The Story of Colors joins all the other stories, easily mistaken for charming digressions, in Marcos's political writing. Some may see it as a traditional creation myth, but it's not. The gods, in their bickering and fatigued bumbling, in their longing for a beauty of their own making and for comfort in a draught of pozol, are not too different from the people, who more than once are imagined making love ("a nice way to become tired and then go to sleep") and drawing deep on tobacco. "These gods," after all, are "not like the first ones, the seven gods who gave birth to the world." These gods don't even know "who made the birds. Or why."

Cinco Puntos, which specializes in bilingual children's books and literature of the border (its lively list can be got at www.cincopuntos.com), says The Story of Colors is a bit of "holiness" from an indigenous culture "that cannot be measured in dollars or defined by politics." Bobby Byrd says it "is essentially about diversity and tolerance." But I don't think it's those things either.

In Shadows of Tender Fury, a wonderful compendium of the letters and communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos published a couple of years ago by Monthly Review Press, the figure of Old Antonio, who narrates the tale of the colors in this book and who, in real life, invited the Zapatistas into the first community they organized back in 1985, frequently appears as the Zaps' guide to the history and traditions--even the geography--of Chiapas. He is their link to the past and the future, the one who confirms for them that, indeed, there are no words in the native languages of Chiapas with which to translate the term "to give up."

Here, Antonio offers an allegory not of "diversity"--a timid, lackluster thing--but of dissatisfaction and its creative possibilities. The world that seems fixed and oppressive can be changed; the "gods" can be anyone, but what they make they must safeguard against forgetfulness in case the spirit of revolt should dim or be tamped down. And so the gods, who color the world with a thrilling abandon, use the last of their pigment to paint the feathers of the macaw, a bird revered in the highlands, "because they didn't want to forget the colors or lose them."

It's no minor matter that the Zapatistas call themselves after Zapata, or that, while insisting upon the absolute integrity of indigenous culture, they speak to the whole of the country, invoking a radical nationalism that is inconceivable, because historically impossible, in the United States. In a sense, Marcos has been telling the story of colors in different ways since he first explained the Zapatista struggle to a curious world. In a February 14, 1994, letter (reprinted in Shadows) to a coalition of workers, campesinos, students and intellectuals called the National Coordination of Civic Action for National Liberation, Marcos wrote:

The oldest of the old of our peoples spoke words to us, words that came from very far away, about when our lives were not, about when our voice was silenced. And the truth journeyed in the words of the oldest of the old of our peoples. And we learned through the words of the oldest of the old that the long night of pain of our people came from the hands and words of the powerful, that our misery was wealth for a few, that on the bones and dust of our ancestors and our children, the powerful built themselves a house, and that in that house our feet could not enter, and that the light that lit it fed itself on the darkness of our houses, and that its abundant table filled itself on the emptiness of our stomachs, and that their luxuries were born of our misery....

But the truth that traveled on the paths of the word of the oldest of the old of our peoples was not just of pain and death. In the word of the oldest of the old also came hope for our history. And in their word appeared the image of one like us: Emiliano Zapata. And in it we saw the place toward which our feet should walk in order to be true, and our history of struggle returned to our blood, and our hands were filled with the cries of our people, and dignity returned once again to our mouths, and in our eyes we saw a new world.

Not a folk-tale new world; folk tales aren't dangerous.

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