Chiapas is Mexico.

When masked raiders stormed into a half-dozen towns in the Mexican state of Chiapas on January 1, they raised a question that hasn't been answered yet. The baffling March 23 assassination of the ruling party's presidential candidate asked the question again. Is the Chiapas revolt merely a regional conflict--or is it the start of something big? Will Mexico return to calm, slip into chaos, or go through a period of real change? The answers may lie, of all places, in histo north of the Rio Grande, in Dixie, circa 1963.

Chiapas, at the southwestern end of Mexico, has a population of 3.5 million--about the size of a Central American republic--and its inhabitants hold several claims as the poorest in any Mexican state. A third live in homes that aren't electrified, and 40 per cent in hovels that have no running water. Two-thirds of the residents of Chiapas can't dispose of wastes through sewer pipes. A third of them are illiterate, and a third of the state's children don't attend school. Chiapas has the highest tuberculosis rate in the nation, and last year some 15,000 Chiapanecos died of malnutrition and curable ills.

The guerrillas have set up shop in the three regions of Chiapas where rural poverty is worst: in the Lacandon jungle near the Tabasco state line, in the highlands, or Los Altos, and on the border between Chiapas and Guatemala. In the Lacandon and Los Altos areas, between 45 and 50 per cent of adults can't read, and some three-quarters of the region's housekeepers sweep floors of dirt.

The indigenes in Chiapas, as elsewhere in Mexico, are mostly peasants and cottage artisans. They have a Mayan heritage in common, but are divided into four important language groups: Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Zoque, and Tojolabal. Some 32 per cent of the state's adults don't speak Spanish--and that, too, is a national record.

To put all of this into U.S. terms, Chiapas is the Mississippi of Mexico. Its indigenous areas are Dixie's black belts. The solutions that the Mexican government is proposing in Chiapas are that country's version of President Johnson's War on Poverty. Peace will return to Chiapas, the optimists believe, just as soon as desk jobs are created for the ski-masked rebels at the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

"This is a local problem, in a region of extreme poverty, where there are many inhabitants of indigenous origin, on the border with Central America," President Carlos Salinas de Gortari said a few days after the outbreak.

"You must understand that our movement isn't Chiapaneco, but national.... Our objective is the solution of the principal problems of our country," rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos declares, stating the opposite of the government's case. Either the Subcomandante, like Huey Newton or Bobby Seal, has dreams of militarized grandeur--or else the government's evaluation is way off base.

Chiapas is poor, but by income statistics, Oaxaca, the state on its western edge, is poorer yet. And only statistically insignificant margins distinguish Chiapas from Guerrero, one more state removed, a state that includes Acapulco--43.1 per cent of homes lack running water in Guerrero, for example, as compared to 41.6 per cent in Chiapas. Indeed, the whole of southern Mexico and the peninsula of Yucatan cluster together on graphs.

The national figures for Mexico are not much better. For example, even in the relatively prosperous North, in the state of Nuevo Leon, whose capital is industrial Monterrey, almost 40 per cent of households lack sewer lines. About 15 per cent of the student-age population of Mexico does not attend school, and national illiteracy runs to 20 per cent. In the same way, if the indigenous population in Chiapas is relatively numerous, the national picture is different only in degree, not in kind. About 10 per cent of Mexico's population is Indian--a ratio comparable to that of the African-American population of Texas and of Alabama.

Not all of the leaders of the Chiapas revolt are Chiapanecos. Subcomandante Marcos, for example, is white-skinned and doesn't speak an Indian tongue. And the movement's rank-and-file are not Indian, through-and-through. In the Lacandon jungle, most of its supporters are relative newcomers--residents or the descendants of residents who've been there for less than two decades.

These observations have been made even by government critics of the revolt--but for a reason that's known too well: "Serious problems, disputes, exist over there, but this is not an indigenous revolt," President Salinas told a gathering in Europe. "Some indigenes participated under an armed group, very well trained and with a radical ideology," he said.

