Piecework

Each day after lunch, we walked under the hot, scoured Mexican sky to the center of the town of Tepoztlán. Off to the left were the sour remains of old cane fields where shirtless kids played soccer in the dust. Down the broad valley behind us, we could see men riding horses and the sudden glint of sun on a machete. In the town’s graveyard, tiny cones of dust whirled among the headstones. On both sides of the valley were the mountains of Morelos.

Those mountains, surrounding this town about 60 miles south of Mexico City, are a spectacular sight: sheer cliffs, sudden crags, rocky formations that seem split by some cosmic ax. Behind them, other mountains rise, big and broad-shouldered, with the dark purple silhouettes of still more beyond — all part of the Sierra Madre, the primordial spine of Mexico. Each day, as my wife and I walked to town, they became as familiar as the road itself.

A half mile from the house where we were staying, the modern two-lane blacktop abruptly gave way to 18th-century cobblestones and rose steeply into the town. Here, visiting automobiles slowed to a crawl in a tenuous and losing negotiation with the colonial past. At the top of that steeply terraced hill, sitting in doorways, wearing the familiar white pajamas of the campesino — the countryman — their eyes cloudy with the past, their faces gullied by time, were the last old soldiers of the man who once was the revolutionary master of these mountains: Emiliano Zapata.

“Si, fue un Zapatista,” an old man told me one afternoon. Yes, I was a Zapatista. Then he paused, in modest clarification: “We all fought. In Tepoztlán, we were all Zapatistas.”

The sight of these old men moved me in complicated ways. I’ve been going to Mexico since the mid-1950s, when I was a student there on the GI Bill. In 1956, on the Transportes del Norte bus heading south from Laredo, I carried Zapata in my psychic baggage, or at least the version of the great revolutionary leader that Marlon Brando played in Viva Zapata! In that fine, tragic 1952 movie, directed by Elia Kazan, Brando gave Zapata a muted and melancholy grandeur. For once, the movies got it right; over the years, as I studied the history of this great, tormented country, it became clear that Viva Zapata! might be of limited use as literal history, but was absolutely true as legend.

Here in the village of Tepoztlán, among the mountains of Morelos, was the proof. The legend lived. But for these old men, Emiliano Zapata wasn’t simply a character in a movie, a figure in a mural, or a name, in the history of the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution. He had lived, he’d fought, he’d died here. Or in places within a day’s horseback ride or three days’ walk. These men saw him, heard him speak. “All of Morelos followed him,” one man said. “Right to the end.”

Even today, many decades after his death, the spirit of the Zapatista struggle seems to permeate Morelos, while haunting Mexico. “He is one of our legendary heroes,” wrote the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz. “Realism and myth are joined in this ardent, melancholy, and hopeful figure who died as he had lived: embracing the earth.”

That earth was, above all, the earth of Morelos, where Zapata was born in 1879 in Anenecuilco, a village whose name in Aztec means “place where the water moves like a worm.” And though as a young man Emiliano was a master horseman, not a tiller of the soil, his ancestors had lived and worked the land for generations. Much of that land was communal — the grazing fields, the rivers — and was theirs according to land grants that went back to the earliest days of the Spaniards. But over the centuries, and increasingly under the dictator Porfirio Diaz, who took power in 1876, the common lands were taken from the men of Morelos by the owners of the expanding haciendas. Stolen village cornfields were planted in sugar, rivers diverted to irrigate the lands of the rich. Guns proved more powerful than paper. Those who protested were humiliated, jailed, sometimes killed; after the turn of the century, when the Diaz regime was in full power, those who protested were often sent off to penal slavery in the henequen plantations of distant Yucatan. More and more, the men of Morelos whispered about revolt; someday, they said, they would have to fight for the land with guns.