On January 1, 1994, thousands of indigenous people rose up in arms in Chiapas, Mexico's poorest state, on the border of Guatemala. Calling themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation after the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, hero of an earlier Mexican uprising, their demands were for land, food, health, education, dignity, autonomy, democracy, and justice. Ten years later, that uprising has become a long-term movement of indigenous organizing and resistance in Chiapas and has inspired similar movements worldwide.

Of the many legacies of the Zapatistas, one of the most enduring might be the way that their movement has brought people worldwide out of isolation and into communities of resistance. As soon as the Zapatistas sent out their first call for international support, people from all over the world began making the pilgrimage to Chiapas. Aside from the handfuls of church workers, anthropologists, journalists, and human rights workers, those of us who traveled there were young people, mostly people who scarcely had the money or the means to travel internationally, mostly people who didn't have jobs or didn't want jobs, or felt that the jobs that don't pay are always more important than the ones that do.

Very few of the hundreds and thousands who have passed through Chiapas went because we were told to go, or paid to go, or thought it would advance a career or earn school credit or lead to success or fame or money or any of the things that we learn we should be motivated by. The media quickly captured this exodus and coined the phrase "revolutionary tourists" for the flocks of idealistic young people stepping off of buses in the 3 a.m. chill and hoping to stay a few months or years. But the phrase is belittling as well as inaccurate: when we dug latrines and carried sacks of rice and built schools and painted murals, we were not mere tourists; we were part of the uprising. And what we collected in our tourist scrapbooks has helped us to bring that uprising back to our own communities.

I personally went to do the work of developing potable water systems in villages where water-borne illness was the number one killer of children, and to write reports on human rights violations as the Mexican army surrounded Zapatista communities and attempted to force them from their lands. But there were many other jobs to do, and many people willing to drop everything and report for duty with the NGO's and the collectives and the loose-knit, self-started and eccentric projects in the mud and rain and mist of this once-obscure corner of our hemisphere.

The Zapatistas called for "a world in which many worlds fit," offering "one no and many yeses." Subcomandante Marcos, one of the main spokespeople of the movement, in a famous communiqué wrote that he was a gypsy in Italy, a black man in the ghetto, a queer in San Francisco, a lone woman on a dark street at night, a hungry campesino in the jungle - that is, he represented the misfits and outcasts of the world, and that the struggle was to make a world where no one was marginalized and everyone was at home. Welcoming the diverse crowd to one of the many Zapatista gatherings, he said, "Each one has his own field, his own planting, but we all have the same village, although sometimes we speak different languages and wear different clothes. We invite each of you to plant your own plot and in your own way. We invite you to make of this forum a good tiller and make sure that everyone has seed and that the earth will be well prepared."

I was always struck by the fact that many of the multitudes who descended on Chiapas were the most outcast - the punks, the crusties, the queers, the anti-social misfits, the travelers, and the artists. In contrast, the indigenous villagers of Chiapas are in many ways very conservative - land-based, family-oriented, distrustful of outsiders, not often interested in dressing or speaking differently from the community - in fact, working hard to fit in. Suddenly peasant villages and smoky little mountain towns where people have clutched closely to their traditions for centuries were filled with pierced, pink-haired, patch-worked, tattooed ragtag radical freaks. There was surely some meaning to this.

Of course, the Zapatistas seek not only to conserve ancient traditions, but also to escape from the shadow of oppression cast over them first by the conquest and then by the tyranny of industrial "progress" - and it is this resistance to their marginalized status that they share with their supporters worldwide.

As agents of change, countercultural people have always reached out to other cultures, and down into history, to find common ancestry or to borrow beliefs and tendencies that can continue to foster change and differentiation. Aside from our beliefs in "anarchist organizing" or "third world debt relief" or "reclaiming the commons" or whatever ideological tendencies we profess, I believe that what has drawn many foreigners - US nationals and others - to spend time with Zapatista communities in Mexico, is an evolutionary, almost biological, imperative to learn and borrow from another culture, or, more accurately, another counter-culture, in order to feed - and seed - our own.

So we went, and we stayed, or we passed on, or we got deported, or we fell in love and moved to other countries. But wherever we went we discovered the value of our pilgrimage to Chiapas. Of all the things we found there - adventure, experience, wisdom - the most important may be something that none of us went there looking for - at least not consciously. Put any adjective in front of it you want - international, grassroots, anarchist, radical - but the essence of what we were building was a shared sense of meaning - that is, community. Because as the monoculture seeks to isolate itself from real diversity and to replicate itself through patterns of capitalist consumption that give diminishing returns socially, ecologically, and spiritually, the counterculture reaches out tendrils towards patterns of diversity, integrity, newness.

The Zapatistas had helped to bring diverse activists and counter-cultural people together in a common cause. The decade since the Zapatista uprising has seen the birth of hundreds of radical infoshops, autonomous zones, public reclaiming events, social forums and mass protest after mass protest, each with its convergence space where all the freaks and outsiders and activists gather and unite. In passing through these community spaces, we discover that we have launched this world in which many worlds fit, this great experiment in community.

And it's a project that will occupy us for the rest of our lives. And you're a part of it.

Welcome home, Zapatista.