The Sound of Our World Resurging

David Palumbo-Liu considers Linda Quiquivix’s “Palestine 1492: A Report Back.”

By David Palumbo-LiuSeptember 8, 2025

• Politics

• History

SINCE THE BEGINNING of Israel’s genocide in Gaza in October 2023, the assertion has been made that, to understand the significance of that moment and all that has followed, it is important to acknowledge the violence of the Nakba of May 1948, when some 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their land and—since then—denied their right of return. Other scholars wind the clock back further still to the signing of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British government pledged to “establish ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine.” As literary and cultural theorist Edward Said noted, the declaration was made “by a European power […] about a non-European territory […] in a flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory.” The radical contribution of geographer Linda Quiquivix, in her recent Palestine 1492: A Report Back (2024), to this discussion is to trace the origins of the impunity of Europeans inflicting violence on non-Europeans to almost half a millennium earlier—to 1492. One of the book’s dedications states plainly: “To the product of 500 years of struggles.”

Quiquivix’s meticulously researched, multidisciplinary, and multiform study argues that carving up the world into discrete spaces—both horizontally, to form nations, and vertically, to create an “Above” and a “Below”—was necessary before the West could embark upon a series of conquests, including that of Palestine. In 1648, those in power arrived at the Westphalian bargain to mediate, contain, and distribute their imperial ambitions; the officially named “Peace of Westphalia” ended the Thirty Years’ War, established a secular order, and founded the notion of independent sovereign nation-states. At the same time, those who parlayed power and territories did so from Above, by repressing and exploiting those Below.

From here, Quiquivix traces the slow but relentless accumulation of epistemic, political, and financial power into that new global center, the West. However, the signal strength and contribution of Palestine 1492 is not to dwell upon this narrative; instead, it is (as the title suggests) to “report back” from the Below. Her two primary peoples, which she not only spent years studying but also came to be in community with, are the Palestinians and the Zapatistas.

Indeed, forgoing the constraints of academic researchers to remain “neutral observers,” Quiquivix tells of a series of experiences living in Palestine and Chiapas, Mexico, wherein she becomes remade, immersing herself in the cultures, histories, practices, and struggles of these communities. This requires her to listen, witness, enact, and embody their choices of strategies and tactics, and, even more than that, their worldviews. This challenging venture would seem less convincing or “real” had Palestine 1492 not also included powerful autobiographical chapters. While for the purposes of her story Quiquivix leaves these chapters until later in the book, for this review, I believe it makes sense to start with Linda Quiquivix as subject, who says forthrightly:

Parts of my offering might be more helpfully understood as witness testimony from someone raised by the world of Columbus and Them who can testify that world teaches Palestinians have never existed and that the Maya no longer exist. I can testify that worlds obsessed with “greatness,” the very definition of fascism, over-represent the stories of themselves as the stories of all humanity, as if empires, dynasties, kingdoms have ever been our only possibilities.

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Quiquivix locates the places where she was raised (around Oxnard and Los Angeles) in the histories that affiliate her with the Palestinians and Zapatistas. In other words, birth, land, racialization and empire go hand in hand as she recalls her birth and childhood in “the colonial settlement built on occupied Tongva lands first by the Spanish empire, then by the Mexican empire, then by the American empire, and now by a global empire.” She explains that “Quiquivix is a Mayan name,” adding that “most of [her] family refers to themselves as ladinos, the Guatemalan and Chiapas equivalent of the Mexican mestizos, mixed roots of Native, European, and often Afrikan.”

When she enters college, like many first-generation students from poor backgrounds, Quiquivix opts for a practical major: business. That choice connects her powerfully to concepts and ideologies that will help form her ideas of the world from Above. During her studies, she discovers that the Above has a new code name: globalization, a process in which all were to become absorbed and, what is more, all were to become eager subjects. Again, the spatial is an index to domination. The other global coordinate, time, is similarly, suddenly absorbed into this new phenomenon: “In the business schools of the 1990s, the solution for everything seemed to be ‘globalization.’ […] Everybody was now embracing capitalism, everybody including the Third World.”

Finding the master narrative of capitalist triumph both oppressive and stultifying, Quiquivix does poorly in this field of study—until one fateful moment when she begins to look at the effects of racial capitalism as seen in the “built environment.” She begins to wonder why people and places are rearranged quite differently under the seemingly homogenizing process of globalization. “Maybe it was after visiting other cities,” she writes, “maybe it was after getting a job on the other side of the city that I started to wonder Why is Los Angeles like this? Why is Compton Compton? Why is Santa Monica Santa Monica?” She recounts how, in her last semester of college, she “enrolled in an Urban Geography course on the other side of campus that helped with an answer. ‘Residential Security Maps,’ or ‘redlining,’ racialized housing discrimination from just a few generations before, systemic in its reach from the politicians in Washington, D.C. to the White neighbors across the street.”

