murder of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis, coming on the heels of other police killings of Black men and women in the days and months before, was the last straw. George Floyd’s death sparked a massive Black-led justice and anti-racist movement that is rocking the foundations of U.S. capitalism.

In the U.S., millions have lost their jobs. Those not able to work from home (farmworkers, healthcare workers and providers, grocers, food processors and distributors, day laborers and other essential workers) are subjected to cruel exploitation, exposed to the deadly virus with many losing their lives, health and livelihood. The pandemic has bared the racial and class fault-lines in the U.S., exposing the devastating gaps in healthcare, education, employment, housing and the deadly police violence meted out against Black lives. The majority of those infected by and dying from COVID19 are Black and Brown women and men, queers, indigenous people, migrant workers, prisoners, — the most vulnerable of the vulnerable BIPOC.

Shelter in Art, Solidarity & Resistance

Because we will be connecting through virtual space, we will be able to gather together literally from anywhere in the world. Our voices and demand for justice, our invitation to express solidarity and support for Zapatista and indigenous peoples’ struggles for self-determination, connecting with the art and culture across liberation movements, will be magnified.

We propose that we re-envision sheltering in place as a time for self-gestation rooted in self-determination for a more just and healthier world. Self-care rooted in community-care.

Every year since the Zapatistas launched CompArte in 2016, the Chiapas Support Committee has organized a parallel CompArte gathering in Oakland. We have organized our CompArte as a space to gather in community and celebrate the art and music, the poetry and movements of justice in solidarity with the Zapatistas and indigenous justice struggles.

Last August 2019, like the previous three before, CompArte opened with Danzantes blessing at the Omni and then we spent the rest of the afternoon hearing local artists share songs, poems, good words and art on the walls. We shared tamales, coffee and artesania while artists were cranking out silkscreen posters and people visited with each other. We will create this same ambience while we shelter-in-place.

CompArte 2020 will continue building on this tradition as a space to gather all our best dreams and envision a different, more just world from the capitalist world that is shutting down, leaving millions in the shadows of poverty and vulnerable to the pandemics of COVID19, racism and militarism.

Join us August 26, September 26 and October 26 in CompArte | ComradesShareArt!

Vivan las, los y loas zapatistas everywhere.

Register here for the August 26, 2020 online CompArte gathering.

Visit CompArte Zapatista instagram. Comparte/comrades share art. Use the hashtags: #comparte #zapatistart

For more information, visit the blog of the Chiapas Support Committee: www.chiapas-support.org

CSC Social Media:

Email: enapoyo1994@yahoo.com

Website: www.chiapas-support

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CSCzapatistas

Instagram: CompArte Zapatista instagram