Piecework

In the slow afternoons in Tepoztlán, moving through the amber torpor of the sun, you can still see those small powerful women, built like tree trunks, pounding fresh tortillas on three-legged metates as their ancestors did for centuries. You can buy chickens killed that morning. You can see boys negotiating the cobblestones of Avenida de la Revolución on burros, comic books jutting from their back pockets. There are a few good restaurants, but most people here eat at home, as they always did. They seem entirely indifferent to the groups of city people who own second homes here as refuges from the horrors of modern Mexico City: writers and painters, businessmen and intellectuals, and a few American expatriates. This is a proud town in a state of proud people. They don’t kowtow to strangers but they almost never descend to rudeness either. At the same time, you witness none of the fawning theatrics of those who live in tourist towns. And you see no beggars.

What you do sense, if you read the history and allow the town’s layered past to seep into you slowly, is the eventual triumph of Zapata. The agrarian reform for which he lived and died came slowly. In the early years, the campesinos were given the worst land: on untillable mountain slopes, in places devoid of water or topsoil. The new politicians, the thick-fingered hustlers of the revolution, grabbed the best land for themselves.

Irony was without limit. In Anenecuilco, where Zapata was born, the worst abuser of the campesinos in the 1940s was a man named Nicolas Zapata. He was 13 when his father, Emiliano, was killed. Everywhere, human beings have a gift for outrage. But during the presidency of Lázaro Cardenas (1934-1940), the worst abuses were ended. Schools and hospitals were opened, transportation made easier, farmers helped with credit and supplies. Eventually, Nicolas Zapata was hustled out of Morelos.

The people of Zapata country soon had to face a harder task than the fighting of a revolution. As Mexico’s population soared in the 1940s, a new generation soon learned the obvious: There simply wasn’t enough arable land to be divided up, generation after generation; even the holy Mexican tierra was finite. Many young people from Morelos began to emigrate, to Cuernavaca, to Mexico City, to the United States. Some never came back. Obviously, agrarian reform wasn’t the answer to all of the problems of Morelos or Mexico; in this world, nothing is the answer.

And yet, for all of the disappointments, there is something about the people of Morelos that is healthy and enduring: They bow their heads to no man. That is surely the most valuable inheritance passed down by the generation of Emiliano Zapata. That is Zapata’s triumph. He wanted humble people to be proud. Not vain. Not haughty. Proud. And you sense that pride here in the way ordinary citizens move, in the confident (if reserved) way in which they deal with strangers. You see it in the way they take care of their children and their homes. You see it in the poorest barrios, where flowers are planted in tin cans on doorsteps and windowsills.

The pride is not merely in self, but in place. The anthropologist Oscar Lewis believed that the name Tepoztlán means “place of the broken rocks,” after the spectacular peaks and buttes that rise above the town. If so, the name is no longer completely accurate. The name doesn’t truly describe the abundant beauty of bougainvillea and avocado trees, the citrus green in the sun, the mango and papaya trees, the fields of coffee and bananas appearing around a sudden bend. Nor does it portray the handsome homes of the city people who have moved here in the past few decades, adding the bright shimmer of swimming pools to the town, behind walls of volcanic rock. Nor does the name explain why so many of those who went away have begun to return, as dismayed as Zapata by what they encountered in the cement streets of big cities, explaining that at least here they had “petates y parientes “ — a place to sleep, and parents, too.

In short, the name of Tepoztlán doesn’t explain the beauty of the place, or its mood, or its ghosts. Sometimes they all appear after the sun has vanished. You walk here at night with no sense of the menace that stains the night in almost all the cities of el Norte. On the dirt roads of the lower town, faceless strangers pass in the dark and murmur hello. A few drunks sing the old canciones. Somewhere, but never seen, dogs are always barking, and the odor of jasmine thickens the air. On such a night not long ago, as I sat behind the house, gazing up at the black silhouette of the mountains, the wind shifted subtly and a cloud acquired the gleaming texture of mother-of-pearl: still, beautiful, perfect. The moon was hidden. A lone dog howled. And I swear that up on the ridge, high above this dark valley in Morelos, I saw a white horse.

TRAVEL HOLIDAY,

October 1990