Salinas was giving new life to the old "outside agitator" charge, the accusation that Governors Ross Barnett and George Wallace used in the 1960s to defame Harlemites like Stokely Carmichael and hundreds of whites. And it makes about as much sense as the Dixiecrat allegation did; non-Indians have joined in the Chiapas revolt because its cause isn't ethnic at its base. If the assassination of ruling-party presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio says anything about Mexican politics, it says that Mexico's malaise is not confined to the South; Colosio was shot in Tijuana, on Mexico's northwestern border.

The possibility that the revolt in Chiapas will unsettle the country as a whole is rooted not so much in wishful thinking by people "well trained and with a radical ideology," as in two great, pan-Mexican present ills: the decline of the traditional land-tenure system, and the corruption of Mexican politics. Private property did not exist in Mexico when Hernan Cortes conquered the place for the West. Most people worked on lands that were theirs, automatically, by reason of birth. All males born in Mexican villages, except for priests and a few artisans, were required to labor in fields that were planted and harvested by their townsmen or kinship clan. Despite land grabs by the Spanish crown and the colonial Catholic church, despite its prohibition by the mid-nineteenth Century Mexican Republic, this tenure tradition survives in most indigenous communities as the ejido comunal or, in rough English, the "communal collective farm."

Ejidos comunales remain where indigenous cultures and languages do. But the turbulence of modern history--"modern" meaning "since the Conquest"--has split most Mexicans from their ancestral roots and deprived them of their mother tongues. During the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, commune residents were forcibly dispersed, and their lands taken over by large, sometimes foreign landholders, who formed the plantations that Mexicans call haciendas. The displacement of comuneros, often to urban locales, was the principal cause of the Revolution of 1910, whose most important result was the creation of the institution that is today's leading form of land tenure, the ejido colectivo, or collective farm.

After the Revolution, a new national constitution gave every Mexican not merely the opportunity but the right to own land. The revolutionary constitution and its implementing laws required that the federal government give parcels to landless tillers who applied for them. Grants from the government were to come either from federally owned tracts or from private holdings that were to be expropriated as the need arose. Today, ejidos colectivos account for some 52 per cent of Mexico's arable land. The rule established for these farms was that while every member would farm his own plot, no one was permitted to encumber the land--or to sell it. The ejido, not yeomanry or sharecropping, is Mexico's legacy.

The Revolution's recognition of existing ejidos comunales and its sponsorship of ejidos colectivos became immediately notorious in the West, and the notoriety has grown with every advance in mechanized, credit-backed agriculture. Its reputation is warranted, in purely economic terms: Ejidos are the least productive land units in Mexico. But Western economics knows only the value of efficiency, not the value of corn, which, for economists, is merely a crop of choice. In Mexico, that's never been the case.

"In Mexico, corn is more than a food. It is culture, religion, and national identity," says Eduardo Pesqueira, Mexico's representative to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The Mexican identification with corn is so thorough that in the Mayan creation myth--the heritage of the Chiapas indigenes--mankind was the child of corn, not the reverse. The truth, of course, is that corn is a domesticated plant, a human invention, and it was invented in Mexico. The first milpa, or family cornfield, was apparently planted near the present site of the southern city of Tehuacan.

Corn was, and is, far more important to Mexico than wheat is to cultures of European derivation because, in Mexican cuisine, corn is a part of nearly all staple foods. Tortillas, enchiladas, tamales, tacos, chalupas, totopos, gorditas--all are corn dishes, whose chief variant is the proportion of beans, meat, or chiles they contain. Though the century plant was the basis for alcoholic beverages in precolonial Mexico--bourbon, the corn booze, is a North American curse-corn was the chief ingredient in horchata, Mexico's most popular nonalcoholic drink before the arrival of soft drinks. Even the corn chips which have become a part of the North American snack food diet are a Mexican concoction, from the recipe of an Oaxacan who for a while took up digs in the American Southwest.

