Mural on Zapatista highschool building, Caracol in Resistance and Rebellion for Humanity,
Oventic, Chiapas, Mexico

  When imagination is released from personalistic conceptions, we can see its essential necessity in community life. In the work below I take up the imaginal’s functions in the life of community. During the first decade of 2000, while working on issues of forced migration from Mexico to the United States, I became deeply interested in the Mexican mural movement, and in particular the use of murals and art in autonomous Zapatista communities in Chiapas and art on the Mexico side of the U.S. separation wall at the U.S.-Mexico border for resistance, conscientization, and prophetic imagination. 


Watkins, M. (1988). The image of the activist in psychological research, Conference on Quaker Studies on Human Betterment, Proceedings, Swarthmore College .

Watkins, M. (1992). Perestroika of the self: Dreaming in the U.S.S.R. Dreaming, 2, 2, 111-122.

Watkins, M. (2003). Toward splendid cities. (unpublished)

Watkins, M. (2003). Afghan Refugee Girls’ School: Prophetic dreaming and moral pilgrimage, Among Friends, Santa Barbara Friends Meeting Newsletter (July).

Watkins, M. (2012). Notes from a Visit to Several Zapatista Communities: Toward Practices of Nomadic Identity and Hybridity. Psychological Studies. 57 (1), 1-8. 


Watkins, M. (2014). The Undoing of Hard Borders: Art at the U.S. Border Against Mexico. In S. P. Moslund, A. R. Petersen & M. Schramm (Eds.), Migration and culture: Politics, aesthetics, and history. London/New York: I. B. Tauris Press.