I would like to tell the story of the people of Morelos — how the desire to live steadily in a familiar place drove them on the path of armed struggle, how they acted, how they behaved when they gained the upper hand, what they did when they lost power, how they returned to a peaceful life and what happened to them. Zapata is the protagonist of the story, not because he craves attention, but because the villagers of Morelos see him as their leader and always rely on him for guidance, and because the villagers across the country also see him as a fighter for their rights. Represented by him, the rednecks took their place in the Mexican Revolution. I believe that even if their revolutionary experience is not representative of everyone, it is still of paramount importance.
Zapata standing portrait
The history of the country unfolds like a wound in Anene Guerco.
—Gaston García Cantu
This book is about a group of rednecks. They were reluctant to leave their homeland, so a revolution was carried out. They don't want to count on a fickle fate. Even if something big happens, no matter what the propagandists from outside say, no matter how fertile the pastures elsewhere are, they must stay in their own villages and towns. That's their hometown, Morelos, a tiny state in south-central Mexico, where they grew up and where people have been born, old, sick and died for hundreds of years, starting with their ancestors.
As the century approaches, another group of people – powerful industrialists living in the cities – wants to drive the villagers away for their own benefit. As a result, fierce clashes broke out between the industrialists and the villagers. Outside of Morelos, similar areas in other states have also seen such clashes, although less remarkable, but no less intense. Industrialists across Mexico are finding that without radically changing the country, they can't maintain their previous level of profitability and keep their government running. But wherever there is a fundamental change, there will be villagers who will rise up in revolt, because where they have lived for generations, they can no longer earn money.
In 1910, after a period of thirty-four years of political stability, the actions of high-ranking politicians provoked a revolt on the question of the succession of the president. Of the entire Mexican population, almost only the Morelos actually participated in the rebellion. A few months later, the leaders of the movement gained state power. But in their disregard for local traditions, the new leaders are no different from those who have been replaced. Businesses everywhere are not constrained and continue to push forward with their development plans. The situation of the villagers of Morelos became very dangerous, and they were overwhelmed by what to do, so they revolted again. Then came nine years of fighting, in which ordinary peasants and farm laborers took up arms and became guerrillas and terrorists, surviving sieges from all sides, persisting in sabotage and nonviolent resistance in the face of government repression. Among their leaders, Emiliano Zapata took the lead.
Partly because of these people's rebellion, but mainly because of the more vigorous movements that broke out in other regions, Mexico carried out a series of radical changes in the 10s of the 20th century. In 1920, Zapata died, and the revolutionary wing of Morelos was recognized by the government and became a legal group. Imperceptibly, they have pushed the government to adopt policies that favor the rural poor. To this day, the Mexican government still considers it its mission to protect the interests of farmers.
The rest of the book is a story, not an analysis. I would like to tell the story of the people of Morelos — how the desire to live steadily in a familiar place drove them on the path of armed struggle, how they acted, how they behaved when they gained the upper hand, what they did when they lost power, how they returned to a peaceful life and what happened to them. Zapata is the protagonist of the story, not because he craves attention, but because the villagers of Morelos see him as their leader and always rely on him for guidance, and because the villagers across the country also see him as a fighter for their rights. Represented by him, the rednecks took their place in the Mexican Revolution. I believe that even if their revolutionary experience is not representative of everyone, it is still of paramount importance.
……
Elected Leader
The old man was about to start talking. A group of peasants waiting under the arcade behind the village church fell silent and listened. They know that this rally is very important. In order to make it possible for everyone to participate, the village elders deliberately set the meeting time for today-Sunday-evening. In order to avoid being discovered by the foremen of the manor, they spread the news of the meeting in private, and did not use the church bell to publicize it.
Almost all the men in the village who had become a family came. Most bachelors are too. Some old men in their seventies and eighties also came, and these people knew each other well, and they were related to each other by blood, by marriage, by close friends, or by enemies. On this September evening, people gathered in the twilight to listen carefully to the wrinkled old man. They know that José Merino is a figure that must not be overlooked. He was close to many of them, respected within a radius of several miles, and at the end of the summer of 1909 he was the chief elder of the village and the chairman of the village council. It could be seen that he was too tired to say superfluous words, so he could only go straight to the point. People listened as he spoke, quietly and attentively.
He said he was in his seventies, too old and too tired, and the other elders were the same, too old and too tired. Last year, he said, the work in the village was already overwhelming. They no longer have the strength to go into the fields, stand in court, and defend the village's land and water rights. Doing their job requires traveling between the village and the state capital, Cuernavaca, and even to Mexico City, hiring lawyers, dealing with the Cuautra's jefe político (chief executive), and battling farm supervisors and foremen — tasks that are too heavy for the elderly.
And since Cuernavaca passed a new real estate law three months ago that reforms taxes and ownership, the job has been even more difficult to do. Over the years, these elders have done their best to contribute to the village, and now the greatest contribution they can do is to give way to the newcomers. Times have changed too fast, and in addition to the wisdom of the elderly, the village needs something new. The Anene Guerco had to elect newcomers – younger ones – to defend their interests. So be it, he said. He then asked people to nominate a new president of parliament, who would be his own successor.