Conquest, European immigration, and national expansion have altered Mexican culture greatly, it's true. But they've changed its surface more than its soul. Today, in those Mexican cities where Europeans settled most, thousands of people eat bread more often than products derived from corn. In Mexico's northern reaches--largely unsettled at the time of the conquest--where rainfall is too scant for corn, tortillas are typically made of flour. Personal income statistics follow the corn index. Mexico's indigenes, who don't eat bread, are at the bottom of the heap. Mexico's multimillionaires don't eat corn. In Europeanized neighborhoods in Mexico City, there's a quip that tells it all. "We don't eat tortillas," the joke goes, "because if we did, we might forget our English, too."

The definition of the Chiapas revolt as a regional and ethnic uprising unravels when the linkage of corn, income, and race comes into view. But this observation doesn't transport northward as a concept very well, partly because in the United States, the African-American minority is defined in an unusual way. Here, anybody who admits to having an African ancestor is regarded as African-american even though, rather than being black, he or she may be the color of Atlantic sand. But almost every African-American, or "minority," knows that he or she had a white ancestor somewhere.

In Mexico, racial classifications were thrown out in 1820, and the indigenous minority is now defined by language, not by race. About eight million of Mexico's eighty-five million people speak a non-European language. Based on that count, indigenes are a minority, like America's blacks.

Almost all Mexicans believe they have a European ancestor--in the same way that African-Americans believe there's a white man in their family tree. African-Americans do not see their white ancestry as differentiating them in any significant way from Africa's blacks--and Mexico's masses don't see themselves as belonging to a race distinct from the indigenes. In Mexico, most multi-millionaires are white. The majority is bronze-skinned. Indians in Mexico are a subgroup of a cultural and racial majority, not a minority at all.

The same can be said about the supposed demographic and economic divide, by whose terms--officially, anyway--most Mexicans are city-dwellers, while poverty, the statistics argue, is mostly a rural condition. About 65 per cent of the people of Chiapas--and only 45 per cent of the nation's population as a whole--are rural residents. Government and academic spin doctors and the unscrutinizing press present that statistic as meaning that Mexico, like all "truly modern" states, has an urban base.

But the statistics lie. The Tijuana slum where Colosio was killed, for example, is as poor as any hamlet in Mexico, and even were urban prosperity a general fact, Mexico would remain a predominantly rural country. The Mexican census bureau, like its American counterpart, defines rural residents as those who live in communities of 2,500 inhabitants or fewer. Even ejidos comunales typically have more inhabitants than that. Most Mexican farmers live in small towns or villages, not in the open countryside, and are therefore urban residents--statistically, anyway. About 80 per cent of the people of Chiapas are probably farm folk--and more than 60 per cent of Mexico's people are. The spread between Chiapas and the rest of the nation, as in earlier comparisons, tells less about Chiapas than it does about the nation itself.

President Salinas introduced a shift in Mexican agriculture that only a Western stooge, World Bank economist, or Cortes would have dared to try. In 1992, he steered through amendments to the Mexican constitution that repealed the promise of land and, for the first time, also permitted the sale and encumbrance of ejido plots. That is why Subcomandante Marcos, in his hyperbolic way, accuses Salinas of plotting indigenous genocide. The disappearance of ejidos would wipe out the roots of Mexican culture.

Salinas probably figures that he's only Dr. Kevorkian in a politician's suit, and from an economist's point of view, he's probably right. Even John Womack, the Harvard professor who wrote the definitive biography of Emiliano Zapata, says that today, "an ejido parcel is a ticket to misery." There's not enough land to support Mexico's ten million peasants, if they mechanize their fields, and survival is chancy for them if they don't.

But Mexicans want the ejido as an option in their lives, anyway, and there's land to be had. Legally and extralegally, ranchers across Mexico have cobbled together vast extensions of pasture and acreage for sorghum--for cattle feed--over the past fifty years. Peasants complain that the steaks and hamburger patties these lands produce go to the prosperous classes and to the export trade. And it's true. Mexican wage laborers eat red meat about once a week, and peasants, less often than that, because it's not really traditional, and because they can't afford the outlay.

