REVIEWS

...Thus, they became more than an indigenous movement by reframing the marginalization of indigenous peoples as a model for all forms of marginalization in Mexican society...

...Not to mention one that, at the same time, attempts to introduce new theoretical models for social movement theory...

...For these compañeras, confronting traditional views of women as passive and isolated individuals required challenging long-established notions of womanhood and gender...

...Success and transformation, then, for the banana unions in Latin America has been a matter of education—the kind of education that can move mountains when, together, men and women push hard enough...

...Their relation to the Internet was never direct...

...They then managed to survive the wrath of the Mexican state for over a decade, and even managed to carve out spaces for their own autonomous, revolutionary government, all without firing a shot—largely by their brilliant ability to mobilize international support...

...However, the book’s ultimate focus is not so much on the unions’ successful or unsuccessful interactions with the transnationals and NGOs, but on the ways organized, goal-oriented, democratic union work and women’s movements have substantially transformed worker-to-worker relations—often the difference between successful labor unions and those that have fallen through the cracks...

...Bananeras: Women Transforming The banana Unions of Latin America by Dana Frank, 2005...

...Means of communication aren’t worth much without something to communicate...

...The book ends with the “silence” of the EZLN and the global effects of 9/11...

...Those ideas then played a key role in inspiring a generation of young activists across the planet to break out of the paralysis in which the left had been cast at the end of the Cold War and begin to build a new global movement against capitalism...

...This was not, the author usefully stresses, simply a matter of the EZLN manipulating the media or the Web...

...Myself, I am relatively innocent of social movement theory...

...It would begin by telling how a tiny band of would-be Marxist guerrillas arrived in Chiapas to create a rebel army...

...They required us to rethink the idea of revolution as the creation of forms of autonomy, rather than seizing control of the state—thus reinventing the paradigm for an age of globalization in which state borders were increasingly irrelevant, and providing the means by which dreadlocked teenagers in Brussels or computer hackers in Brazil could imagine themselves as revolutionaries once again...

...Labor Education in the Americas Project (U.S./LEAP)—successful...

...But it is remarkably ambitious for a slender volume of only about 200 pages...

...To learn more and sign a petition, visit http://www.geocities.com/graebersolidarity...

...But Frank adds that the mix-gender unions’ vision of respect for all workers, regardless of gender, and the support of their male allies is what makes the bananeras’ international partnerships—with groups such as Britain’s Banafair, Germany’s Banana Link and the U.S...

...Particularly striking is the peculiar absence of what is perhaps the most poetic notion of all: “revolution...

...What the Zapatistas managed to do, then, was to place themselves at the center of the global consciousness of an emerging “transnational counterpublic” by turning their own local frames into models for ever-broader schemas of interpretation...

...However distancing the language, Olesen is ultimately right in seeing this nexus—of bold experiments, on the ground and in spatial networks—as the future of the left...

...To write so poetically, however, would require of Olesen to break out of the rather restrictive social movement theory framework and adopt a language that has, in fact, been shared by most sides of the conversation: from Marx’s famous assertion that a revolutionary class must represent its own alienation as a model for that of humanity in general, to debates among Italian autonomist theorists over whether computer hackers, or indigenous peoples, are more likely to provide the new focus of revolutionary struggle—a debate apparently resolved, in practice, by the alliance that Olesen so skillfully describes...

...But in my experience this is precisely what the Zapatistas’ radical supporters felt was most inspiring about them...

...it was always “mediated” by Internet activists who became the core of their support in North America and Europe...

...In essence, Olesen’s argument is that the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) was successful first of all because it appeared at exactly the right moment—at the very beginning of a periodic upsurge in the cycle of global social movements—and were the first to use the Internet as their major means of communication...

...then, they became more than a Mexican movement by reframing the neoliberal policies of the Mexican state as a model for new ways of looking at an unjust world order...

...Olesen devotes the second chapter of the book to developing a theory of such frames...

...Yet it does often feel the author’s own meta-frames serve more to capture and contain—rather than facilitate—what the author once (citing political theorist John Holloway) calls the “overflowing” quality of Zapatista language...

...If you set out to write a book on Zapatista solidarity networks, there are two obvious stories you could tell...

...The relation between computer activists and indigenous militants was obviously structurally unequal, but all sides did their best to overcome previous forms of “ideological solidarity” or “rights solidarity” to develop a new ethos of “mutual solidarity”—to help and learn from each other as equals...

...Furthermore, Frank explains that funding from international allies targeted to women’s organizing has allowed women to build greater organizational autonomy within the unions...

...This makes a certain amount of sense, since the two are clearly related...

...Unlike “democracy,” or “human rights,” which are constant themes, the word “revolution” does not even appear in the book’s index...

...Latin America’s banana unions are facing the combined threat of free trade agreements, increased competition and overproduction, ushering in an endless race to the bottom with plummeting wages, no health benefits, deplorable working conditions and union busting...

...About the Author Diana Medina is NACLA's Advertising and Outreach Coordinator...

...The other story would be slightly different...

...The end of the Cold War marked a moment of opportunity, as the conceptual frameworks by which political actors interpreted the world had been thrown into disarray...

...South End Press, 137 pages, $12.00 paperback...

...dreams cannot endure or effect change without an autonomous space in which to disseminate them...

...Indeed, attaining union recognition from transnational corporations like Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte—successor of the infamous United Fruit Company—and victories such as the signing of a “socially responsible” agreement with Chiquita in 2001 can be traced to breakthrough moments in gender solidarity...

...Though the continuing fight for fairer treatment and respect is a recurring thread throughout Bananeras, Dana Frank—professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz—tells the story from a different perspective: that of the mujeres bananeras, or women banana workers, who have painstakingly transformed the banana unions in Latin America by educating men and women to value women’s work within the industry, the household and the community...

...Since the late 1990’s,” writes Frank, “women’s autonomous control of outside funds has made all their flourishing projects possible while legitimating the women’s agenda within the banana labor movement as a whole...

...In a way, International Zapatismo, based on the doctoral research of a young Danish sociologist, tries to tell both...

...The author addresses the price paid by Latin America’s banana unions if they ignore the voice of 25% of their work force by showing how gains in male respect and support for women’s work led to some of the banana unions’ most important achievements...

...it does not extend to the creation of the caracoles or the new Zapatista initiative to form a unified front of the non-electoral Mexican left...

...Just when it seemed like revolutionary dreams had to be placed in permanent suspension, an “army of dreamers” appeared to redefine and revitalize the entire concept...

...As such, my only real discomfort with the book comes not from what’s said but from what isn’t...

...Instead, they ended up immersed in a series of conversations and experiments with the indigenous communities they had come to organize, shattering their Marxist orthodoxies and causing both groups to reinvent together the very notion of revolution...

...The result is brilliant and abrupt, evocative and technical, the kind of book that alternates between insightful reflections on the notion of “dignity” and flow charts of network systems...

...The EZLN, for example, is the first revolutionary army to deploy poetry as a means of political struggle...

...Yet their ideas, particularly about new forms of democracy, then went on to inspire new experiments in organization, particularly in anarchist circles...

...Frank guides the reader through the lives of activists like Iris Munguía and Gloria García in La Lima, Honduras, who entice and cajole fellow bananeras to attend conferences and motivational speeches led by other compañeras in struggle...

...About the Author David Graeber is an activist and anthropologist recently fired from Yale University under mysterious circumstances...

...My only authority here derives from my involvement in Zapatista support groups, which puts me (as a professional anthropologist) in the rather unfamiliar role of being a “native...

...One is about a relatively small band of mostly indigenous rebels in Mexico who launched a brief uprising against the Mexican government in 1994...