Enero Zapatista Bay Area is a month-long series of events in the month of January that commemorates the January 1st 1994 Zapatista uprising in the struggle for Indigenous autonomous life, land, health, education, housing, food, self-governance, media, and justice. The annual commemoration began in the San Diego-Tijuana borderlands in 2004, with a group of students who wanted to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the EZLN. In the Bay Area, we were inspired by this organizational process and commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising in 2024, last year, by organizing the 1st Enero Zapatista month-long series of events in the Bay Area. 

Now, with our 2nd year, we hope to continue to grow and accompany the autonomous struggle for life and rebellious dignity locally, by accompanying the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. We hope that with each event, we gather to exchange and share in our dreams from below, from the places we honor that come from ancestral, cosmic, and land-based knowledges, from each of our communities here in the Bay Area. We hope to root ourselves and each other, in what the Zapatistas call “lo común”, the common every-day people and places. Rooted in Zapatista principles, we construct Zapatista autonomy and a world according to our voluntad, our willpower, and build a society we want to live in and the life we want to enjoy. Exercising autonomy every day is a historic step with a monumental magnitude.