Piecework

In Anenecuilco in 1909, the 400 citizens turned for help to 30-year-old Emiliano Zapata, electing him their leader. He was a proud, tough man who did not toady to the rich. He spoke Spanish and Nahuatl — the language of south-central Mexico — and had traveled beyond the valleys, beyond even Cuernavaca, the capital of Morelos; he had even lived in Mexico City, la capital, where he had handled horses for a rich family. And he had demonstrated his love for Morelos by coming home. “Uneasy and depressed,” wrote John Womack Jr. in his classic 1968 biography, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, “he was soon back in Anenecuilco, remarking bitterly how in the capital horses lived in stalls that would put to shame the house of any workingman in the whole state of Morelos. …”

For more than a year, Zapata and the men of Morelos tried to use the law to settle their grievances. Basically, they wanted the return of the ejidos, the communal lands that had been theirs since before the Conquest. They pleaded with the owners of the haciendas; they sent letters to the governor. They were ignored. Finally, in 1910, initially over the narrow issue of reelection of the dictator, Mexico exploded into full-scale revolution. And with Zapata as its leader, Morelos was the most revolutionary state of all.

Although he never learned to read (in 1910, 77 percent of all Mexicans were illiterate), Zapata soon proved to be a more daring and intelligent commander than the well-read graduates of the military schools. He was quick when they were slow; he was patient when they were not; above all, he had the respect and support of his people (who supplied food, information, and troops), while they had only the heavy artillery.

“Seek justice from tyrannical governments,” he said, “not with your hat in your hands but with a rifle in your fist.” For the next decade, with a rifle in his fist, Zapata made clear that he wanted nothing for himself. He was offered haciendas, land, power. He turned them all down, remaining true to the basic Zapatista demand: “Tierra y Libertad”- land and liberty — for the people who worked the land.

This was, of course, a conservative vision; Zapata offered no blurry Utopian future. He asked only that stolen land be returned to its owners, the campesinos, and that they be allowed to work that land in peace. Now, before the planting. That, plus the freedom to speak what they felt and elect whom they wanted. The troops of his army marched under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, not Karl Marx.

There was fighting all over Mexico, of course, but Morelos suffered more than any other state. Hundreds of villages were damaged; Cuernavaca, the state capital, was reduced to rubble; the state’s economy was destroyed, as was the sugar industry. The people suffered horrendous losses; almost half the population was killed or driven away by the war. That’s why here, of all the regions of Mexico, the hope and pain of the revolution remain so vivid.

You drive down a side road near Cuautla, where there is a monument to Zapata, and off to the right is the chimney of a destroyed house, the smashed bricks and beams of a church, and more often the oddly splendid ruins of a once more splendid hacienda. The last always evoke images of Mexico’s anden regime, when men in tight chamois pants and silver spurs built grand mansions they thought would last forever. In 1910, 30 haciendas owned 62 percent of the total surface area of Morelos and almost all of the arable land. Their ruins are also monuments to Zapata. “The land free, the land free for all,” he said. “Land without overseers and without masters, is the war cry of the revolution.”

From that, Zapata never deviated, even in 1918, the worst year of the long struggle, when the ruthlessness of the Carranza government combined with an influenza epidemic to devastate his Army of the South. Morelos was the grinder; Carranza’s troops burned crops, drove off cattle, raped and murdered women and children. The widespread hunger and misery, combined with sheer human exhaustion, probably led Zapata into the trap that would cost him his life.