The four elders of the council began to register their names in preparation for the vote. They do not need to give any advice or warning; For 700 years, Anenéguerco survived on the spiritual strength of such men, and until now, it is still the strongest force that sustains the village. One of the four elders, Carmen Quintero, was already in politics long before some of the young people in attendance were born. For 25 years, he was active in local politics while maintaining his non-partisan stance.
Another, Eugenio Pérez, began defending the village land in 1887 with a loaded rifle. The other two, Merino and Andrés Montes, have been the village's most loyal and committed leaders for more than a decade. There were about 400 people in Anene Guerco, almost all of whom were related to the four elders, and one of the four was their uncle, uncle, cousin, brother, father, or grandfather. In front of these dignified, majestic, fair and selfless old men, no one dared to manipulate the election, and no one dared to leave the venue angrily after defeat. In Anene Guerco, the affairs of the village are paramount, and it is not allowed to be interfered with by evil forces or the temper of any one.
The nominations are out. The first to receive the nomination was Modesto Gonzalez. Bartolo Parral then recommended Emiliano Zapata, who then nominated Parral as well. The people then voted: Zapata won easily.
This result is not surprising. Although Zapata was very young, having just turned 30 a month ago, the voters knew him well and his family, and they knew that Zapata was the youth leader they needed and that there was no one more responsible for the village than he was. There were conflicts between Zapatista and the local authorities, with the first conflict occurring a year or two after the death of his parents, when he was 17 years old. He had to leave Morelos for a few months and run to the ranch of his family friends in the south of Puefra. However, no one objected to him because of this - in the countryside, confrontation with the police is simply a rite of passage that every young person is bound to experience.
For the last three years, he has also been the leader of a group of young people who are enthusiastic about village defense, organizing protests, playing a small role in the delegation meeting with the chief executive, and boosting the morale of the villagers. He recently helped organize a local election campaign for an opposition gubernatorial candidate, and despite major setbacks for his party — voters were intimidated, votes were invalidated, and leaders were arrested in labor camps in Yucatán — he continued to meet and connect with opposition politicians across the state. Following the enactment of the new immovable property law, he established a regular partnership with Parliament.
By the standards of the countryside, the villagers knew that he was not a poor boy. Instead of a shack, the Zapatista family lived in a sturdy house made of adobe bricks and stones. He and his brother Eufermio never worked as day-laborers on the estate, and, after the death of their parents, both inherited a small plot of land and some livestock. Ofermio sold his share and went to Belacruz to start a business, and no one knew what he was doing, selling from house to house, street to street, or setting up a stall in the market.
Emiliano, on the other hand, remained in the area of Anene Guerco. He cultivated his own land and rented a few acres from a local estate. In his spare time, he would catch a convoy of mules and drive through the village along the Cuautra River all the way south. He also resold horses in a petty way. Because they didn't have much land, the Zapatista family had been buying and selling livestock for many years, so Emiliano became familiar with the business at a very young age. He also knew what it was to ride a horse, so he spent all the money he earned on it: buying a horse and saddle his favorite horse, and he himself had to dress up, put on the best boots and spurs, and ride heroically on the shining back of his beloved horse.
Zapata in Diego Rivera's frescoes
His reputation for knowing horses has also paid off. From east-central Morelos to western Puevra, and even Mexico City, the owners of the estate say he is the best horse trainer in the region and rush to ask him to work for them. Yet no matter how much they admired him, he remained unmoved, and people always found a painful sense of alienation in him. The Anene Guerco remembers an incident when he was a child, when the local estate took over the village orchard, and he witnessed his father having a nervous breakdown and crying bitterly, and he promised him that he would take the land back. The story — if it is true — happened when he was only nine years old, the ninth of ten children in his family (only four of those ten children survived to adulthood).
Even if the story is apocryphal, the determination it embodies always burns in his eyes, and although he is very strong and no one dares to bully him, sometimes he is still so emotional that he almost cries. He was a silent man, drinking less than most of the men in the village, and once he did, he became even more silent. On one occasion, he worked for a few weeks for a sugar plantation owner in Morelos, tending to his luxury horse farm in Mexico City. It was a good opportunity to make friends with the powerful and make a fortune: he could have filled his own pockets, built his own horse farm, and even a small ranch. But the behavior of slapping horses, sweet talk, cleverness, tricks, and underground trading did make him feel disgusting.
Disturbed and discouraged, he soon returned to Anenéguerco, complaining indignantly that the stables in the capital were much better than those of the laborers of the whole Morelos. Even if he dressed up for the holidays, trotted around the village on a horse in a silver saddle, or wandered around the nearby city of Ayala, the locals would never wonder if he was one of them. Although he rode a good horse and wore fine clothes, the Anénéguerco never called him Don Emiliano.