Mexico's best-watered lands, on the western coast, produce tomatoes and avocados and bell peppers and the like--mostly for the American winter market, not for domestic sale. Peasants see these farms as lands that they could seed for corn, had they not been hijacked for foreign benefit. Today, American consumers import beef and winter vegetables, exporting to Mexico America's glut of corn and beans. The modernizers' plans call for Mexicans to trade their national identity as "the people of corn" for a new role as citizens of a hemispheric industrial state.

For the urban worker in Mexico, the immediate economic result is much the same, though the political perspective is different. Produce is either expensive because it's the fruit of subsidies and time-worn technology, on the one hand, or it's expensive because it has to compete with market prices set in the United States. As a consumer, the city dweller pays an exorbitant price, no matter which way the agricultural economy turns. But as the son or daughter, or grandson or granddaughter of someone who lives on the farm, under the Salinas constitution, the urban worker loses his refuge when times are hard, his goal in years when savings accrue.

In today's Mexico, almost every laborer dreams of earning enough money to go back to the village that he or she calls home, or that his or her mother called home, and to open a shop or store whose profits--the dream says--will subsidize his or her ranchito, or small farm. In the newer sections of the metropolis, while fantasizing about their eventual return, laborers live on tracts that they claimed under the constitution's guarantees--only they claimed their parcels for home-building, not to put under the plow.

The urbanite longs to return to the farm, more often than he or she dreams of succeeding in the modern rat race, because city success is rarely seen. Those Mexicans who have migrated to town in the past two generations have not prospered, wildly, as the living conditions of Colosio's alleged assassin show. The suspect, Mario Aburto Martinez, who described himself as an industrial mechanic, lives in a fourteen-by-fourteen-foot shack--with a half dozen others of the same culotte class.

Across Mexico, the purchasing power of urban families has declined by about 60 per cent since the oil crunch of 1982 put neoliberalism into the presidential seat. Maquiladora workers who labor in American-owned plants are as poor as the rest: base wages run $4 to $5 a day, and top scales halt at $100 a week. In comparative terms, Mexican factory pay is lower than that in Hong Kong, Singapore, even Haiti. Neoliberalism's push to keep wages stagnant and food subsidies low brought about most of the decline.

Integration of the Mexican economy into a hemispheric scheme was one-half of the plan President Salinas inaugurated under the banner of modernization. The other half was "democratization" of the political process. The president's professed political goals were less credible than his economic program, as Mexico's Indians--had they known--would have been the first to recognize. Democracy, the Western myth says, was the invention of Greek citizens who, during civic assemblies in ancient Athens, raised their fists to show numerical strength. If that myth is true--as most of the Mexican elite believes--then it makes perfect sense to talk about "democratizing" Mexico, and democracy is an imported, evolutionary process.

But you can't prove that democracy wasn't invented in Mexico, even before the time of the Greeks. Though the method by which native emperors governed Mexico is a matter of dispute, from time immemorial the communities that are today ejidos comunales have resolved local issues in civic assemblies ruled not by a majority vote, but--what could be more democratic?--by unanimous consent. Most ejidos comunales also try accused criminals before the town council, and in Mexico, where trial by jury doesn't exist, their practice is more democratic than the modernity embodied in law.

Despite the conflicting jurisdiction of "duly constituted authority," even today, when important business is at hand, Mexico's indigenes meet in town assemblies and comuneros who also are functionaries in the civil government do as the council decides, ignoring their agency manuals and the bureaucratic superiors who live outside.

Democracy, from the indigenes' point of view. has been corrupted as much as created by the modern scheme of things, and this is nowhere more obvious than in the recent history of Chiapas. Salinas won election in 1988-his party and government say--by a national margin of 50.3 per cent. In Chiapas, he got 89.9 per cent of the vote, more than in any other state.

