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by Justin Gallant, Cohort ’24

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“...we are everything when we walk together...” Subcomandante Marcos

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I got the tattoo before I saw the murals.

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It was January in Mexico City, near the Zócalo, at a small studio called Yoka Art Tattoo. I had come prepared—design in hand, intention set—but the artist and I still struggled to communicate. My Spanish, his English, both broken, but trying. He didn’t quite know what I was asking for at first, until I showed him a picture of Subcomandante Marcos. His face lit up—not with concern, but with genuine curiosity. Why was this American getting a Zapatista tattoo? He wasn’t upset. Just intrigued. And I didn’t have a rehearsed answer. Only that I needed to carry it. That the body might be the only site left where revolution can be held without permission.

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The next day, only Molly Davis and I were still out wandering. Everyone else had gone elsewhere. We decided to head toward the Secretaría de Educación Pública—the building with the Diego Rivera murals. But before we made it to Rivera, something unexpected happened.

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We stumbled into a side room—unmarked, or at least unannounced. The murals inside hit us before we even fully stepped in. One wall held a screenprint showing the Virgin Mary in a gas mask, the “virgin of the barricades.” Another depicted land and people as one continuous form—stitched, imperfect, alive. A third wasn’t painted at all but a quilt, sewn like a map. There was no finished product, polish, or attempt to perform mastery—just creation, raw and alive.

It took me a moment to realize it: these were Zapatista murals. The Zapatistas, a militant Indigenous resistance movement that emerged in Chiapas in 1994, have become a global symbol of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggle. Their art wasn’t there to impress. It was there to speak, hold space, and exist as a transformation through trauma. As Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “Our greatest disappointments and painful experiences—if we can make meaning out of them—can lead us toward becoming more of who we are...” (68). These murals felt like memory stitched into a matter—less art object than a living echo.

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It reminded me of José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of ephemera, which “remains after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself” (10). These weren’t archives. They were residues. Traces of struggle left open-ended. 

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Then we made our way upstairs—to the third floor—and finally saw Rivera.

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The building itself had already stunned us. It was a government office. For education. And here we were, walking through halls covered in revolutionary murals. Armed workers. Fists. Frida Kahlo handing out guns. If the U.S. Department of Education had Black Panther murals in its stairwells, it might be close. But this was real. These murals had been here for just over a century.

Diego Rivera, one of Mexico’s most famous muralists and a committed Marxist, painted these as part of a state project in the 1920s. He believed art should be public and political. At the SEP, Rivera later wrote that he initiated “the true novelty of Mexican painting... by making the people the heroes of mural painting” (Rivera). And yet, something about their permanence—fixed, monumental, frozen—felt different from the unfinished hum we had just felt downstairs—neither more true nor less, just another kind of mark.

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That hum returned a few days later at Kurimanzutto.

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The gallery was sleek, contemporary, posh, and tragically hip. White walls, concrete floors, and curated silence. But the work inside? Not silent. Dr. Lakra filled the space with sculptures of tattooed doll parts, totems with Darth Vader faces, and paintings stitched together with anatomical dreams. The whole thing vibrated.

Dr. Lakra, a contemporary Mexican artist who began as a tattooist, is known for merging traditional tattoo aesthetics with sculpture, collage, and salvaged cultural materials. His work doesn’t just mix media—it bends them. It felt like the Zapatista room had fractured and grown limbs.

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And something in me synchronized.

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I had just been tattooed. I had just stood in a room of living murals. I had just stared up at Rivera’s state-backed revolution. And here was this third space—where the body, the symbolic, and the absurd coexisted. Anzaldúa fractalizes, “The self had added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts.” It wasn’t clarity but resonance, “...that third element is a new consciousness” (102). The experience spiraled—recursive, drifting, folding in on itself. I didn’t know it yet, but the tattoo had been a signal, not a conclusion.

The trip became a collapse function. A moment where recursion built to the point of rupture. Not in a neat narrative arc, but like tectonic pressure—quiet, irreversible shift. I didn’t go to Mexico to get an answer. But I left with a mark. And that mark holds everything: Rivera’s monument, the Zapatistas’ patchwork, Lakra’s chaos, and the strange decision to put revolution into skin. Ephemera doesn’t only linger in public spaces—it lingers on the body. The tattoo became a residue of the journey, an imprint that outlasts the moment, both archive and evidence.

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Subcomandante Marcos once wrote, “We are nothing if we walk alone; we are everything when we walk together in step with other dignified feet” (Marcos). That quote didn’t guide the decision to get the tattoo. But it echoes through it now. Because the mark isn’t just mine, it’s a step taken among others—one I’ll carry, for as long as skin allows.

Works Cited

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Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

Muñoz, José Esteban. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, vol. 8, no. 2, 1996, pp. 5–16.

Rivera, Diego. My Art, My Life: An Autobiography. Dover Publications, 1991.

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