Book review: “Zapata and the Mexican Revolution” by John Womack Jr.

Pablo Gonzalez Garza — a general during the presidency of Venustiano Carranza at the end of a decade of rebellions, known as the Mexican Revolution — was the mastermind of the assassination of Emiliano Zapata. It had to do with tacos and beer.

The killing was carried out by Gonzalez’s subordinate Colonel Jesús Guajardo who, hinting that he would defect, lured the leader of the Morelos rebels to a meeting on April 10, 1919.

As John Womack Jr. recounts in his 1968 classic Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, Zapata had been waiting with his guard for the colonel outside Guajardo’s hacienda. Several times, he turned down offers to come inside to dine. “But as Guajardo’s officers went on repeating the invitation, tacos and beer sounded better,” so Zapata got down from his horse and with ten men went in.

Womack lets one of Zapata’s aides continue the story:

Having formed ranks, [Guajardo’s] guard looked ready to do him the honors. Three times the bugle sounded the honor call; and as the last note died away, as the General in Chief reached the threshold of the door…at point blank, without giving him time even to draw his pistols, the soldiers who were presenting arms fired two volleys, and our unforgettable General Zapata fell never to rise again.

Arriving later after night had fallen, Gonzalez had Zapata’s body dumped onto the pavement and then carried to the police station where it was photographed.

“Tremble from head to foot”

In the capital, red newspaper headlines screamed the reports of Zapata’s killing, and Gonzalez had movie cameras brought in to record the burial, reasoning that the publicity “would sap the surviving Zapatistas’ resistance and discourage villagers from protecting them.”

Thousands of villagers, including Zapata’s two sisters, came from the nearby pueblos to view the body, Womack reports.

As these “humble people” filed up to the coffin and then for an instant paused and looked into it, they would, wrote an Excelsior reporter, “tremble from head to toe.”

What shivered them was probably not, as the eager reporter believed, fear of “the ringleader” but the horrifying surprise of their own guilt; years before they had located a man whom they asked to stand up for them, and he had stood up for them, and now they saw him dead…”It hurt me as much,” a Tepoztecan remembered later, “as if my own father had died.”

Here, in a nutshell, is the rebellion in Morelos from 1909 to 1919, a separate revolution from all the other revolts that were taking place in Mexico during that decade.

And here is the leader of that rebellion — not someone like Carranza and other politicians of his ilk, maneuvering for position and organizing campaign slogans for the achievement of power, not like Pancho Villa and similar revolutionaries who were hard to tell from bandits.

 

A man of the soil, the pueblos, the people

Zapata was a man of the soil of Morelos, a man of the pueblos, of the people, opting at every twist and turn of the decade to do what he could to bring about the land reform that the people wanted, reform that was actually a return to a simpler, more egalitarian time and way of life.

Womack’s meticulously researched and sharply written account details how Zapata, his followers and the pueblos wandered for a decade through the fog of rebellion, buffeted and shaken by events elsewhere in the nation, beaten down and oppressed by political foes representing middle-class landowners and men of ambition.

Never does he portray Zapata as a military genius, just a stubborn soldier.  Never does he suggest that Zapata was a brilliant theorist, just someone who was asked to do a job he wanted to do — that is, reclaim for the rural people the land they had long had use of, before being squeezed out by capitalist hacienda plantations.

If Zapata was charismatic — and he was — it was as someone who believed wholeheartedly what his followers believed, who embraced the land and the old way of life just as much as the rural folk who joined his troops or helped in whatever other ways they could.

Never does Womack show Zapata scheming to gain control outside of Morelos, to exercise wider or even nationwide power. Always, Zapata was a man of Morelos.  That is how he lived, how he fought and how he died.

 

For shame and anguish

Less than a week after the Zapata killing, Gonzalez issued a manifesto ordering an end to the mourning for the slain leader, only to be dismayed that the shock of the assassination had failed to break the Morelos spirit.

As one anonymous vandal carved into a post in Cuernavaca’s Borda Gardens the day after the murder, “Rebels of the South it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

Rumors circulated that Zapata had been too smart to fall into the trap, that it was a lookalike who was slain, that he was seen hiding in the mountains.

The belief that he had not died was a consolation, both for shame at not fighting any more and for anguish at having charged him with an impossible responsibility, having trusted him to death. But it was not a healing consolation. Among the rural families now laboring to hold on in the new order, the ache of sorrow persisted. After all, a doubtful, painful belief in the incredible was a way of staying loyal to the Chief even after he had gone.

 

“Where villagers could remain villagers”

Yet, Zapata was killed even as the Mexican Revolution was coming to its conclusion. And Morelos was a winner.

In May, 1920, a year and a month after Zapata was ambushed by the honor guard, Carranza himself was assassinated after he fled Mexico City before the armies of General Álvaro Obregón.

Obregon ruled as president for four years, the first of a series of generals to hold the high office over the next two decades, and, then, in 1928, in his turn, he was assassinated before taking office for a second time.

By the summer of 1920, the Zapatista leaders held enough power in Morelos to begin carrying out their long-promised land reforms.

By the new law Morelos became a place where villagers could remain villagers, decently and by right endowed, economically enfranchised.

Any cluster of farmers in the state who qualified legally as a pueblo, rancheria, congregacion, or communidad could together now apply to the governor to reclaim old or to gain new land around their settlement.

 

“Rustic harmony, easiness, and contentment”

And, for a time, life was what the pueblos had been and what, at the start of the rebellion, the pueblos wanted to get back. By 1927, Morelos had changed more from agrarian programs than any other Mexican state.

In rich, wet, warm country like Morelos, where the only pause between harvests was for the crop to ripen, the emerging pattern of tenure was the outline of the old populist utopia.

A kindly but shrewd American anthropologist researching in Tepoztlán saw rustic harmony, easiness, and contentment as the essence of life there.

The same vision transfixed a usually acerbic American reporter. “Tepoztlán! Will you be as self-sufficient, as heroically beautiful a hundred years from now?” he cried. “If I read the god-like palm of your destiny aright, you will forever cherish your traditions…”

 

How Zapata won

Yet, as Womack details in the final pages of his book, the rustic harmony, easiness and contentment faded over the next forty years as national and international forces changed the land of Morelos and the people of the state, particularly the children of the rural folk for whom Zapata had fought.

That, perhaps, is one of the lessons of Zapata and the Mexican Revolution: A revolution, even a victorious one, is never stable.  Rebels may win their goal — and it helps that, in Morelos, it was a clear, tangible goal — but times change and so do people.

The greater lesson, however, is that Zapata and his followers were successful because their goal was simple, and they embraced it wholeheartedly. While revolutionaries in other parts of Mexico were debating a wide range of policy possibilities, the Zapatista leaders were focused solely on agrarian reform for their state — pure and simple.

While ambitious men sought to gain power in as wide an area and over as many people as possible, Zapata and his followers sought only to control their own land and their own lives.

That is how Zapata won, even in dying.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

9.10.26