At the age of twenty-two, creeping towards a bachelor’s in something practical, Ian Harris looked destined to join the ranks of the smug and overpaid. His plans changed abruptly when he, by chance, attended a Progressive Student Network conference in Washington. The theme of the gathering was the hemisphere’s emerging people’s movements. Ian insists that his activist bona fides didn’t run much deeper than owning a Rage Against the Machine album, but it’s clear he had a sense of history. There were just and noble stirrings of the exploited and he was on their side. The year was 1994; Larry Hunter was drafting a Contract with America, Vanilla Ice was sporting dreadlocks, and Ian Harris was off to Chiapas.

“Zapatourism” saw thousands of activists descend on the southern Mexican state. Merchants in places like Tierra Adentro sold revolutionary knickknacks and handcrafts to international adventurers, while graduate students back home sold MA theses about “mobilizing frames under transitional conditions” and “countermovement synergy” to tenure tracks. The global climate and local conditions couldn’t have been more different, but those who actually made it to Mexico were in the tradition of the Venceremos Brigade and the North Star Network. Far from passive observers, activists delivered aid, performed human rights observations, installed irrigation, and repaired infrastructure, generally conducting themselves like model internationalists. Still, Ian’s stories from the front are mostly about chronic diarrhea and mosquitoes. And today, a partner in a law firm, he is by his own admission smug and overpaid.