Autofiction, history and myths in the narratives of subcomandante Marcos

The uprising of 1994 by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in Mexico, represented not only a political and military event but also a discursive one. This arose from Subtmandante Marcos -military leader of the EZLN-initiating not only a military career but also fortuitously a literary one, by taking on the role of guerilla spokesperson and improvising a rhetorical struggle in order to control both political and media representation of the EZILN. In this study, I analyse the ways in which historical and factual dimensions are intertwined with the personal accounts written by the deputy commander Marcos. His writing poses specific difficulties, given that he wrote directly from the frontline as both an agent and witness of such events and under the urgency of this historical period. Furthermore, he represented his own personal experience through factographic, testimonial, historical as well as fictional discourse. Such enunciative conditions stimulate us to examine the transitional modalities between live memory and textual representation in order to learn more about the genres and rhetorical devices that are used to represent this historical period.