That title would have stripped him of the reality of the local life, which was full of narrow lanes, flies, manure and sludge, and turned the visceral respect for him into a vague and respectful attitude, as it had done with the squire. He was one of them, and in Anéneguerco, they felt and treated him that way, and they never felt uncomfortable about it. Migliano, they called him that, and after his death, they called him pobrecito. He was their neighbor, their cousin who was capable of leading the whole family, their beloved nephew, and he was like a piece of air-dried wood, rough and real.
This is the person who was elected by the villagers as the chairman of the council. But when they chose him, it was also a gamble — a bet that he would always be the way they knew him. What reassures them that he won't change when he takes power, that he won't abuse their trust, and that he doesn't even think about it at all is his family reputation. The Zapatista family is very important in Anene Guerco. During the War of Independence in the second decade of the 19th century, Zapatista began to appear in the local news as a rebel. Emiliano's father, Gabriel (a quiet, likable, hard-working man who stammered slightly) and his mother Cleopas are unremarkable in all historical records, but they passed on to their sons those distinctive traits of the family's history—pure courage without utilitarianism, tenacious and unwavering integrity.
The Zapatista and Salazar families (Emiliano's mother's family) have the essence of Mexican history in their bones. During the War of Independence, the Spanish army surrounded the rebel army of Cuautra. For weeks, many boys from nearby villages sneaked back and forth to deliver agave, salt, liquor, and gunpowder to the rebels. One of the boys from Anene Guerco was José Salazar, who was Emiliano's maternal grandfather. And two of Emiliano's father's brothers, Cristiano and José, also participated in the war of reform and the war against French intervention in the sixties of the 19th century. Years later, Emiliano still remembers the stories they told him about the fight against the reactionaries and colonizers.
In addition, there is a José Zapata, whose exploits have given the Zapatista family great prestige in the village. In 1866-1867, during the Franco-Mexican War, the young Republican general Porfirio Díaz gathered a large number of men in south-central Mexico to join the final battle against the French. He needs to have a credible agent in each community to mobilize and lead local forces. In the countryside around the city of Ayala, his agent is this José Zapata. Zapata is old, but he knows the land and its people like the back of his hand, and he is respected everywhere he goes. His home was in Anene Quelco, and when the war ended in 1867 and the government of the Republic was restored, the people there and the people of Ayala naturally counted on him to lead them and re-establish a peaceful and orderly life.
During the tumultuous years of the late '60s and early '70s, he was the chief elder of Anéneguerco and was also elected to serve in the Ayala municipal government. In those years, José Zapata remained loyal to Díaz, who had turned into an ambitious but mindless confused opposition politician. He organized a Porfirio underground club in Anene Guerco, where he secretly contacted his old prefect to discuss how to protect the villagers' land from the sugar cane plantations, which he called the "evil disease." The people of Anene Guerco have great respect for José Zapata: in 1876, when his companions reported the news of his death to Dias, they said: "Our revered leader, whom he loved as a father, has died. For many years after that, they continued to follow the political path he had pointed out, and even after Díaz came to power and betrayed his earlier promises, they still believed that Díaz would eventually remember his promise and reach out to them to protect their land.
In 1892, in a hotly contested presidential election, the younger generation of Anéneguerco, including Eufermio Zapata, Octaviano Gutiérrez and Teodoro Plasencia, still felt that it was their duty as citizens to join the Porfirio club and vote for the old leader, who had poured all their convictions into Díaz under the influence of José eldeo. Emiliano was born three years after José Zapata's death, and it is still unknown what the relationship between the two was between them, but José Sr. may have been the brother of Emiliano's grandfather, his uncle. In any case, his prestige in the history of the village has made the Zapatista family highly respected.
General Zapatista and his staff (Library of Congress)
Finally, it was at this meeting that the power of kinship was also felt: Emiliano is also the nephew of the current president, José Merino. The villagers knew there would be a lot of trouble in the next few years. They can only take a gamble on Zapata, hoping that he will lead them through the storm.
Nominations for other positions are also being made. Young people have been elected one after another—for nearly five years, these are the informal leaders of a new generation of villagers. Francisco Franco, a close friend of Emiliano, was elected secretary, Edviguez Sánchez and Rafael Merino, the latter was the son of José Merino, were appointed accountant, and José Robles became the village's spokesperson with no specific duties. The meeting was very brief, and the whole process was a meeting, an election, and a transfer of power. This is nothing unusual, because in difficult times, the old "judges" should follow the convention and give way to the younger "warriors". And on the evening of September 12, 1909, that Sunday evening, Anene Guerco seemed to face a particularly difficult future.
Zapata spoke a few briefly. He said that he accepted all the difficult tasks entrusted to him, but he hoped that everyone would support him. "We're going to support you," Francisco Franco still remembers 30 years later, when a voice in the crowd shouted to Zapata, "we just want someone of kind to protect us." ”
*The article is excerpted from "Zapatista and the Mexican Revolution" (John Womack Jr., Joint Books, 2023-11)