Anthropologists are familiar with post-fieldwork mise-en-scènes. I am in Mexico City during one of those routine visits characteristic of fieldwork follow-ups, all the while already having one foot in the next research project. Once familiar, however, the location seems now, again, uncannily foreign; yet, not quite as strange as it was prior to my two-year residency in Mexico City, the city that had both fascinated and irritated me for years. I had arrived at the Cantina Centenario with Maria Ines, an Argentine exile and Foucault scholar from whom I had learned a great deal, in particular that research should be “algo placentero,” indeed, fieldwork as a use of pleasure. Later on in that afternoon, after lunch, I would go to an appointment with a curator who was one of my key interlocutors while I was conducting fieldwork, and who had become the director of an experimental art venue in Mexico City's Centro Historico.

Over lunch we shared personal stories and discussed current events. This was before the tragic massacre of Ayotzinapan and Ayala in which forty students were killed by the police and buried in mass graves. On that day, the news was dominated by an important announcement. Rumors were that Subcomandante Marcos, the charismatic leader of the Zapatista Liberation Front, was going to retire. A few days prior to this he had sent one of his many elaborate and intellectually driven communiqués in which he would announce his early retirement as leader of the movement. His announcement was enigmatic and, needless to say, of great significance to the anthropologist always on the lookout for old and new media forms. At once carefully montaged, animated, and curated, Marcos's speech was broadcast in viral fashion, from traditional television networks to cutting-edge Internet platforms. Its message startled his large, local and global audience:

Marcos took us all by surprise because of the insistence with which his message wished to update both the metaphorics and materiality of his usual mask with the vernacular of digital media.