Word: zapata
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...occasionally a book appears which chronicles for an illiterate people what they could not record themselves. With great pain and diligence and scholarship John Womack Jr. has wrested the story of the agrarian revolution captained by Emiliano Zapata from the reports of the literate and the educated, and has managed to give their history back to the people...
...Zapata and the Mexican Revolution is a vast achievement, not only because the civil war in the state of Morelos and Zapata himself are important to the Mexican Revolution, but because it is hard to imagine a historian, especially a gringo historian, writing a book which comprehends so deeply the spirit and desires of the men who made the events...
Although the Mexican Revolution ended a half-century ago and some of its accoutrements, the big sombreros and the moustaches, may seem laughable to us now, the Revolution remains an instructive episode in modern history. Zapata's guerrilla tactics were those the Viet Cong use; during the Huerta dictatorship, villagers in Morelos were herded into camps while their land was defoliated, that the farmers might be pacified; journalists and outside agitators attempted to change the course of the Revolution...
...CENTRAL figure in the story, Emiliano Zapata, became a mythical being in his own lifetime. To the Lift in Mexico and around the world, Zapata is the purity of the Revolution, and the intransigent spirit of the People. His best-known statement of policy, "It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees," was one of the slogans in the Mexico City student revolt only last summer. (Womack is not sure Zapata ever said it, and the students attributed the remark to Father Hidalgo, the fervent but inept tocsin-sounder of the Revolution...
Although Womack deals with the origins of the mythic Zapata, he is not taken in by the myth. Rather than the story of a man and how he changed the world, Womack tells the story of a little world and a man who epitomized it. The tale ends, not with Zapata's murder, but with the final dissolution of the movement he started. In the history of a populist movement the people are the real heroes and the story ends with their surviving our not surviving...