In Step With Other Dignified Feet

“In Step With Other Dignified Feet” was composed in September, 2022. I wrote the music and first verse, which is performed in a singer-songwriter style. The rest of the song, performed as a Bolero Lento (a style popular in Mexico which originated in Santiago de Cuba), gathers words from public declarations of the Zapatistas. (The song’s title is also from the Zapatistas.) The instrumental outro recalls “Song for a winter’s night,” by singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot.

Imagery in this music-video features Zapatista iconography and political action, interleafed with footage from the recording session on May 17, 2024. The first frame shows members of the EZFL (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) with their stick-weapons. The second frame is a reproduction of José Clemente Orozco’s Zapatistas (1931). The poster shown at 3:44 references 12 October 1492 – the date Columbus made landfall in the Caribbean. Indigenous peoples in the Americas have been resisting colonization since that time.

Thanks to Wes Carroll for audio engineering and videography.

Bill Carroll
Victoria, British Columbia

In Step With Other Dignified Feet

(Homage to Zapatistas)

This is what we believe in the face of all the lies
There’s no time to mourn or grieve, we must rise and organize
It’s plain to see the wellsprings of history
Are nothing more than our collective will to live with dignity.

‘We are nothing if we walk alone; we are everything when we walk together
In step with other dignified feet.’

‘The world we want to transform has already been worked on by history and is largely hollow.
We must nevertheless be inventive enough to change it and build a new world.’
‘Walking, we ask questions’; in leading, we obey
‘We want a world where many worlds fit.’

‘We are nothing if we walk alone; we are everything when we walk together
In step with other dignified feet.’