Such a discipline of geography affords Quiquivix a powerful set of instruments with which to understand how the present contains the traces of a long historical process of imperial expansion and slaughter, of carving up land for conquering, controlling, and expelling populations deemed unfit to live with those Above (that is, the conquerors). Overlaying Compton at the “end of history” onto the Iberian Peninsula of the 15th century, she writes:

Throughout Columbus’ lifetime and for many centuries before, the Roman Empire had been re-establishing itself in the West by a Crusade against Islam of another name, the Reconquista […]

Modern Europe was birthed by the blood of Black Afrikans, Muslims, Jews, and anybody different, anyone the empire considered the Devil.

In 2006, Quiquivix begins work on her doctoral dissertation, aiming to understand better the borderlands between Guatemala and Mexico. She goes looking for the Zapatistas but fails to find them. During the subsequent six years, she spends time translating their communiqués into English. When she does finally meet them directly for the first time, in 2012, she is struck by the fact that they often speak of Palestine and the Palestinian cause and declare their solidarity; they find that their histories and those of the Palestinians emanate from a common source. Again, throughout her book, she shows how maps are indispensable instruments to the project of conquest and colonization.

Quiquivix draws a direct line from these acts of mapping and expulsion to figures like Edward Robinson, a professor of biblical literature at Union Theological Seminary in New York, whose Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea (1841) was published simultaneously in the United States, England, and Germany. It became a “cornerstone of nineteenth century Palestine exploration” and made Robinson known as the “Father of Biblical Geography.” Resisting the tendency of geography to reproduce the world in its own terms, and holding true to her commitment to report back from below, Quiquivix notes: “[W]hen Columbus world speaks about Palestine, it speaks only of the empires, dynasties, kingdoms that have occupied Palestine.”

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Quiquivix goes to Palestine in 2010 as part of her research for her doctoral dissertation on these maps. She is asked about her project by an Israeli border guard and notes that she had prepared herself to describe the work “without once referencing Palestine.” While she intentionally omits “Palestine” in order to allow the “Holy Land” to stand (a moment-specific sacrifice) in the settler’s understanding of the place, Quiquivix goes on to cite a Palestinian friend: “All of this stuff is not Palestinian history, Jihad had said. It’s the occupiers’ history. We have been occupied by Israel, then the Romans, then the Greeks, then the Turks, then the British, and then Israel.”

Writing back against this is a seminal part of upholding Palestinian history and cultural and political practice. “Palestinians have long counter-mapped that construction against the colonizer,” Quiquivix observes:

Maps of Palestine in necklaces, embroidery, and other artwork have helped build a consciousness of a common struggle among everybody within the colonial outlines of that map. Palestinian communities are highly diverse, yet every single one whose lands are within the colonial borders have been marked for extermination. The counter-map of Palestine convokes their collective resistance.

This reclamation of geography as an act of collective resistance is mirrored in other actual acts of resistance. Maps, as Quiquivix illustrates in her recollection of a conversation with a Palestinian friend, are everyday parts of existence in the region: “When I asked Nidal if I accurately trace the streets on the map […] he nodded but remarked, ‘You know, the rooftops are also streets.’” She goes on to explain:

Jumping from roof to roof was how he and his friends could check in on everyone and pass medicine, food, news, and supplies. I soon learned that every Palestinian seemed to have a story like this […] with every geography different for everyone, yet still the story of everyone, each with their own calendars, each with their own ways, each new path out of necessity, each new path impossible to map by anyone else, least by a professional geographer like me.

Once again, to weave together the author’s biographical history with that of communities whose maps—and ways of making and living maps and spatial demarcations—work differently from her own is not a seamless or easy process. Quiquivix is constantly and ardently unlearning not just the ways professional geographers are taught to map the world but also how those techniques and practices can blind them precisely to the actual experiences of people living “Below.” This becomes even more significant when the author sees the connections between the worlds of the Palestinians and the Zapatistas and her own figurations there. Such a fusion of horizons is solidly grounded in a desire to build a much different world from the one depicted in and maintained by our conventional maps.

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Quiquivix’s book argues that Zapatista political theory offers a particularly potent way of viewing political struggle, both for Palestinian liberation and for all peoples Below. One of that ideology’s key insights is that, rather than fixate on recognition from those Above, it is essential to work side by side, even across differences. Difference then stops being an obstacle and becomes a point of shared respect and solidarity: “The Zapatistas say their struggle is for a world where many worlds fit, and by this they don’t mean a multi-polar world, they mean a world where all worlds can fit, where universalisms are inadequate, where not even a single universe is adequate.” She goes on to relate how, “as the Zapatista women say,” a “world that begins with we are equal because we are different […] is a world where all worlds fit.”

The capacity to imagine multiplicity that does not ultimately collapse into one sort of static container of universalism is possible only by taking a view in which worlds are continually made and remade from the Below rather than maintained by a power Above. Quiquivix explains how, “in the Zapatista Maya world, empire’s pyramid is turned upside down. That is, the base is the authority.” As a result, “governing is a community obligation, not a career, a duty, a burden, a responsibility, and it is everybody’s right.” In this configuration, leading “by obeying guides the flow of power within the community so it circulates in an everyday dispersed fashion rather than concentrating on any single leader,” a notion she calls the Zapatistas’ “most important contribution to contemporary politics.”