Even as the new president's plans for agriculture became known, his popularity in Chiapas declined by only a few points. In 1991 elections, 76.3 per cent of the state's voters backed the PRI. And--wonder of wonders!--the ruling party's support was strongest in the same towns where, two-and-a-half years later, the rebellion would set up camp. In ten of the nineteen municipalities in Mexico's ninth federal voting district--the heart of the revolt--no one cast a vote against the PRI. The party's apologists say that it won 100 per cent majorities in towns like Altamirano, where the rebels were welcomed, because the indigenes, following their consensus tradition, voted en bloc. The rebel leaders say that they're sick of apology and fraud.

As things were in 1988, only after the federal government's Mexico City computers crashed for seventy-two hours--atmospheric "conditions" were blamed--did Salinas emerge as the victor, by the narrowest margin in the Mexican almanac. Western journalists now say that the Salinas victory was "clouded" or "marred" by "reports" or "allegations" of fraud--to stop short of saying that it was stolen outright. But Subcomandante Marcos doesn't play with words--not on that score, anyway. "The government of Salinas is an illegitimate government, product of a fraud," he says. And, he adds, "This illegitimate government will necessarily conduct illegitimate elections." That's why the rebels are calling for Salinas to resign before a new president is elected in August.

Through its chief negotiator, Manuel Camacho Solis, the Mexican government and the party it represents have made it clear that they will dispatch aid to Chiapas, more public works, more medical and welfare programs. Camacho has even said that he'll see whether a way can be found to satisfy a rebel political demand that the town councils of ejidos comunales be recognized as legitimate governments, with powers parallel to those of "duly elected" officials. But Camacho and Salinas, the party and government as a whole, are balking at the rebels' "national" goals.

Mexico's future is now more unsettled than at any time since the Revolution sputtered out. The PRI is promising a "clean and transparent" election, as its candidates did in 1988, 1982, and 1976. But because the people have learned that the ruling party does play dirty tricks, the millions of them who suspect that the PRI ordered Colosio shot--to rid itself of a weak candidate--are likely to vote to clean Mexico's house.

The most significant declared opponent is Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the son of the only president whom the peasantry has ever loved, a former governor and former chairman of the PRI, who stood aside, Gandhi-like, while he was cheated of victory in the elections of 1988. Now even his most pacific supporters are hoping that the threat of Chiapas will save him, very much as admirers of Martin Luther King Jr., when the chips were down, saw the Black Panthers as a means.

There's an American parallel for what Chiapas portends to Mexico, as it approaches the elections of August. In 1963, when King led his marchers at Birmingham, Americans concluded that we had a problem in the South. The racial peculiarities of Dixie were dissected and scorned, night and day, until 1965, when the Watts district of Los Angeles broke into flames. By 1968, when Detroit, Washington, Newark, and other points north had joined in the disorders, the thesis that the African-American rebellion was a local event was thoroughly dead.

Modern American history would be much different--and much happier--had most of us recognized, as soon as the Negro Protest began, that it wasn't a regional or racial revolt but an uprising whose objectives served the interest of the nation as a whole. Had most Americans known that Americans in black skin represented the future of Americans in white skin--as the increase in white joblessness and single-parent homes now is making clear--we might have halted the painful economic shifts that afflict most of us today.

Americans who are familiar with Latin America tend to feel sorry for Mexico. But at the present hour, its political future is more promising than ours, despite the specter of post-election disturbances this August. King and other civil-rights leaders aimed their appeals at the conscience of the majority, on behalf of a specially oppressed group. Fortunately, the rebels in Chiapas don't have to play their crusade that way. Mexico City intellectual Jorge Castaneda has coined a slogan to summarize their point of view: "The problem of Chiapas is Mexico," he declares, standing the government's formulation on its head. America's problem wasn't Dixie, but as hindsight shows, just the reverse. If luck is running with the Mexicans, they'll have time to act on the lesson that we are learning so late.

Dick J. Reavis is a veteran of the Southern civil-rights movement (Alabama, 1965-1966) and the author of a book about Mexico, "Conversations with Moctezuma" (William Morrow, 1990). He is writing a book about the Branch Davidian affair.