Soon after the Zapatistas emerged into public view in January, 1994, Subcomandante Marcos replied to a letter from a young girl in Mexico City with a tale of a tobacco-stealing beetle who was angry about the recent military invasion and the threat of so many soldiers’ boots to such small creatures as himself. The beetle, Don Durito de la Lacondon, tells Marcos that he is “studying neoliberalism and its strategy of domination for Latin America” in order to discover how long the Zapatista struggle, and by extension his own, would last. This marks the beginning of a long series of letters and communiqués between Marcos and Don Durito, a correspondence shared with various national newspapers and magazines, inventively explaining the shifting politics of the Zapatista struggle and their history as an organization and movement.

The Durito stories are some of the most literary and complex Zapatista communiqués. Their narratives combine political critique, satire, historical debate, literary seduction, and poetry, and regularly change register from elevated theoretical language to popular Mexican word play or albures, indigenous and foreign languages, archaic and peninsular Spanish, and Caló (a hybrid language spoken along the U.S.-Mexico border). While other Marcos collections have excerpted these stories from the communiqués in which they originally appeared, Conversations With Durito contextualizes each one within the original communiqué, presenting them not simply as stories, but as documents of particular moments in the Zapatista struggle. To further this understanding, the communiqués are supplemented with a lengthy historical overview, brief introductions to each story, integrated footnotes and bibliographic resources, all adding critical political, historical, and cultural information to this vital and contemporary literature of resistance.