Perhaps the most radical and dramatic enactment of disengaging with the Above and focusing instead on the circulation of power Below came in 2005, with the Zapatistas’ “Sixth Declaration,” which “announced the Zapatistas would no longer engage with political parties, politicians, bad governments, all of the above. Instead, they would struggle ‘from below and to the left.’” This commitment was dramatized on December 21, 2012, a day considered by some to be the Mayan calculation of the date of the end of the world:

More than 40,000 Zapatistas of all ages marched in silence throughout several cities in Chiapas that day. They erected a stage with a ramp on each side for all to ascend and descend, left fists up. Not a single word was said aloud. Everything they had to say that day, they published in a brief communique […] “Did you listen? It is the sound of your world crumbling. It is the sound of our world resurging. The day that was day was night. And night shall be the day that will be day.”

It is difficult, if not impossible, for many of us to detach from our habitual beliefs in the containers of the nation-state, in international organizations like the United Nations—they have become naturalized and normalized as the proper, necessary, and only way that the planet can be moderated and stabilized, so that things can keep churning along, as dismal as things are.

To be clear, these habits have not in any way made for a better world. Indeed, one could say exactly the opposite. As I write this, Israel, by attacking Iran, has just opened another war on top of its genocide in Gaza and its accelerated and intensified ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. No one and nothing is stopping this. At the same time, a civil body, the Gaza Tribunal, has issued its Sarajevo Declaration. One of the leaders of the Tribunal, Richard Falk, explains that it “speaks on behalf of the people and doesn’t attempt to be an organ that is addressed principally to government.” In a podcast interview I conducted with him and two other members of the Tribunal, Falk elaborated:

This  Gaza experience has highlighted that kind of gap in the expectations of a global rule of law flowing out of the experience of World War II and the realities of geopolitics being sustained and reaffirmed in this UN framework and generally in the behavior of the international system. […]

It has fallen in past situations, like the Vietnam War and the anti-apartheid movement in relation to South Africa, that global solidarity initiated within civil society has proved to be an important political instrument, policy instrument.

I take this to be one variant on the message we get from the Zapatistas—but only one that is perhaps most legible to those of us already deeply enmeshed in conventional approaches.

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To get further toward the spirit of listening to and working with the Below requires a much more radical, and at the same time smaller-scale, reorientation. It therefore makes sense to listen again to Linda Quiquivix tell of her own experiences, in illuminating detail:

The first time I heard about sharing the world side by side as an alternative to Above Below I was listening to Sylvia Marcos speak in Chiapas for the first time […]

I was in attendance as a listener seeking to weave more between Chiapas and Palestine, seeking to organize a Palestinian delegation to Zapatista territory. I had just encountered the right person. When I shared with Sylvia my task, she responded, “I am Palestinian. My grandparents are from Bethlehem.” We embraced.

The next year in her home, we gathered with a Palestinian delegation of women, all of us having returned from week-long stays in Zapatista territory as students in their Escuelita their Little School. […]

The Little School taught me most about the land. It taught me the way I was fighting for the land is all wrong. The land is not just a moral imperative, the land is the condition of possibility for the creation of another world. It taught me the struggle is not just about taking back the land but about what kind of life is made possible with the land, and about what kind of world can we build together with the land side by side with the land.

Palestine 1492 presses us to first recognize the profound nature of our collapsing world, the result of 500 hundred years of fracturing, exploitation, and alienation. It shows us the costs of modernity; it rips the veil off our illusions. It also shows how people Below have managed to create their own mappings of their environment, maps that offer us a world that is categorically different from the conventional manners in which lands, oceans, rivers, and peoples have been named and contained. The greatest challenge posed by the book is not to recognize and critique these acts of naming and mapping but to live otherwise. To do so, we might recall this instance of Palestinian mapping, described in Quiquivix’s interview with a geography professor at Bir Zeit University:

“Land was used for pastures and herders,” [Ahmed] Al-Noubani continued, recalling a time when maps were rare. “Tribes knew their borders.” Claims to property, he had explained, were made through the Hujja, a land transfer paper agreement where boundaries were not lines but descriptions of natural landmarks that villagers understood between each other.

This “understanding” is not simply a matter of recognizing landmarks and demarcations—it is a matter of living in a common world with mutual respect, authority, and recognition. The challenge for those of us who want to live otherwise is not just to be against bad things or for good ones but also to make worlds that are better and live in them. As Quiquivix writes,

We can say we are anti-capitalist all we want, but how many of us know how to live without capitalism? We can say we are anti-patriarchy all we want, but how many of us know how to live without patriarchy? We can say we are anti-domination all we want, but how many of us know how to live without domination? How many of us know how to get to that world of side-by-side-by-side-by-side and if we don’t know, how many of us wish to start?